My First Blender 3D Artwork was TERRIBLE... Can I FIX IT?

so this was my first 3d render from ten years ago so everybody starts somewhere this is where I started guys ten years ago and this was actually following a tutorial without a tutorial would have been able to do anything inside of blender oh gosh it looks like a little pile of poop when you blow your eyes and just look at it it looks like a little turd that's head tutorial is way better than what I came up with here big thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video the easy way to build a stunning looking website so that's what I thought would be kind of fun to date is to see if I can take this scene now and make it look a little bit better maybe kind of redeem myself ten years later hopefully it's a lot better than it was back then fingers crossed geez the topology of the scene was so bad I used two different meshes for the head probably cuz I messed up on the mouth and so I just created like two meshes for the mouth here I don't know I don't know what I was doing but um yeah I didn't know what I was doing those eyes are kind of like staring into my soul o demon eyes but basically I'm not gonna lie this was a fun project I remember having a lot of fun doing this 10 years ago and that's why you should never be ashamed of your first art work it always started you somewhere you have to start somewhere and unless you're one of those guys that post an artwork like this and then go hashtag myfirstproject those categories you know that we all hate because they just look amazing right out of the box and we're like come on nobody's nobody's that guy come on it's not for recreating the scene today I didn't want to just go and try and create like a realistic cow in a field with some trees and flowers because that wasn't the objective that I was going for I knew it wasn't looking like a realistic sitting when I was creating and I thought it looked pretty good but I knew it didn't look realistic it was going for like that clay sort of scene so that's what I kind of want to recreate today I want to fix the wrongs I did back in the day and make it actually look more like what it was intended to so with a clay render inside of a nice nature scene no blenders come a long way in the last 10 years with this new render engines and stuff I'm not too sure if I've come a long way or not but hey that's what we're here to find out so it should be a lot of fun for some of us anyways so without further ado let's just start off with this product I just start off by creating a clay material I'd subdivided the cube add some smooth shading and add it in a fingerprints texture for some clay material I connected this up to the roughness on my principle shader as you can see using those fingerprints right away kind of gives a nice clay material to our blender render and then using a color ramp to kind of tweak the roughness a little bit and then I added in a bump note and connected it to the height of the bump turn down the strength of it and you can see that we had some nice fingerprints on a sort of clay material so that I just started working off of that cube mirroring it over to the left side just kind of rounding it out a little bit and then in setting some faces for the nose our of our cow I think it's even off the bat we have sort of a cute little pig nosey cow face that looks was going for so I'm just duplicated that cube and start making some shapes for the body sort of modeling it as I would if it was clay but then I realized I don't know how to model with clay and so I started silently panicking at this point that after ten years of blender experience I was no better at the program and as you can see some of these results were like cow chicken nightmare material so at this point I was having a little bit of a midlife crisis wondering if I chose the right to career path but after getting out of the way and putting some more work into it I was back out getting a simple shape here as you can see I wanted to keep it sort of like a clay model so I want the legs and stuff to be individual pieces kind of connected to a clay thing as it would be if you were making a little clay model and that's kind of what I came up with here something that wasn't entirely disturbing and I thought it was kind of cute and then also using a displacement modifier here I was able to kind of give it a little bit more of an organic clay shape then I just added in some cute cartoon eyeballs and then I duplicated the eyelid cut it in half gave it a nice blue color and some thickness and then rotated around the eyeball to kind of give it the eyelids and this kind of just made the cow a bit cuter putting those blue eyelids on it then just a little bit of an ear model super basic some horns up on top and shockingly we actually have something that's kind of cute so we're ready to move on to e mouth and this is where things went back to pot again because I realized that if I tried to model a mouth similar to our as I did in the past is still it look like a monkey Carol why can't everything be easy easy like this video sponsored Squarespace with Squarespace student create stunning looking websites and no time at all by using the easy to customize templates to create really great looking websites plus you can grow your website really fast using their powerful analytic tools social media sharing and email campaigns it's like easy had a child with easy and now it's Squarespace plus if you don't believe me you can head over to Squarespace calm and take advantage of their free trial to try it out yourself start playing around with things and if you want to buy a website or domain then you can use my coupon code CG geek at checkout to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain so it's pretty much like the easiest thing ever so this is where I did a little bit of research on what a good clay model looks like I was referencing some shaun the sheep reference artwork and this is where I can decide that I should make the email a separate piece so I made just this little job piece here with some teeth on it slapped it on the bottom of that nose and I decided that this looked kind of cute so that we had a little cow model that wasn't gonna give children nightmares I decided to start moving on to the environment and for this I figured I could do better than a green plain so I went ahead and added in a new plane to my scene kind of shaped again using proportional editing and added in a basic moss texture to the ground here from textures calm and then I went ahead and threw on the roughness and normal Maps and as you can see we have a terrain that is something to work off of so then it was onto adding some trees and as you guys know with my 1-minute tutorial creating trees is super easy so I went ahead and created some of these low poly trees through some branches on them and stuck them in my scene as you can see here I just played around with him a little bit until I found a composition an angle for the different trees in