Tutorial: Blender MODELLING For Absolute Beginners | Low Poly Girl

so perhaps you've always wanted to learn how to make really cool stuff in 3d software you might not have done it you might have dabbled in it a little bit in this tutorial what i'm going to be doing is trying to take one video and introduce a lot of the fundamental things the things you really need to get started and i'm going to show you how to do it in a free software called blender that you can very easily download without an account or a password or anything like that so you can see here this is the final result i'm going to show you the first of all the software itself just the very basics not covering all the thousands of different things and then i'm going to take you step by step after that through the making of this character here and how to render it out as a final result and you can use this same low poly modeling technique here which is really simple and beginner friendly to make all sorts of things so hopefully this video grabs your interest if you want to learn as an absolute beginner if you already know something about blender maybe this is just a little bit too basic and repetitive but this is definitely more for absolute beginners people who really don't know anything and they just want a simple video that's going to make it make sense and you can also after an hour or so walk away with something that you can feel really good about a final result and from there you can choose if you want to go on and learn more about the discipline of 3d modeling maybe even animation later on so let's get into the video and i hope you enjoy i will be adding some timestamps so it can make it easier for you guys the different chapters and you can bounce back and forth if you get stuck let's hop in getting your hands on blender is quite simple you go to your internet browser you can type in blender.org open up the site and you're going to go to the tab here called downloads and what you can do is just click on this blue button here that's going to download an installation file so you can install it on your computer another option which i prefer to do is to go to this little drop down here and you're going to actually see the portable versions here so it's for windows and mac in my case i have a windows computer i would click on the zip file here for the windows portable download that zip folder then extract it like you do with any zip folder and then just open that folder inside of there that's going to be blender you click on it you run the program and when it runs for the first time you can just right click and pin that program to your taskbar and there you have it so very very simple no signing in no passwords no accounts and you can do that anytime there is a new release you can even have multiple versions of blender so that is very self-explanatory very easy so i'm not going to go any more into that let's get into the next thing where we actually open it up and i'll show you how to use it so if you go ahead and open up blender you may even be doing it for the very first time and if you do it may even seem a little bit intimidating but rest assure all of these different tabs and windows and features that you see most of them you will not need to know a thing about just getting started you'll learn that with time now this thing you see here the box when you first open up blender what most people do is they just left click somewhere in the viewport and that box just pops away now getting on to the user interface itself what you're going to see here is the one that just stands out and this is like i said the 3d viewport this is where everything happens this is where we see our objects where we add things in where we can set up our layout now i'm not going to be covering navigation just yet i promise i'll get into that in a bit but for now i'm just explaining what these different windows are or these different boxes going on to this little box that says up here and that is our scene outliner and essentially what we see here is the different items and objects that are in our scene it really is a great organizational tool and if you're a beginner this really makes things easier as well getting organized when especially when your projects get a little bit bigger is one of the most important things you can learn as a beginner and what you can see here is these collections now collections are essentially just these things you can create where you can group different objects in your 3d scene together you can put them in that group look at it almost like layers in photoshop i'm not saying there are layers but you can almost look at it like that in a sense if that helps you visualize it you can add in different collections um and you can also name the different object you can even directly come here and click on these objects instead of actually coming into your scene and left clicking on an object the outliner is just another way you can visualize your what's in your scene and select things you can even go to the drop down and see more information about certain objects or what relationship they have to different objects now don't worry if that doesn't make any sense to you you don't need to know that right now if it doesn't make sense i will explain it later on in the tutorial if it's relevant to what we're doing but that is our scene outliner essentially and now we have that out of the way we can come down here to our properties and this is where different things you did you do in blender you can see their properties for example um let me just click on objects say for example just left click on the cube to select it then you can go over here to all of the different properties so if you click on this little tab which is the materials property the properties of the material that this thing has are here so we can change values we can change different sets of information that relate to the materials on this cube now we have for example over here one called the object properties so over here we can see the different transforms for this object now transforms essentially i'll get into that in a little bit but it is the things that we can use to move an object in 3d space so we have an x y and a z coordinate so you can see for example here in the scene we have to the green line here which is our y coordinate and the x is our x coordinate so pretty simple so essentially here you can see all of these are set to zero and that's why our cube is in the middle of our world if we move any one of these on a certain axis you can see that the cube here is moving doesn't matter if you don't fully get it i'll definitely get into that more later but that's what properties are different things relating to the objects in our scene we can come over here and see their properties now sometimes some of these properties are not relating to an object in our scene for example if we click over here we can see the world properties and the world properties has to do with the environment and which you can't really see now because we're not rendering so these three windows here are just the three main windows you need to know for now another thing i'll quickly mention is obviously just this little thing down here called the timeline that's just when you're doing animating and it's just like a timeline on a lot of different softwares even 2d softwares it's where you can come and scroll through on different frames and go to different time intervals within your 3d scene and then you can change things and this is where you would be doing your animation and stuff like that so not to worry about that right now because that's not what we're doing but you get the general idea here so just these three main ones keep them in your mind okay so now we're going to talk a little bit about navigation it's actually pretty simple but before we can even get into that we have to talk about the number pad on the keyboard so if you have ever seen a keyboard you know that it has a little number pad down here now some computers or like more like laptops don't have this number pad and if that's the case there's something you can do about that where you can make these numbers up here emulate a number pad so let's just quickly go over into edit once we have blender open preferences and then you're going to go over here to the input go up to keyboard and make sure emulate number pad is enabled if you don't have a number of pads so for me i have a number pad so i'm not going to have that enabled then i'm going to close that and now you should be able to use your number pad as well so while we're in the subject of number pad you could actually go over here to view go to viewport and then go to for example the front view or go over here and go to the right view but it's just good to use the number pad so if you use one on your number pad you can go into the front orthographic view you can see over here it says front or for graphic if you press free on your number pad you can go into the right orthographic view you see it says right over here and seven goes to the top and if you want to for example go to the bottom you can just hold in control or command seven and then go to the bottom so it just does the opposite of so for example it's the same with one if you press one on your number pad it goes to the front view what if you want to look from the back so to make