Tutorial: Easy 2D Image to 3D Render Workflow (100% Open Source)

so you have an image of a logo a low resolution pixelated highly compressed image and you want to turn this in to a 3D render I'm going to show you how to do this and it's surprisingly simple all you need is a logo that you can screenshot so to screenshot an area on Windows you can go Windows shift s and then you can just box select the area that you want to screenshot and now this image is saved to your clipboard so now we're going to go ahead and download inkscape it is a free and open source design tool and it's amazing okay so when you're inkscape you can simply press Ctrl V to paste your image and then you can scale it down a little bit if you like you can hold on control and just place it in the middle here now you can see this is still the low resolution JPEG so now you can simply go path Trace bitmap here you can see you have this preview window I'm not sure what the default settings are all but I like to have live updates enabled so if your logo is only one color you can use single scan but if you have more colors you can use multi-color and set it to colors and then you change the amount of colors but here you can see we have gradient so this works best if you have solid colors only so let's go single scan and I'm going to set brightness cut off and then you can change the threshold here that looks good and I'm going to click invert image so the logo is black and then let's click apply so now you can select the image that was behind and you can delete it and now we have this really sharp Vector object so to turn this into a 3D model we want to use blunder so to export this to blender as a vector file let's go file save a copy and then let's save this to our desktop as drawing.svg scalable vector graphics let's just click save so now I'm going to open up blender and I'll be using blender version 3.6 so if we were to import the logo now we couldn't see it so let's just get rid of all the stuff in our scene by pressing a to select all and X to delete and now let's go F4 import scalable vector graphics and let's go desktop let's find it import and now you can see it's there but it's really tiny so I want to press a to select all and then s to scale it up and now you can see we have our Vector object in our scene and this is actually quite amazing because if you press tab to go to edit mode you can see that you have these actual Curves in blender and this is just so cool so just to compare here is the super blocky low resolution JPEG and here's the crisp Vector file it's just really cool that this is possible okay so now we're in the 3D world let's start messing around with this I want to move this to the center of our scene so let's go right click set origin to geometry and then you can press alt G to just move it to the center and I don't want this to be laying on the ground I want it to be standing up because it's a little bit easier to navigate around it then so let's press R to rotate and then X to specify the x-axis and then hold down control and then you can do 90 degrees and then you can press G to move it and then Z to specify the Z axis and now we got a beautiful logo hovering in our scene but I don't really like this color I want this to be brighter so it's a little bit easier to work with so let's select the logo and let's go to material properties and by default you can see that it has this SVG matte material which I don't really like so let's just click X to delete this and now it's brighter and much better but this is still a 2d object in a 3D world because it's infinitely thin so I want to make this a little bit thicker so let's go to object data properties and under geometry you can extrude it so if you click and drag on this it's really sensitive so you can hold down shift and I think I want to 0.002 so now we have a little bit of a thickness but even though there's thickness to this we're still missing some light and Shadow so I want to add an area light so let's go shift a light area and let's press G and move this up on the z-axis but this doesn't really light this up and that's because we have to set it to render view so let's set our viewport sharing to rendered okay nice now we can see our light so let's move it forward a little bit to increase the power you can right click and go adjust light power and then I want to make a ground plane so let's go shift a mesh plane and you want to press s to scale this up and let's rotate it on the x-axis by a value of 90 degrees and let's just move it a little bit back and by default we're working in EV but for this effect I think Cycles looks a little bit better so let's go to render properties and let's change our render engine from EV to Cycles and now already this just looks a lot better with the ambient occlusion so now I want to make this look really beautiful by adding some materials I want to take a break to talk about mental health if you were to ask me what is a creative person I would argue it's a person that goes through the process of one identifying a problem two solving that problem with limited amount of resources and then three identifying a new problem that spawned as a consequence of solving the previous problem and then you repeat all this over again until you're exhausted and the reason I'm talking about this is that I consider myself a full-time creative person and I feel that this mindset can quickly turn into the default routine and just become really difficult to turn off and you know it's great for harmless tasks like tweaking an extra 30 minutes on that keyframe sequence to get it really smooth but my problem is if there's suddenly a big negative change in my life that I can't control my brain still goes full speed into this identifying and problem solving mode and that just doesn't work because there are a lot of problems that just can't be sold so because of this I get a lot of anxiety where where I worry too much about a lot of things that I can't do anything about so I've gone to therapy through better help the sponsor of this