Tutorial: Rendering 2D Icons as 3D Objects in Blender

how to make this 2d icon into a 3d render using just free software here is a website that just has a lot of free icons search for hamburger take this one and download the svg to do the free download you have to attribute the author or you can use feathericons.com which are open source icons you can use google fonts and then click the icon section which also are a lot of open source icons these are really nice too but i just really like this hamburger icon so in blender the free and awesome 3d software let's go to preferences you can press f4 and add-ons and just type in svg and this is going to allow us to import scalable vector graphics so go to desktop click the hamburger file we just downloaded and where is it well let's get rid of this stuff first it's there it's just really tiny so let's scale it up this looks really weird but don't worry this happens to most svgs for some reason a lot of stuff is just overlapping in a weird way so first of all let's get rid of all these highlights because that's some sort of 2d design choice so let's just select these pieces and just delete them there we go since these are curved objects you can go to object data properties geometry and just extrude and if you hold down shift it can be even more sensitive let's do the salad and you can just extrude these out and let's take the buns and if you want to do two at the same time you can hold down alt so and then hold down shift as well and there are some seeds here so let's go into x-ray vision alt z and hold down shift to select these select the edge and hold down alt shift and extrude and we got ourselves a 3d burger oh some overlap here there we go now let's rotate this but it's a lot of different pieces so to keep this all together nice and tidy let's select everything hold down shift so the edge is sort of marked then press ctrl p and parent so now all these other objects will follow the edge of the burger and we can rotate it on the x x-axis to make it stand up move it to the center and if you want you can go object set origin origin to geometry so now the burger is sort of rotating in the middle let's set up a really nice lighting studio in cycles so set your render engine to cycles under render properties let's make a plane shift a mesh scale this up like this and then in the front view let's look this from front press shift a add a camera and then go to view align view align active camera to view and now this is our camera and the camera is selected you can press g move it a little bit and right click and adjust the focal length so to add a light to the scene we want to add an emission plane so right click down here vertical split and now we can set this to rendered view and we can turn off the widget and the overlays so press shift a and add another plane move this on the z-axis this is going to be our lamp so go to material properties new material let's call this laptop surface emission now we can scale up this lamp and we can make it more powerful yeah that's good now we want to make this into a smooth backdrop like those nice photographers use all the time so let's select the ground plane and select these two vertices in the behind and extrude on the z-axis and now you can see we've got some sharp edges here we've got a sharp edge down here let's take care of that first so go to modifier properties add modifier bevel and let's increase the amount and let's increase the segments and right click shade smooth there's another hard edge here which is the light is making this shadowy part on the backdrop and there's a really nice trick to solve this so go to the side view and there's our camera right and there's our light so try and point the light just right towards the camera so let's move this on the x-axis until it's just a little line like this then let's move it just outside our frame and now we have a really powerful lighting controller let's just scale up the backdrop a little bit on the x axis and select the light and press g and y y press y twice so you're moving it on the local y axis and now we have a really powerful light controller like this is a mafia boss and this is an interrogation victim it's sort of it's a really nice way to just control your lights so instead of rendering everything around there you can press ctrl b and just exclude it to only the camera let's add some interesting materials so select the burger edge go to material properties use nodes and set the surface material to glass and this is going to take a long time to render but i think it's worth it so lower the roughness let's select the edge of the burger we can move it up a little bit on the z-axis you can press r to rotate then you can press r again to trackball and you can sort of tilt it and get this really cool 3d effect there we go now let's select the backdrop material and to increase the contrast a little bit set the surface to diffuse and make it a bit darker i think that's much more dramatic now before we render this there are some issues if you see hair there are these artifacts in the glass one really simple way i've found to disable this is to just select the edge and under modify properties just add an edge split modifier and this fixes the problem but another issue we have before this is good to go is that i think these edges are a bit too sharp as you can see in this render there is this highlight that looks really nice on the glass material so select the burger edge and under object air properties you can scroll down to geometry and bevel and this depth slider is really sensitive so if you set this to 0.01 it just turns into a blob right let's set this to 0.001 0 5 and now you can see our rendering is getting quite slow but we still have some artifacts on these edges here and this is because there's not enough refraction data so let's increase the resolution like to nine or something so one final thing let's increase the resolution preview of the burger because it's a little bit low resolution now so let's set this to 32. okay so now we're ready to render and let's go to render properties denoising and enable the denoising for the render i'm going to increase the resolution for you guys and let's have a look it's going to take a while if you think the colors looked a little bit washed out compared to this one you can go to render properties and scroll all the way down to color management and set the view transform to standard and you have to be careful so that this isn't overexposed because it messes with the colors a little bit so let's hold down shift and lower the exposure i can increase the gamma a little bit and this is just for previewing but the thing is that when you save this alt s and then set this to png it's going to use this color management so let's save this and let's have a look so there's our end result and if you're still here i just want you to know about some seriously powerful techniques that is possible with this workflow first of all using svg icons as a starting point for your mesh can be a huge time saver you'll quickly get some basic shapes into your scene extruding and adding some bevel and materials in less than a minute and there are so many different open source icons out there take this wind icon for example you can do a simple round bevel and then add a text object give them both a flat material add a subtle background color and write something that fits the narrative keep it clean and simple and i think this is a logo and don't forget the most powerful thing here we're still in 3d here's where things get interesting let's import two different icons make one big and one small then use the curve modifier to make the small icon follow the shape of the big icon separate all the elements just make a bunch of copies and now all the small icons will follow the shape this is a great way to add some deeper meaning to your work like the most secure online shopping cart where your fingerprint is stored in a really secure way that this is the last one i promise just take a bunch of icons throw them in your scene and place them randomly in the frame now add your own vectorized logo and then you can add more text using the same font with your logo adjust the kerning get that registered trademark in there and then just give it the same extrude and bevel treatment as the other stuff with it now add a bunch of empty objects for each letter you want to animate then parent the letter to the empty objects and now you can add rotation keyframes to all the empty objects and then just offset them a little bit and you're done [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Polyfjord

Views: 2,985,372

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Id: zthvZvw-yJE

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ProfitTheProphet]

I watched this the other day, it was awesome.