it the opposite of you just hold in control and then press one and now you're at the back view so very very easy you can note that down write it down and it's super simple so just experiment with the numbers on your numpad and that will take you into different views primarily you're going to be working in one or the front orthographic view so you'll almost always be using one or sometimes even three to see the side view so not really that much you have to learn as far as changing the views that's about the main thing we have to cover for now but as far as actually moving around with the mouse if you hold in the middle mouse button on your mouse and you hold it in and you move the mouse you can actually rotate around like this and that's pretty simple so just middle mouse button holding it in and if you want it to go side to side like pan all you have to do is hold in shift then the middle mouse button and hold that in and just move side to side and then if you want to zoom in and out you can literally just roll the middle mouse button there's also the option of holding in control and then the middle mouse button holding it in and then moving the mouse but it really is just simpler and more intuitive just to roll the middle mouse button so blender's navigations are actually really easy so just a quick recap middle mouse button by itself you can rotate shift middle mouse button you can move side to side and then just rolling the middle mouse button you can zoom in and out extremely simple there's a lot more you could probably say but those are some of the fundamental things as far as navigation goes and this isn't really navigation but what if you actually want to move an object well all you have to do is left click on an object and you can just come over here to these things here they're called the um the tool panels but you have this one here called the move you can click on it and then you can just click on any one of these handles here so the red one is the x axis the y is the green here is the y and the blue is the z if you press n on your keyboard you can go over here to the control panel go to item and you can actually see here these are our transforms so the z here for example is the blue so you can actually come here to the z under the location and move it that way or this way it's just really the same thing just a different way of doing it and if you just press g g is the shortcut key for moving things so just pressing g you can actually move things and also you can go g and then press z to restrict it to the z axis x to the x or y to the y so all the same thing just a different way of doing it if you don't really understand what i just did don't worry we'll be recapping it as we get into the modeling tutorial so it's just something you need to be aware of and then you have this one here called rotate and scale and it's the exact same thing obviously of rotation you still have these axis here now instead of moving you're just rotating so you can left click on one or maybe left click on this red one so you're going to rotate around the x and the exact same thing over here in the properties you can just come to the rotation and do the same thing manually here on these different vectors and scale i mean neither i explain the exact same principle this time you're just dealing with scale and you can also just click here on the tool and by the way the shortcuts here are s for scale and also r for rotate so um very very easy navigation and also moving an object around so i think we really have covered enough now just to get you to understand the basics we'll now jump into the tutorial and if there's anything you haven't understood we'll just cover it slowly i'll go over it again if need be but you should be able to get it now that you're up to speed on blender so before we get into blender and we do a little bit of modeling um you're probably going to need a model sheet and that's just something to give you a little bit of reference so you can actually see here on the screen that's now recording here is a picture of a screenshot that i actually took of a model that i've already modeled to practice so what you can do is you can just use the print screen key on your keyboard or just use the snip tool that comes with windows and just about every operating system has some sort of built-in tool to allow you to do screenshots or snips so just go ahead and you can also crop it if you want just so you have the picture and once you have that um you know you should just hit like in this case i just named mine girl and here it is somewhere on my computer what you're going to do is you're going to open up blender so in this case i am using blender 2.3.2 so i'm using blender 3.2 and it's now opened up now the thing that's going to be different here for me i'm just going to enable something that's an add-on you don't have to do this that just enables you guys to see over here um the keys that i'm pressing so that just should help you out a little bit um but you can see here we have the default scene as we've already kind of covered in the previous part but what you can do is you can press one on your front off graphic to go into your front of a graphic view so to number pad one you can also just go to view viewport and then go to front and what you're gonna do is you're gonna get that image that you should have taken a screenshot of so in this case i have it somewhere in my computer so i just named it girl and you're just gonna click on it and just drag it into the front of a graphic view make sure not to drag it onto the cube but just drag it somewhere here in the empty space and you're gonna see it adds it in so now you can make it full screen again and you have this image here in your front orthographic view now you can press g while you have it active and if you're not sure if you have it active what you can do come up here to your scene collection you can see the different objects and by default it's going to be named empty over here see that object called empty so if it's not active just click on it and you should be able to go g and move it and you can just move it over here and then when you have it roughly in place just left click and what you can also do is while you have it active you can go over here to your properties panel that we talked about earlier and you can go over here to object data properties down here on this little image and you can come to this option here called opacity and just click on it and then just click here and drag that down a little bit so it's almost see-through like that okay just a little bit is fine and what you can now do is you can just hold your middle mouse button in and just move to move to the side like that you can see here it's now in the free space what you can do is you can go g y and move it back in your scene so g and then y to restrict it to the y axis just so it's not intersecting with the object we're going to be modeling and if you go into your front orthographic view again by pressing one on your number pad you can see here that we want this uh the front pose to be in the middle so in this case if it's not quite in the middle all you can go do is go g and then x to move it along the x and just make sure it's in the middle as it could possibly be here and also over here in fact let's just quickly go and enable up here this thing called x-ray and now we can see through we still have this empty active we can now make sure we have the feet sitting on the ground so you can see this red line here that kind of represents where the ground is so we're going to go g z and just move it down until that feet there are sitting right kind of on that red line so now we have this front post right in the middle there and we can use that as a reference and how do we get the side so the side is simple all we have to do now is go shift d with this axis so shift d and just right click to let go and then type in r z 9 0 and hit enter so r z90 and if you press n to open up your properties panel and go to item you should be able to see here that on the z it's a rotated 90. so if it's not just type in 90. now press free on your number pad to go into the right orthographic view you can see up here right off the graphic view and now you can go g y and move it onto y until the side image is lined up here and kind of in the middle of where this cube is over here you can also look at this blue line here as a reference that's just a z coordinate that you see in the right orthographic view and make sure that she is roughly in the middle here so so g y to move it and make sure you restrict it to the y when you do because we don't want to be moving it down or up now because those feet as you can see here are still on that floor there which is really good so also with this one now on the side we want to go g x and just move it over to the side like this so we're going to write orthographic view and we model with this cube here that image is not intersecting with the mesh here so now we have our front reference and if we go into our right orthographic view by hitting free on the number pad we have our side reference now before we lose anything let's save this so we're going to go file save as i'm going to choose my desktop and i'm just going to call it girl low poly and i'm going to go save as and now it's saved so when it comes to actually modeling