video betterhelp is a platform that makes finding a therapist easier because it's online it's remote and by filling out a few questions Better Health can match you with a professional therapist in as little as a few days for me it actually just took a few hours to get matched and if you don't really fit with that therapist at first which is a common thing with therapy you can easily switch to a new therapist at no additional cost after using better help for a while now I found it really helpful to talk to a therapist about my problems and it's been helping with my anxiety and I really like that it's a video chat because I talk a lot with my hands you know so if you want to try it out check out the link in my description it's betterhelp.com polyfjord now click on that link helps support my channel but it also gets you 10 off your first month of better help if you want to try and talk with a therapist and see if it also can help for for you now back to the video okay so for textures I really like to use this website called ambient CG so we're gonna go and find a fabric texture and then I'm going to do this one I think so I'm going to go ahead and execute fabric number 66. so let's go ahead and click download on the 2K jpeg you won't need anything more than that I'm just going to save it to my desktop and go right click extract two and then it's this folder with all the textures in it this color is basically just what we need so now in blender I want to split my viewport in half by going right click vertical split and then I want to change this editor type to Shader editor now if you select the background you can make a new material let's call this background and I want to press n to get rid of this panel and here you can see we have the principal bsdf node and I think this is a little bit too comprehensive for what we'll be doing today so in the material properties let's just go to surface and let's click principle bsdf and let's set it to diffuse so now we can just lower the roughness and to add a texture to this I can highly recommend that you go to preferences and under atoms you can install the node Wrangler add-on that just comes with blender just enable it like this and now you can select this diffuse Shader and you can press Ctrl T and you have this node setup that is really easy to use to add a texture so let's click open and let's find our fabric texture and I want to do color and let's click open image and here you can see you have our fabric but this is way too small especially if we scale this up like I want to scale this up like this and now we want to increase the scale of the fabric so to increase the scale of this let's just click the mapping node and then you can click and then you can drag down and then sideways to adjust all of them and I think I'm going to do a scale of seven and then I want this to be a little bit brighter so let's go shift a and let's add a color RGB curves node and let's place this in between the texture and the Shader so now by placing these RGB Curves in between the texture and the Shader we can manipulate these curves to change the look of the Shader so I want to toggle the blue channel here and I want to increase this yeah that looks cool okay so now I want to add an interesting material to this logo element so let's go to material properties and let's give it a new material and let's just call this glossy and then under surface let's click the principal bsdf Shader and let's change this to glossy and now let's orbit below here a little bit and now you can see we can lower the roughness of this and we got this sharp shiny metal okay so we got a realistic texture on the background and we got an actually quite realistic glossy Shader here but this still does not look realistic and why is that if we zoom in here you can see that there's no highlight on these edges and that's because these edges are infinitely sharp look at that it's a perfectly 90 degree angle no matter how far in your Zoom so to fix this we can add a little bit of a bevel to this shape and that is going to really help with the realism so let's select our logo let's go to object data properties and under geometry we can scroll along to Bevel and here you can see you have the bevel depth so now I want to zoom in here and this is also really sensitive so I want to hold down shift and I want to set this to maybe 0.001 and now you can see you have this beautiful highlight on the edges here and this is just looking a lot more shiny but I'm not really sure if I like this rounded look so to make this Edge harder let's change the resolution to zero and under modify properties we can add modifier Edge split and now you can see you get these beautiful highlights here but I actually think I want to lower it a little bit so let's go back to object data properties and let's change the bevel depth to 0.005 or zero zero zero five yeah look at these beautiful highlights now this definitely looks a lot more shiny okay so we're almost ready to really make this design a lot more interesting but before that I want to add some color so let's select our logo and in the Shader editor let's go shift a converter black body and this allows us to add color based on Kelvin temperature so I want to assign this to the glossy and now you can see we get this really warm color and then I think I want to do a Kelvin temperature of 2200 and now here's the cool part let's go to World Properties and let's change the strength to zero look at that this is really coming together you can see you have these beautiful colors bouncing in between the shapes here so now we're approaching more and more personal taste so I just want to add some more lights but at this point in the tutorial feel free to go crazy with the lights you can add more lights you can experiment with color this is the part where things get really fun so I want to take this light and I want to move it further out and I want to right click and I want to increase the area light size and now you can see you get more of these beautiful highlights and I want