Tips for Concepting in Blender 2.8

everyone today I'm gonna be giving you some tips on rapid concepting with blender 2.8 some of these tips are transferable to previous versions of blender but we're gonna be focusing on 2.8 because that's the future this videos gonna act like a compilation of mini tutorials but we're gonna start with some preliminary information so if you want to skip ahead to the actual blender stuff then I'll leave the time here so with that being said enjoy the video now just for a quick note before we begin there's a little bit of a running joke amongst some friends about my personal style I tend to gravitate towards this specific part of the visible spectrum but most of the reason for that is because when I look at it it gives me some emotional stimulation in a way that other colours don't I don't really know how best to describe it but I haven't even been subtle about it because if we just take a little look at some things from my portfolio if you look very carefully you can see that there's a bit of a theme going on the stupid thing is I wasn't even completely aware I was doing it until people started pointing it out and then there was a moment of realization like oh yeah there's a whole awful world of color just waiting to be used you've got the blues and purples nailed down I think it's time to move on so in an attempt to be a bit more divergent and push the walls of that comfort zone I've collected some work from free other artists whose work I keep coming back to we've got Ben a scow and Rob the reason I've picked them out is because they will have quite vibrant styles to often make use of colors that I don't use so much so I'm gonna try and channel that occasionally during this video ok so what I mean by concept in well I mean is piecing ideas together that are not necessarily complete concept enough and involves a lot of rethinking and testing variations so what I've done is split the ideas of this video into two categories speed and divergence speed refers more to quick turnaround so being able to make things quickly and with relative ease while still maintaining control and divergence refers more to stepping away from what you have and considering alternate ideas that haven't necessarily come straight from your own mind so to start off we have kept bashing making use of Kip Bosch models will let you create detailed ideas really quickly the only downside is that you restrict yourself to the style of the original Kip batch pieces if you're working within a style and have Kip bash models prepared for that specific style then you give yourself a lot of power to be able to rapidly create variations in designs while still staying true to the original idea the collection system in blender 2.8 makes it easy to manage variations of kit batch results there 2.7 we were kind of restricted by the number of layers the with 2.8 we can organize our concepts in a folder like structure for example I could have parent collections for things like androids ships weapons and so on let's spend a whole day bashing together different variations under child collections it's really useful the equivalent of kit bashing in the 2d space is called photo bashing there are some art purists out there who would consider this cheating but when it comes to concept in when your final idea is unknown it's extremely powerful and the most productive artists are the ones that know when and where is a good place to recycle and refactor old work to produce something new and that's really the core of creativity take something old and make it new because let's face it a builder doesn't go out into a field and mine for metal every time they need the bag of nuts and bolts be realistic with your time and reuse your work of Ben and Pascal while kit bashes arguably Ben is one of the best data that I've seen for detailing ask our users and more for constructing points of focus because his works are much more subject oriented I actually watched his are station master class a while back and it was quite interesting for Ben the finer detail scale makes even his subject pieces like this ship so almost environmental which is actually really cool because I don't see many people pulling that off I would definitely like to explore a world made by Ben anyway moving on next we move to randomizing transforms which is more of a divergence technique the aim of using this is to take some input that we've provided blender and then allow a randomization procedure to shake it up and try to give us some new ideas with all of the objects selected that you want to move press space and then start to type in randomize transform you will see the operation appear in the list in the parameters area you can change values to control the maximum changes in position rotation and scale randomizing the layout of objects can help to present you with silhouettes that can act as inspiration for shaping generally the larger and fewer shapes there are the more viable the result will be because when generating a random result we are less concerned about finer details and more concerned about the overall shape following this if you have a shape that you'd like which is one coherent object but want to shift the proportions about then the lattice modifier will be useful for you I would categorize this as a speed technique because it saves you time in changing the shape of your object the only annoyance about the lattice modifier is that it requires the creation of a new lattice object whose resolution is controlled in a separate tab of the properties you also need to get in the right position surrounding the object as you move individual points on the lattice vertices in the actual object that are close to those points in the lattice will move with them you can use this to reshape areas of your object so let's say you use a few kip patch pieces of a certain style create some variations reshape them a bit and fill in the gaps with your own modeling finesse you could end up with a nice collection of similarly styled yet unique designs like a free D version of one of Rob Turpin sheets in fact I say free D but that doesn't have to be the case because as we'll see later on the grease pencil allows 2d artists to make full use of blender as well which is very exciting ok so let's say you've got something you like and you've rendered it that you're not sure about the color blenders compositor gives us some nice control of a huge shifting this is a divergence technique because it lets us experiment with different visual styles now here's the key thing not only can we shift the hue with a hue/saturation node but we can also reduce or enhance specific colors afterwards using a hue correction node using both of these