something we can use something called primitive objects so you can see here for example we have one already in blender called the default cube so if you left click on it you can see it becomes active also up here in the scene collection you can see the cube and you could make this into any shape once you start editing it and it's just so you understand i'm going to quickly delete this you don't have to follow along but just so you understand so for example you didn't have an object what you can do is you can go shift a shift a brings up this add menu and you can just go to the meshes now the meshes are the actual things that the apology that we'll model in 3d and you have a whole bunch of objects here now all of these are just a bunch of points or vertices that make up um an object in 3d space so here is a cube the one we already had here is a circle here's a uv sphere so if i add in a uv sphere you can see um same thing but just it's shaped like a uv sphere so i'm just going to go ahead and add back in a cube and the reason it is actually in the center of the world here when it's added in is because of this little thing here called the 3d cursor now over here you can see above the move tool there's a 3d cursor if you click on that you can click anywhere and it moves that 3d cursor that 3d cursor is where things get placed by default in your scene it's also a point you can use to rotate around as a transform won't get into that at the moment but if i were now when shift a after moving that cursor and i added maybe a sphere it adds it in there so it's important if that thing isn't in the center um first of all just click back on the move tool if you've done that if there's ever a situation where you need to get your cursor back to the center you can go shift s and you can see cursor to world origin as option here you can actually set the cursor to all sorts of places but to have it in the center of the world go to world origin it's important that you understand that as a beginner kind of concept also when an object is added in um all objects in blender have what you call an origin point so you can see this little orange yellow dot in the middle um if you come over here to this um overlays and you go to the drop down um origins may not be ticked so if it isn't just make sure to click on it so you can see that origin point and that is actually the point where things rotate around so if you go r where it rotates around it if you go s it scales from that point and g and all of those transforms look at that origin point so in 3d i've already shown you guys previously how you can scale move things around rotate things but how do you actually edit a piece of geometry to do that you can come up here and this is to object mode and for now don't worry about all of these options just focus on the edit mode if you're going to edit mode with an object selected you're going to now actually see instead of seeing not only the whole object but you actually now see the vertex vertices that make up these objects in this case you can see you can actually left click on an individual point and just like you can move things into object mode you can also go g and r at the moment you can't really notice rotation you'd have to select more than two to see that but exact same thing and this is how you can actually edit the shapes you can see the origin point is still there in the middle but if i were to actually just left click and drag to select all of this and then go g to move it off if i now go back into object mode you can see the origin point is still there where it is so if i now go r to rotate it's not going to look at the object but actually the origin point so it's important that you guys understand what the origin point is and how that all works you can almost look in object mode an object in object mode as being just a collection of verts that are connected to this group and the vertex is the center of it so just look at it almost like a collection of points in 3d space so now that you understand that let's actually model here so currently we have um the x-ray toggled on you can also toggle it off so you can see through i'm completely up to you but for now i'm going to press 1 to go into the front orthographic view we have our image set up and we have our cube which we're going to be using and let's go g and then z to restrict to the z let's just move it roughly to where the body is here in fact i'm going to turn the x-ray on for now so i can see and let's go s and let's scale this down to about here so it's almost the width of the body like that and as long as your cube is roughly in the middle can be down a little bit or up doesn't really matter but what you're gonna do is you're gonna press tab to go into edit mode or you can just come up here and go into edit mode that way and inside of edit mode you're going to left click and drag and just drag over these top vertices to have them selected like that and then you're going to go s x and scale them on the x axis you can even see up here that red is the x and you can actually see the numbers written here on the different colors or the the letters on the different colors and then you're going to left click and drag and select the bottom ones and you can go s x and scale them along the x so now from the front it looks okay but if we press free on a number pad we can see on the right orthographic view that it's not quite matching up so we can select these at the top by left clicking and dragging and we can go s y and flatten it onto y you can also just left click and drag and just select just the front ones or the back ones and go g and just move them like that so we're currently in the right orthographic and these ones here they're more or less in the right place but you can also move them if you wanted to so now we have that roughly in place what we can do now is we can extrude this bottom face so one way to do that is just left click and drag to select all of the bottom verts but i'll quickly mention you also have these options up here for different selections you can also click on the face mode and now instead of selecting verts you can select a face which is a collection of verts and edges so now you can just left click on that face and then you can go back into the right orthographic view by hitting free and you can go e so e is the shortcut to extrude and that'll extrude a face you can also come here and click on the extrude button here and it'll bring up some options but it's easier just to use the shortcut so i've extruded it down and then just left clicked and then i'm going to just go r and i'm going to slightly rotate that face and i'm going to go g and i'm just going to move it back so one thing you'll notice is we're still using a lot of the same g s and r to scale rotate and move things which is really cool so now let's go to our front view by getting one on a number pad and you can see here it's kind of right at the bottom but over here now it is lacking um the right dimension so what we can do to add in an edge is we can just come over here hovering over an edge and you can go ctrl r or command r if you're using a mac and you're going to see this yellow line up here once you see the yellow line you can just left click twice and it'll add it in then go back into your front of a graphic view by hitting 1 on the number pad s x with that edge selected and you can scale it out like that now let's just say you accidentally unselected that edge how do you select it by left clicking and dragging no not necessarily because now that it's edge select you might select more edges than you wanted to in some cases that would happen so what you may want to do is you can actually when there's a loop like this you can go shift alt and then just left click on an edge and it'll select the whole loop you can also just hold in shift and while you're holding and shift and you're moving around you can select multiple faces so that's one thing to keep in mind if you guys um struggle with that that's how you select edges so now we have that in there if we now go to our right orthographic view by hitting free we can see it's not quite right so let's go to our vertex select left click and drag to select these verts and let's just move them by pressing g and you can see what we're doing here right it's not hard at all we're just creating the rough shape from the front and the side and yes it is boxy but what we can do now is we can progressively add more um topology so let's come here to the middle control r just like we did hovering over one of these edges you should see the yellow line up here and then left click twice and now what we've done we've cut it in half here we have an edge it's perfectly symmetrical but we can cheat a little bit we can actually mirror so we only work on one side so let's now left click and drag and just select these verts over here and let's press x and then go delete and what are we working with vertices so let's click delete vertices and now we only have half an object we can now go to the properties panel here and let's go to our modifiers modifiers reduce these cool things we can add to an object i won't go into too much details but let's just go to the add modifier and let's just go and give this one under the generator and that's a mirror and all it's simply doing here is mirroring this object so now