to rotate it a little bit on the x-axis further out and what's really cool about moving the light further out is that when you view it from below you get this really beautiful reflection and I don't want this reflection to be a square I want it to be like a thin rectangle so you can select the light go to object edit properties and under shape you can change it from Square to rectangle and now you can right click and you can see you have two more options here so you have X size and then you have y size so I just want to make this really long and then I want to rotate it on the x-axis move it down here you can see you can rotate it on the y-axis as well and now look at this if you move this back and forth you can get this really cool shining effect and then I want to duplicate it by pressing shift d and then X to move it on the x-axis and I think I want this to be a little bit over here okay so I think the lighting is a little bit flat so what I like to do is I want to add a spotlight so let's go shift a light spot and let's move this up and over here and I'm going to rotate it in like this and then I want to right click adjust light power and I just want to make it brighter so I want this Spotlight to just be really subtle so right now it's too hard I don't want to see this shape so to get rid of this let's right click and let's go adjust Spotlight blend and you can just lower this to the lowest and then you can maybe move it out a little bit more and then rotate it in to make it even smoother we can right click and adjust the light radius this will also make the shadow a little bit softer which is really nice so now as you can see if you right click and increase the power even more you can see that you just have this really subtle highlight and if you just want to view this without any of these lines you can just click this overlay button to toggle overlay okay so I'm actually getting really happy about this so I want to render this out as a still image and to do that let's go render render image but remember earlier we deleted our camera so to make a new camera let's go shift a camera and now we have added the camera to our scene but we want the exact view that we have now to be the camera view so to do that let's go Ctrl alt numpad0 which is a mouthful but it aligns the camera to our view so you can press G and you can frame the camera a little bit and you can press G and then Z and then Z again to move the camera on the local z-axis so now we're pulling out like a dollar shot like this and I think I actually want to rotate a little bit and if you don't want to render everything outside of this you can press Ctrl B to set render region which is a really nice way to just isolate it a little bit more okay so to frame our camera I want to press R to rotate and then R again for trackball rotation and now you can really easily reframe your image I think that's good I want to right click adjust the focal length on a camera to zoom out just a little bit and one final effect as the cherry on top I want this to look really tiny so I want to add some depth of field so let's select our camera and let's go to object data properties and let's enable depth of field and let's set the f-stop to something really shallow like 0.1 okay nice maybe 0.05 but now everything is just super blurry so make sure your camera is selected and go right click depth of field distance and then you just click the head of the bird you can collapse this by going right click join areas and click on the one you want to disappear now you can see you have this really beautiful shallow depth of field effect where it's blurry hair and it's sharper over here and this especially looks really cool with this texture that we have for our fabric background okay so to render this as an image you can simply go render render image I just really like how this reflection is interacting with this texture this just looks so cool and what's really cool about this is that you can zoom in and you can zoom in and you can just keep zooming in because this is Vector so the only limitation is the background texture that you have here so we did the 2K texture but you could easily have done 4K or 8K for the background texture and it's just yeah it just looks really sharp at any zoom level now this is the final result and you might be asking is this workflow even useful for anything else and yes that is a perfectly good valid question to ask I mean you could say it's useful because you can take a screenshot from anywhere and turn it into a curve and as long as you can turn something into a curve you don't do something like curves can be converted to Greece pencil and that unlocks this noise modifier that just gives anything a ton of Personality look at this wiggling text then you can either build modifier to this as well to animate how it's written and maybe you can turn this into a gif and add it as your email signature that's a useful workflow right okay fine hang on how about this let's find another logo and let's do the screenshot into Vector into burn organize and now check this out we don't use the curve as a visible object we can use it as a guide as a path and then we can add stuff to the path and now we add some materials and come up with a clever solution to not make it boring you know and hopefully we have something useful okay okay one more just let me try one more thing this will actually make you believe in this workflow let's take a real photograph a real animal and let's use this technique to slice it into layers and get that into blender now we're talking we got all these curves stacked on top of each other okay nice now we got some depth going on here I want to add some thickness to this some bevels good lights shadows and volumetrics now if you ask me that is a useful workflow which probably should have been the actual tutorial foreign [Music] [Music] Plagueis the wines

Channel: Polyfjord

Views: 287,918

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Id: e32ZtsnW-fI

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023