the scene that I thought kind of complemented the composition I guess it's a fancy word for experimenting until something looked okay then for some rocks across the scene you guys know how easy it is to create rocks with that one minute tutorial that I did as well I just added in a simple stone he's the same Veroni displacement texture and I was able to just sort of modify my cube here and get a nice Rock shape wherever I wanted it then I kind of wanted to create a nice brick wall behind our clay modeled cow to kind of separate it from the background a little bit and this was actually really easy using the same rock technique it just made some flat rocks out of it duplicated it change the cube shape a little bit and was able to just stack them up really easy and once you create a little section of rock wall as you can see here I was able to just duplicate it over and then fill in the holes by using some smaller rocks to patch it up and it was really easy to just shape the rocks however I wanted and create a nice little background rock wall as you can see here and that did work well it's the nice sort of out-of-focus wall behind our subject separating it from the background so that one adds some realistic nature underneath the cows or started with my nature asset pack I have some tutorials on how to create these assets if you guys are interested in more detail and modified the grass assets I have there but using proportional editing to kind of pull the grass into the different shapes that I wanted for the scene I start with some long tall grass and then he used a weight paint mode to choose just the areas like around the trees rocks and walls that I wanted longer grass to be located and then use that as a particle system and as you can see that actually worked pretty well and then I just went on to creating some more variations of this grass for some lower sort of mowed down grass to put in the other areas so here I made a variation of the Daisy that I used in my nature scene add that as another particle system to add some nice cute flowers and these are kind of to match the flowers that I had in my original scene I don't know why I went with the color blue blue is kind of uncommon flower color but hey you know I was being a creative back in the day so you have to create a realistic nature floor it's just about layering more and more assets on top of each other using different particle systems and vertex groups to give them patchiness across the scene here I added some weeds and clover to different patches of the scene I went ahead and added another one for some leaves here and there across the scene with a little cycles preview you can see that that's looking really great already as a nice sort of nature floor the entire scene is actually just lit with an HDR from HDR Haven back in my original scene it was lip euerle with a Sun lamp today I just went with an HDR lighting because it's obviously a lot more better but I also wanted to share this and my experimenting with the grass I actually came across an issue where wasn't getting it to blend very well with the surface of the ground and what I actually did to work this out was just add more assets tweaked the colors of the grass and the ground until I was getting the textures matching the grass more like I was looking for and it just took a little bit of experimenting so I think in one way that I've improved a lot is basically I just know that things can look better and it's just gonna take some time experimenting trying different things until you get what you imagined it looking like instead of just settling with what it does look like so then for those distant mountains I just used to landscape generator to get some nice displaced ground then I just projected that farmland texture onto the plane and scaled it up to have a little bit more displacement in my scene another little step I did was just select some the vertices on the individual patches of ground and add some height to them to kind of break up the different field flash forests in the scene and it was just a little subtle thing to maybe add a little bit of definition to the background super janky but I knew it was gonna be out of focus as this is sort of a miniature scene I thought it looked pretty good back there so that for a final touch I wanted to add some atmosphere to the scene it always looks better when you have some depth to your 3d renders and there's a lot of different ways to do this the best way is probably to use volume metrics like I did here by adding in a cube scaling it up to the size of my scene using a simple noise texture plugged into the density of a volume scatter node as you can see here and this just gives a nice sort of volumetric effect to your scene now there's other methods of doing this using like textures layered on top of each other that might render faster but generally I think actually doing volume metrics is going to be the most realistic looking result in the end and it's just gonna take a little bit longer to render but we're not finished yet as a wise man once said moths add realism to anything that's right we had to add moths to the scene to make Yein proud so all I did was take a basic moth texture import it as a plane use the janky using the knife tool to just cut out the moth in edit mode as you can see here deleted the faces on the outside gave it a little bit of thickness and then just positioned the wings using some proportional editing and then I just use my volumetrics cube to emit these from the volume of the cube this adds a nice little bit of realism to the scene as well as some depth when you use that depth of field on them and I thought just looked really cool and hopefully I made Ian Hubert proud in the process let it through a little bit of grass in the cows mouth and rendered the scene this was my finished result here and I think it's a little bit of an improvement over my first work I'll let you guys be the judge so hopefully after 10 years this kind of writes the wrong I did exorcised the demons out of the scene and hopefully we have some better results like I said it's not wrong that you started off with a scene something like this and I'm actually very happy that I did that there's a ton of fun to create and if you guys want more videos like this definitely let me know because I have tons of really terrible artwork from back in the day that I could probably fix so if you guys want to see videos like that I'll probably make more let me know what the like on the video and I will see you all in a future video gasp see you later bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 553,311

Rating: 4.9474549 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Art, Progress, progression, Fixed, bad, 3D, Cute, Artwork, Funny, 10 years, First, Clay, Render, Cycles, Eevee, 2020, tutorial, blender tutorial, 3d modeling, visual effects

Id: 7vn53QxlcRc

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sachin_55]

Really enjoyed this video.Thanks for all the great tutorials