we can't actually come here and select anything in this side but if we select something on this side and we press g to move it or rotate it you can see it updates on this side but one of the issues is if we start moving things around it pulls apart so what we're going to do is we're going to come over here we're going to click on this thing called clipping and now if you move it it all sticks together which is really cool and it's going to help you a lot now going back into the front orthographic by pressing one on the number pad you can actually see that little origin point that i talked about earlier is in the middle that's actually what our mirror modifier is looking at as a reference point so now that we have that mirrored what we can do is we can press seven on our number pad to go to the top orthographic view and this is looking boxy so let's go ctrl r and with control r we're going to see the yellow line appear over here let's double click by left clicking and now what we can do is from the top we can left click and drag and select the front verts over here in the corner and we can go g and move them in a little bit and then left click and let's left click and drag over here selecting these verts and then let's go g and let's move them in like that now we simply rounded that out so this is already starting to look a lot better and we've just used some very simple modeling techniques let's also just select this vertex down here by left clicking on it and let's just go x and delete that vertex so we now have this open like so and let's also select this one at the top here let's go x and delete that vertex as well okay so one to go back into the front orthographic view and let's continue extruding this topology up and making the rest of the body okay so what we're going to do is we're going to make sure we have our vertex select option enabled we're still in edit mode we're going to left click and drag in our front orthographic view and we're going to select these verts over here so once they are selected in your front orthographic view remember one to go into the front or for graphic view you're going to go e to extrude and then just move it up to about here on the reference or just under the neck and then you're gonna go r so r to rotate and rotate it this much and then left click and then just g again and just move it till it's lined up to the bottom of this v here this delta then you're going to press free to go to your right orthographic view and then you can go s y and flatten it on the y like that okay back into the front orthographic view let's go e to extrude and extrude it up like so and leave it about here let's go into our right or graphic view and we're going to go s y and scale it onto y about that much and then we're going to go ctrl r or command r hovering over one of these edges you should see the yellow line then you're going to just left click once and then if you move the mouse you can slide so you can slide it to about here and then left click again and that should put it in place and while that is still active you can go alt s and what is different about this and i won't really get into normals at the moment um too much but you have these things on the faces called normals they're like these directional um points that the face is kind of um like i'll quickly show you because it's kind of hard to explain i'm just going to enable something you guys don't have to do this but it's just so you understand kind of what's going on here i'll quickly show you so these things here right the normals now if you just press s by itself it just scales everything as like an average but if you go alt s it looks at these normals and it scales out along the normals and it does it a little bit in a different way so going alt s we'll scale that out like this nice and evenly so i'm just going to turn that off that i turned on because i don't need to have that on right now but you guys should understand where i'm coming from so one to go back into the front orthographic view i'm gonna come over here control r over one of these edges left click once and then move the mouse to bring it down and then alt s and scale it out like that and then just like that we have this little thing forming here quite easily and what we can do as well just ctrl r hovering over this edge here double click to add an edge and over here as well the back ctrl r and then double click and now we have a bit more topology i'm also just going to come in here ctrl r hovering over one of these edges and just double click once to add in an edge that's most of the body done now so let's just quickly make the leg so instead of using existing topology in here what we're going to do is we're going to go back into our object mode up here and earlier i showed you guys how to add in an object we're gonna go shift a we're gonna go to our mesh option so we're gonna add in something called a cylinder so go ahead and add that in now this has got way too much geometry so let's go over here to this add cylinder option down here just left click on it it'll open it up and currently this consists of 32 vertices so let's click on here and type in five so now you can see it's a lot less topology that's more like we want we're going for low poly workflow here and you can also come here to the type and change it from whatever it's at and change it to nothing so it won't have the caps on here on the end okay so if you quickly go to your x-ray mode and just turn it off up here you can kind of see it a little bit better so for now i'm just turning off the x-ray up here to toggle and this is now a new object so if we selected this you can see up here the cylinder is active up here in the scene collection and we press tab to go into edit mode or you can also come up here and go into edit mode you should now see that you can't edit this object over here that's you have to actually go back into object mode and then click on this again but what you can do is you can hold and shift after you've selected one of the objects and then select the second object then when both are selected you can see they're both active you can press tab or go into edit mode and now both you can work with both of them and when you go back into object mode they're still both separate objects something interesting about objects that you guys can keep in mind so we're in object mode again just select this guy here and remember that origin point set a little orange dot same thing as the cube we're gonna go s and just scale the whole thing down in object mode to about this scale and then left click once you're done and then go g and move it over here roughly okay then you're going to go and press free on your number pad to go to your right orthographic and you're just going to move it forward a little bit like that just roughly in place and now we can tab into edit mode and while we're in a right office graphic view let's just turn on our x-ray again up here and this is left click and drag and just select these bottom verts and let's just go g move them down to here and then go r to rotate them and s to scale a bit i'm going to select these ones up here move them forward s to scale them a bit just like that okay now we have the leg starting to form here and let's just click and drag and select these bottom verts again and what we're going to do is we're going to go e to extrude and then we're going to go s to scale to about this much we're going to go g and move all of that forward a bit and i'm going to go e to extrude bring it to here and then we're going to go e to extrude s to scale about that much okay back in your right orthographic view you can just move this whole thing back by pressing g s to scale it just a little bit and then we're going to go e to extrude and extrude it down to here r to rotate and then s to scale till it matches up and then we're going to do is we're going to press 1 to go into our front orthographic view and you can see over here this comes out a little bit too much so let's just select these verts over here and let's just go g move them in left click and drag select these two and then g to move them in now you can see it's all starting to look um pretty good so how do we mirror this leg onto the other side so we can do the exact same thing we did up here of the body so we're gonna go over here and this time we're gonna give it a mirror again under the modifiers okay under the modifiers and we don't have to enable clipping because these two objects are not actually touching like this one is over here but you can notice there's not anything appearing here on the other side and why is that so if we tab back into object mode what we have to do in this case because that origin point is not in the middle here like this one has its origin point in the middle we have to actually select a mirror object as a reference so in this case we're going to click on this little eyedropper and we're going to click on the body as a reference and now it'll put it right in the middle the the point where it's mirroring is gonna be right in the middle of that body so it's almost using the origin point of this one now which is really good now it's nice and mirrored like that and it's all starting to look really good so let's just select these legs again tab into edit mode this is press free to go into our right orthographic view click