nodes is quite a powerful combination for quickly prototyping different visual styles you can imagine that the more objects with different colors in the scene the more interesting this change will be also another no other compositor is that with Eevee it's very easy to tell the renderer not to render the background and instead leave it transparent so that we can give the render a different background using compositor notes later on to do this we need to go to the render settings tab and under the film section change the Alpha setting to transparent just for demonstration I'll use this space-themed image you have to add a mix node and make sure the little button next to the drop-down is enabled the background will go on the first input and the render result will go on the second you can see that we can also combine this huge shifting and correction technique with the background separately to get different color profiles obviously this would be more for stylized concepting but even if it's not your usual field it's good to know that you have this control if and when you need it so we're going to combine some of what we've gone over so far with a use case example I'm going to build a cityscape and experiment with different moods I start off by keep bashing some building structures together using pieces from my personal library these individual pieces will be merged together into individual objects all of which are contained within a collection dedicated to our cityscape I duplicate the buildings and spread them around the scene a bit after this and make sure that they are selected and used to randomize transform operation looking through the camera will help to visualize the result and when I feel inspired by a certain layout I will stick with it and create a render using the composited nodes I can shift the color around and get different moods we could imagine that we are designing a sci-fi world with different colored stars and strange atmospheres I'd say this looks like a pretty nice result for something that was quite quick to put together I'm going to throw in a little note here about the volume metrics in 2.8 you can actually get an interesting noise effect on the volume by adding a noise note and using it as the color for the volume but for this to appear in the viewport or render you need to turn both the overall volumetric samples and the render samples down it's kind of counterintuitive since the one thing you usually want to do if all the metrics and renders is remove noise all together but the grainy effect can look quite cool in certain situations although I would say it's a lot better if you just add there and afterwards I'm also going to throw in another example of shifting the visual style but this time of a demonstration that's a bit more surreal so I'm sorry if this makes anyone feel kind of uncomfortable this one is definitely an attempt to try out a greater range of colors as you can see since there's more color data to shift around the results are a lot more interesting [Music] [Music] anyway now we're going to move on to blenders solution to bridging the gap between 2d and 3d the grease pencil features in 2.8 offer a powerful new self tools to bridge the 2d and 3d workflows this means our people with a skillset that occupy both worlds will be able to bring their ideas to reality in a much more convenient way and people that only have experience in 2d will now be able to combine blender features with their own workflow now the grease pencil is treated as separate objects it's easy to manipulate and organize of course just like before grease pencil strokes can be turned into 3d geometry the usefulness of the grease pencil to synergize 2d and 3d is limited only by your imagination so what we're going to do is just run through a couple of use case scenarios one of which is sketching in three dimensions instead of working from flat images when modeling an object we can draw out blueprints in actual 3d space and then we can use them during the process of creating the full 3d object much easier later on because we'll be able to see exactly where to pure geometry in space another use case would be for planning out detail we can use grease pencils to draw a detail onto the surfaces of other objects to plan our work to model those details later on we can organize these and swap them out for other variations since grease pencil is now object based we can combine it with the previous tips such as transform randomization and any kind of deformation to get alternate results or the new creased pencil means is technically a 2d artist could create 3d artworks without even knowing how to model they could use the 3d space of blender to provide perspective for their concepts and build on top of it and image editing software later on one more thing that we'll talk about is the usefulness of the skin modifier which is a speed technique just like in 2.79 you can use the skin modifier to quickly draft our shapes using vertices to inform the direction of the flow of interpolated geometry the cool thing about the skin modifier in 2.8 however is that you can manipulate too in v's real-time rendering mode strictly speaking if you know what kind of lighting profile you wanted to work with from the start you can use the skin modifier to put together a silhouette for your subject while previewing it in that specific lighting condition combining the skin modifier with a mirror and a subdivision surface modifier is great for creating symmetrical bodies pressing ctrl + a while having a control vertex select we'll let you inflate or deflate the geometry that surrounds it the skin modifier can also be used to automatically create an armature which is useful if you want to rig a base template object ready for further details and variation which can be reposed at any time cutting all of the tips that we've talked about together we can start to see how blender 2.8 is already an extremely powerful tool for concept in ideas and it's only getting better by the day the development fund for bender is steadily growing as well the more support they get the more developers they'll be able to hire at once and consequently the faster it will grow but that being said I hope you've learned something and if you enjoyed this video don't forget to Like comment subscribe and ring that Bell I've listed my social media account at the end as well if you want to stay up to date and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 55,315

Rating: 4.9817171 out of 5

Keywords: blender, b3d, concept, concepting, concept art, mech, city, scifi, timelapse, curtis holt, blender 2.8, kitbashing, modeling, tutorial

Id: k9Zl9RKMcVM

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018