and drag select these bottom verts and then go e to extrude bring them down r to rotate them to flatten them out a bit and then this is really simple just click and drag and select these verts over here e to extrude and bring them forward and then bring these two verts down like that click and drag like these bottom verts bring them up then go into your front orthographic view and in this case you may actually just have to come and select um just these verts over here like that so clicking dragging over them go to your front view and then go and then go g and just move them to the side a little bit and you can do the same thing over here just to widen that foot okay so that's looking a lot better and then you can come in here add in more topology you can go ctrl r and instead of just leaving at one cut you can just roll the middle mouse button up once it's going to add in two segments and then click left twice and you can come in here control r over one of these edges and you should see a loop appearing just double click once and then go alt s and scale it out a little bit on the normals just to round things out and there we have a simple foot forming we can refine things a little bit later but the foot or leg area is now done mostly and let's just toggle off the x-ray for now see what things are looking like and you can see how simple this is even if you're a beginner these are very very simple techniques and they're very easy to follow so the legs or the arms are going to be very similar to the legs in fact to save a little bit of time what you can do is you can actually select the leg here and in your front office graphic view you can go shift d that's going to make a duplication you're going to move this duplication up here left click and then you can go r and rotate remember it's rotating around this origin point that's why we have it at the top so we're going to go r to rotate and just roughly line that up with the arms it can be very rough and if you need to enable the x-ray make sure to do that then you can go g and just move it so this origin point is the top of the shoulder here and these things can be roughly lined up in fact let's just quickly while we have that cylinder 001 active let's just tab into edit mode left click and drag and just select all of these bottom parts and then go g and just move it so this middle bit is kind of where this sleeve is over here and then what you can do is while that's all still active you can press x and then go delete faces and now we only have this cylinder here roughly in place and if you go free on your number pad you can see it from the side and in the side here you can just left click and drag select only these top threads and go g just move them back a little bit and go s to scale and then click and drag these ones g and move them a little bit to the middle and then go s to scale up and now that we have that roughly in place go back to our front orthographic view and we're now going to quickly model our arm as well so what we're going to do in edit mode with our arm let's just select these top verts over here we're still in our x-ray mode we're just going to select them and we're going to go r to rotate them and g to move them here a little bit and we're going to select this bottom vert here and we're just going to come up to this thing here called our proportional editing i'm not going to get into these settings too much but if you select one vertex now down here and you press g to move it you can see the rest of them kind of drag along now if you roll down your middle mouse button or up you can see you have this influence factor here and that controls more or less depending on how much you roll it so this allows you to grab one point and then kind of gradually over gradient to the area affect the rest of the verts so i'm going to drag that down like that and then i'm going to disable it again up here and i'm just going to click and drag to select these bottom verts and then what i'm going to do is going to double tap r pressing r twice to rotate it and then just rotating it until it's a little bit more flat and then i'm going to go g and i'm going to move it here and i'm going to go e to extrude to here and then s to scale down and now let's go to our right orthographic view and make sure everything is looking okay here from the side at the moment it kind of is so maybe just move this out a little bit more here but just more or less trying to line that up to what we see here on the side okay that's looking okay so let's go back to the front view and just click and drag to select just these verts down here we're gonna go shift d to duplicate them right click to let go and then e to extrude s to scale and then g let's move them down a little bit and then r to rotate like that and i'm going to go e to extrude them here s to scale and then e to extrude s to scale i'm going to scale them in like that so s to scale now we have that simple little sleeve there in fact we can just select any vertex on this part here and go ctrl l or command l it'll then just select anything that is loose and connected to that vertex i'm going to go g and just move it up in there a little bit just so it's nicely embedded and then select these bottom bits and move them down again so now if you go to your right view you should see it more or less that that is also lining up go back to the front view and let's make a simple hand over here in fact let's just tab back out into object mode okay and we're going to go shift a and i'm going to go to my front or graphic review by pressing 1 and go shift a and i'm going to get a cube the cube is down here i'm going to go g to move the cube over to it a hand this and then s to scale it down quite a bit and then i'm going to go into my right orthographic view make sure it's in the middle of the hand okay that's all good so going back to the front of graphic view and we're going to tab into edit mode and then you select all of this and then r to rotate it like so then click and drag and just select these verts over here like that and then what you're going to do is you're going to go g move them to about here and then s to scale them a little bit and then e to extrude and then click about here and then go g move them here r to rotate in an s to scale a little bit now if you go to your right orthographic view by hitting free on the number pad you're gonna see things don't quite line up so you're gonna select these ones over here you're gonna move them back select this one over here move it here and then select these two and then bring these ones to the corner of the thumb intersection there and then move these ones out a bit too we're then going to come in here and you can see we have a face here in fact let's just add an extra loop we're going to go ctrl r or command r hovering over this edge add in an extra loop then we're going to go to our face select option here click on this face go back to our right orthographic view and i'm going to go g and move this one out to here and then r to rotate and then we're going to go e to extrude that one about this much and then s to scale r to rotate and then g and we're going to move that one back like that and now we have a face over here and that face in our front orthographic view we're just going to go e to extrude it and then s to scale it and then g to move it and that's going to be a simple thumb and this hand here is about as simple as you can get you can come in here ctrl r to add an extra loop and ctrl r in here to add an extra loop then if you press a to select all of this geometry you can come to this tool here called the smooth tool and then just drag in this little gizmo and it'll smooth it all out like that and then just go back to the move tool when you're done so you can see that's looking pretty cool so let's just tab back out into object mode we've got a hand instead of adding a mirror to that hand you can just hold in shift with while you have that hand selected and select the arm and then go ctrl j and it'll join that mesh to that arm so now that's all one object let's just quickly disable our x-ray so we can see what it's all looking like so pretty easy so far isn't it and it's looking really cool very stylized let's quickly get into making the head which is actually pretty simple despite the fact that it looks a little bit complicated so let's go shift a add in a cube and of this cube we're going to go g z and move it to the top of the head and go s to scale that cube down to about the size of the head let's enable our x-ray once again go into our right orthographic view by pressing free on the number pad and let's tab into edit mode and go control r over one of these edges to add in a loop double click and let's just with that still selected go g and move it just down a little bit and let's go to our vertex select option select this vertex over here these two and then go g and move that forward a bit and then select these two back ones here or these four i should say and then go g and move it like that and then you're gonna select these two or these four verts at the top by clicking and dragging over them and you're gonna move them here and you're gonna get e to extrude them up and then s to scale like that it's still looking very boxy so now if we go ctrl r while hovering over this edge we can add in a loop double click go to your front view and what we're going to do is we're going to go ctrl r hovering over one of these edges you can see the yellow line double click then select half of the verts over here and press x and delete you can see that origin point is nice and in the middle there so just like we did with our body originally if we now go to a modifier so we can give it a mirror modifier enable clipping so it doesn't pull apart and now it's mirrored so what we can do is come in here control r to add in another edge here double click and let's just select this vertex down here let's go to our proportional editing by enabling it and then we're going to go g and if you have too little or too much influence you can roll the middle mouse button while you move to control that so we're just going to select that vert and move it in then select these verts here and then go g and just move them in as well then you select these ones bring them down a little bit and you can figure this out yourself it's actually pretty easy all you're doing now is going to the different views and you can select verts and you can go g and just move them and roll the middle mouse button while you have that proportional editing just to select things and round them out it's actually really simple so i'm going to select this corner one here in the right orthographic view and then this one so just rounding things out if you're not sure which one you're pressing just go into the normal view left click then press free to go back into the right orthographic view and just repeat like that you can even select everything once again go to that smooth tool and just slightly smooth it out then go back to the move tool so you can see how we're making the head here so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to come in here control r over this edge to add in another loop click it in select these two here and just move them forward to create a bit more dimension to the face and then ctrl r over here to add double click select these ones at the front and then g and move them in and down then select this brow over here and move it forward and that just creates a bit more of that area where the eyes would kind of sit it just gives that feel of it now we're going to just move some of this topology back a little bit by just selecting it pressing g to move it going back to the front and you can kind of see how this head is coming together pretty cool so let's now tab back out into object mode and let's just go shift a add in a cylinder once again let's just come to the vertices and let's just make it five then we're going to go g z move it up s to scale and there you have a neck so go into your right orthographic view if you wish in edit mode you can just select the different points rotate them and this is just like we've done before at this point you guys should be able to start getting how this all works so selecting the verts scaling them moving them by pressing g and just matching it up to that neck so just a very simple cylinder like that you can delete these caps on the end by just dragging over them and going x and delete faces and there we have it that neck is very very easy let's go back into object mode let's un enable the x-ray we don't need to see it at the moment and you can see it's actually coming together pretty well before we get into the hair um let's just quickly select the body here shift a left click on this edge to loop selected over here this is go e to extrude s to scale and then g just move it in a little bit you can disable proportional editing at this point move it down a bit and then e z and extrude that down and then s to scale it like that so just bringing that in like that okay so we're pretty much now done with most of this you can add some ears as well like i did a very simple way to do that is to go shift a just add in a cube g to move that cube forward s to scale that cube and of this cube here just get roughly the size of the ear then tab into edit mode and if you want to enable the x-ray just do that so you can select the top face g to move it r to rotate then select these bottom ones g to move it down r to rotate then go to your right orthographic view select the whole thing and then go s y to flatten it and then r to rotate it just at a bit of an angle and at this point you can do something where you go ctrl r roll in two extra loops ctrl r over this edge roll your middle mouse button up and then double click now you have a little bit more topology and in your front view you can kind of pull these points around selecting them and just evening things out just a little bit and then to make that divot there it's actually really simple you can go to your face select option disable the mirror for now and then holding and shift you can just click on all of these front faces like so while you're holding shift and go e to extrude s to scale left click and then e to extrude in and then s to scale and then you can just select the whole thing by pressing a so you select all of the topology go to your little smooth tool again and then just drag that little gizmo and smooth it out just slightly and there you have a very simple ear to which you can also add a mirror modifier make sure to click on the little eyedropper and select something like the head for a reference and there we have it ears you can scale them up a little bit go back into object mode and with the head here you can always just go into edit mode again go to this edge select option and then select an edge and you can enable proportional editing and at this point you can very simply select edges and just adjust accordingly to make that all look a little bit better by bringing it all out maybe go to vertex select if it's easier but at this point you guys see what we're doing here just how simple all of this is so an easier way to make the hair is kind of use an existing mesh like the head so let's just select the head go into edit mode and um one thing that might make things a little bit simpler here is maybe to round the head out just a bit so i'm going to go into the x-ray again by toggling it selecting just these here and then with proportional editing i'm just going to press g and move them in a bit and the same here with the squareness of the head just bringing it in optionally maybe go ctrl r add in an extra loop here ctrl r hovering over this edge see the yellow line and double click a to select everything and then just with that smooth tool enabled just drag the little gizmo and smooth it out a little bit so now we can select the scalp and start turning into hair so let's just go to the facelift option here and let's just double tap a to deselect everything in edit mode and if you now press c on your keyboard so c and you roll your middle mouse button up you're going to have the selection tool here so you can make it whatever size you want by rolling the middle mouse button then you can left click and hold in the left click and drag and then select all of these parts like this now remember this head isn't mirrored okay this head is mirrored so you should still make sure you have the x-ray enabled just so you select all of the faces you don't want to miss any faces so i'm going to just do it again so any ones like this just select them roughly and go shift d to duplicate and then right click to let go then you can go alt s and scale it out along the normal so alt s remember i just talked earlier about normals and how they're different from just normal scaling so alt s instead of just s and we want to make this its own geometry it's no longer part of this and the simple way to do that is just while that's still selected you can press p and you can get the separate option you're going to go separate by selection now this is actually a different object so we need to go back into object mode and now we're going to click on this object and this is only new object and we can tab into edit mode and now we only have this so i'm going to just disable the x-ray for now i'm going to go into my right orthographic view and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go alt s even more with all of that selected go something like this i'm going to enable the proportional editing i'm going to go to the vertex select option and then i'm just going to drag and select these verts here i'm going to go g and move them up to follow the reference so you can see what i'm doing here bringing this fringe forward same with these ones here very simple and then i'm going to select these ones here i'm going to go g and just bring them down and bring these forward so pretty simple stuff then go into the front orthographic view and then select these ones here and then go g and then just move them out a little bit it doesn't have to be perfect but just more or less and then what we need to do is enable the x-ray again so we can see through let's just select this bottom vertex here just this one by itself and then go g z we still have proportional editing and you should just roll it just slightly and bring it up like that and then select this one down here and then g and just move it down slightly so now if we enable enable the x-ray you can see here that's what we have it's kind of cute looking fringe we're now going to just take this just kind of roll it in like that towards there and while you have it selected hold in shift and then click on this vertex and then in this vertex you have three of them selected like a triangle and then if you press f it'll add in a face between all of those like that and then you're gonna select this vertex down here and we're going to go g and just move it up here yours doesn't have to look exactly like that but just something along those lines should be fine and then what you can do click and drag and select these bottom vertices over here and go x and delete vertices and now what we can do is we're going to go to a modifier so i'm going to give this something called a solidify and now if you come to the solidify and you drag this value you can see we're adding a bit of thickness to that now you can't actually edit that thickness it's not actually geometry you can grab but you can still see the thickness even if you edit the geometry here in edit mode which is really cool so it's a modifier it's modifying the mesh in real time while you're working with it so now let's get to our right orthographic view let's enable x-ray again let's just click and drag and select these bottom verts over here and let's just go g and move them down a bit and rotate them and i'm going to disable proportional editing for now then i'm going to go e and i'm going to extrude them down a bit then i'm going to select this vertex here g to move it in a bit and this one here like that select all of these again and i'm just going to continue e to extrude s to scale e to extrude s to scale then i'm going to go in to my back orthographic view and instead of pressing 1 on the number pad you can hold in control or command and then press 1 and now you're seeing the back let's just try and model it from the back here i'm just gonna grab that vertex and i'm just moving these out just to round them out a little bit moving this one in you don't have to do it this precise but you get the idea here all we're trying to do is just even out the verts here at the back so we kind of have the hair just coming down like that something very simple but it works and then if you wanted to it's optional you can add these little bits to the side a very simple way to do that is to go to your edge select option up here in edit mode select any edge up here go to your right or for graphic view shift d to duplicate it enable the x-ray and then g move it somewhere above where that hair should start in an e to extrude s to scale rotate e to extrude s to scale and then r to rotate and then e to extrude down and then s to scale go to your front view and now you can select these edges like that and you can move them in a little bit and edit them to make them look nicer from the front as well and it still has that modifier on it now you can notice that this one here if i go to facelift and i select this face the solidify modifier here is making this the effect come in but this one here if i select the face the effect is happening towards the outside and that's got to do with the normals so what we may have to do in this case is correct the normals i'm not going to get into why that happens it's a bit tricky to explain for beginners so just for now all you have to do is press a to select everything alt n and then go recalculate outside or inside depending on what the situation is i'm going to go outside and now all of these should be the same so i'm just going to select a face here go ctrl l to select the whole thing and then g and just move it out a bit and you guys can adjust this however you want you don't have to do it exactly like me i'm completely up to you how you want to do that and uh once you're happy with that you can also just select any vertex or face ctrl l select the whole thing and then go shift d in the right orthographic view move it back and then slightly edit the second piece and there you have these little hair droopy things coming off the side and uh you know very very simple so based on what i've just shown you guys you can make this however you want now that you know the basic techniques but it's very boxy very stylized very low poly but that's a nice look and it's actually what we're deliberately going for here so there we have it the character is pretty much done add a nose if you want but what we're going to do next is we're going to add some nice colors or materials what would we call shaders and then we'll add some nice lights and i'll show you how you can render this out as a nice looking result and then we're pretty much done okay so whenever we want to work with things remember our properties panel over here so remember we have this one here called the materials property i think i briefly mentioned this in the very beginning but over here if you click on it it says material properties here is we can actually add materials and change their properties so how do you add a material it's actually very simple let's just say you want to add a material to a certain object you just simply left click on it in object mode so let's start with the body right and then you go over here and you're going to see this button called new now there's a little drop down here that's where pre-existing materials are materials you already have let's just go new and now it's created the materials given it a default name so you can actually double click here or just click on it the name and call it something so i'm going to call it yellow because i'm going to be a yellow color and then over here you're going to see something called a preview this is where you can actually see a preview of your material and under here is something you see the surface this is where you change a whole bunch of settings now i'm not actually going to get into all of these settings here because that's a lot more in depth and this is something you'll learn as you grow as an artist for now we're going to look at nothing more than the color literally just the color at the moment the color is white so we want yellow so we click on this and we go and click on yellow or wherever we want not only can you change saturations here and colors but you can also come to the value slider and change the values so pretty simple not much more to say than that and now you have that material now obviously you're not seeing it because you have to actually render so rendering is when we press z on a keyboard and we can click on this option called rendered now we're no longer seeing just the shading viewport training but we're seeing the actual material now another thing to think about is when you go up to your properties go up here to this little camera that's your render properties currently there's an engine a render engine being used called ev that's more like a real-time rendering engine and we're going to change it to something called cycles now i'm not going to really get into the detail here cycles does a lot more like a bounce lighting rate tracing a lot more advanced things but if you have a gpu under the device you can enable it if you don't just leave it at cpu it's not a big deal this isn't really a render processor intensive render anyway it's very low quality so probably doesn't matter um so i'm changing mine to gpu we'll add lights in a bit but for now i'm just going to go into the material preview which is kind of like a mix between the the just standard viewport solid shading and the render so um you can see here we have the color so what we're going to do now is go back to our materials properties we have that shirt still selected or the body and remember we added that yellow material what if we i want to add more so let's just tab into edit mode and let's just say for example let's just go ctrl r add in a loop here double click double g to slide and then alt s to scale out along the normals maybe move it up a bit let's just say we want to add a little border here so what we can do go to your face select and then going shift alt with face select enabled you can just shift alt click on this edge over here in the loop select these faces here and now what you can do is come here under your materials properly click on the plus again and now you have a new thing here you can go new and let's just call it red for example and now we can go assign while those faces are selected and has that material now we called it red but we still have to come to the surface here and just like we did with the yellow come to the base color and give it a color i'm going to go with an orangey kind of red so i'm going to quickly tab back out into object mode and now i'm going to select the shirt and instead of this time a cylinder materials tab instead of coming creating a new material let's just go to this drop down and create get the existing yellow and then what we can do as well is tab into edit mode and then click on the plus here and we can create a new one and once again we can just go down and select a pre-existing color so i'm going to go to red and this time if i wanted to be assigned to something i have to actually select it so i'm going to click on a face here on the sleeve i'm going to go ctrl l to select the whole thing and then click on the red and then assign how simple is that now let's create a new thing which is going to be the skin so let's just left click on the hand or on any face on the hand go ctrl l to select the whole thing then let's click plus over here and this time we're going to create a new material let's just call it skin and now we can go to the surface and let's just give it something like a brownish blush i want to kind of go for almost like a like a brown olive olive kind of color and then i'm going to go a sign you can make your skin whatever you want perfectly fine so now we have that there and a tab out and now we can actually select the head and go to the drop down and we already now have that skin so let's select it let's just also select the ear go to the drop down give it that same skin select the neck go to that drop down give it the skin and let's select the hair now the hair we haven't created a material for so let's click on the hair create a new material and call it hair and let's just come to the base color i'm going to go with a brownish kind of red like that and there i have it and that's now the hair so let's go to the legs let's click on the legs let's go new i'm going to call this blue and i'm going to make it kind of like a robin's egg kind of blue like gene almost then i'm going to click on the plus again go new and i'm going to call this one darker blue and if i want to assign it to any specific part we have to go in to edit mode in this case i'm going to make sure face select is enabled i'm going to go shift alt click on this edge over here to loop select these faces control plus or command plus to grow the selection just once so we have this part here selected i'm going to click on the dark blue and go assign and then under the base color let's make it something that fits the description like that and the exact same thing for the rest in fact i'm going to turn on my x-ray here and i'm just going to click and drag and just select these bottom faces they're all selected and i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to come here plus i'm going to go assign i'm going to click new and i'm going to make this like a levery kind of brown color bring that value down and there you have it pretty cool and you can even click on here and name it something i'm going to call it um lever and there we have it how simple is that i'm going to go back into object mode and now we've added all of these materials as you can see once again if you want to see this you actually have to press z and go into material preview like i said like i said so um there you have it so press z and go into either rendered or material preview so now all we have to do is just render this out we've already gone to our render engine and given it the cycles engine but we do need to add some light so let's go shift a and we've been adding meshes before but let's go down to our lights add in this thing called an area light and we're going to go g z and move it just like we've moved anything else i'm going to move it up to here so we've moved it up on the z axis and then we're going to go r and we're going to rotate it like this and then g to move it now you can pick whatever lighting direction you want once you have a position where you want your light to come from go over to your properties and you're going to see this little light bulb and that's your light settings and why is this our properties like i've mentioned before because we edit our properties here so you can go to the power and just as you might assume that's got to do with the strength so the more you put this level up here the what the more power you're going to get pretty common sense and then also the size that's going to make it a bit of a softer light the smaller you have that the point of the light just like you do in real life you're going to have a sharper light and the more broader the light is and closer to the subject here it's going to be a bit more scattered so i like to increase the size a little bit bigger than the default something like that and if we now go z and we go rendered we can see we have this light so it's up to you how much you want to tweak the power amount here for your light you can drag it up as much as you want you can even change the color of your light to give it some mood very simple stuff but once you're happy with it you can also go shift d with that light selected to duplicate it like anything else and then rotate it and you can duplicate and make as many of these lights as you want so i'm happy with that i'm going to go shift a i'm going to add in one more object and that's just a plane on the floor here i'm going to go s to scale that plane up like that and then tab into edit mode and i'm just going to go into my solid work express so z and then go solid and you can go to edge select select this back edge and then go e z and extrude it up on a z like that select this edge here and then you can go ctrl b and ctrl b allows you to make a bevel on an edge you can move it as big as you want by moving your mouse and then roll your middle mouse button to add in more segments and then just double click and it's added in now you can go back into object mode and you have this nice fancy backdrop and you can see here in our scene is a camera so you can literally click on that camera and with a camera active you can press 0 on your number pad and goes into camera view and then with that camera selected you can double tap r and as you move your mouse you can actually rotate the camera if you press r by itself you can rotate just like this and then you can press g and g allows you to move it so you just press g and move the camera to where you want it and then you can just like anything else you can come to your move tool and you can just move the these little sliders or you can just press g like we've been doing so g and then y to move along the y or z whatever you want and if you want to go change the dimensions just go to your output here and you can change your resolution so these are the pixels so 1020 by 1080 by 1920 here i'm just going to drag this value here down a bit just to make it a bit of a different ratio just like that and then i'm going to just um move my camera in a little bit something like that you can also come here to your camera settings i'm not going to get into all the advanced things here is a lot it can be said but just as a beginner here let's just go to the focal length and change that so um if so those of you who are familiar with photography a lot of this would make more sense to you and once again it's not what we're focusing on here as this is more just about a very beginner's tutorial for the modeling and things like that so here we have our camera setup we have our scene we're pretty much done so let's just select these two reference images i'm holding in shift and remember these collections i told you about if we now go m and we go new collection after we selected those two reference images we can go ref type whatever you want in here and then go okay and under your collections here now if you just drop down this main collection you can now see a collection called ref and now two references in there we can just untick it and they're out of the way so they're not deleted but they're just out of the way so if we want to ever bring them back we can but that just organizes our scene a little bit and there you have it we now have this if we press z and we go rendered we have our subject in the view here of the camera and another cool thing you can do in camera view is you can go ctrl b and then click and drag and drag over the camera with control b and it's just going to limit that render to the camera and that's going to free up a little bit of your processing as well so there we have it a fantastic looking low poly model that you guys can be proud of i hope you've enjoyed this and what you can do now is press z go back into solid mode and all you have to do is go to render render image and it's going to render this image for you and in fact i'll quickly just press escape to cancel this because i forgot to mention under your render settings just click on that and go down to the render and take the sample amount down to something like 80. because if you have it at 4000 whatever it's going to take forever to render so the more samples the higher the quality is but if you have this little thing the denoiser enabled blenders algorithm does a pretty good job at getting the noise out after you've rendered so just make sure you do that and then go render render image and we'll see what that looks like so you can see here this a little sample count is 48 samples out of 80. okay it's just finished it's out of the denoising and there it is now what you can do is you go to image save as and then save it wherever you want on your computer and uh that's it that's how simple this is i hope you guys have learned something here i know i didn't go into detail on everything like i said in the beginning but this is just absolutely wet your appetite and get you started as a beginner i hope you guys have enjoyed this i will be putting this blend file on my patreon and i'll probably do some more videos following up on this one we're going to do a little bit of rigging animation so you guys can learn more about this and definitely leave your comments below and i hope you guys have a good time

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 965,127

Keywords: blender tutorial, how to model in blender, how to use blender, blender, blender tutorial for beginners, blender beginners, ABsolute beginners 3d

Id: sbCW0Cs7aI8

Length: 65min 1sec (3901 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022