Original subtitles

Hello, Manu here! in this tutorial we will talk about stylization of shape. we will start off

with the basic properties of lines and shapes such as roundedness or hardness, then we will apply this

concept to sculpting a rounded mountain in Blender and then on the contrary, we will make our mountain

angular and hard edged. after doing this basic exercise on shape language we will move on

to a more complex example of mixing the shape of a tree with a cube and a sphere, so when we say

'stylization of shape' we usually mean that each shape can have its own character and

basically all shapes in our composition or 3d render can follow a certain visual language or

visual flow. in this image for example i tried to keep all the lines flowing, a little bit swirly and

how should i say, liquid. and once we establish a certain visual language we just follow along

with it and all the new shapes and lines that we add to our composition also conform to this

style, meaning the style of lines and shapes and to show the opposite example, let's have a look

of Brian Miller's artwork, here we can see that the lines and shapes follow a totally different

visual language or visual flow, to the contrary of what we saw before, the lines here are all angular,

very hard edges indeed and if we see something rounded like the clouds it only serves the purpose

of accentuating the hardness of all the other lines and shapes. that's a matter of contrast.

so the stylization of shape works in this image in such way, so all the elements of the composition

become sharp and angular and everything that you will decide to add to this composition will

also take this shape, unlike this type of the shape stylization which obviously is a complete opposite,

rounded smooth and pretty calm overall. now let's do a quick stylization of shape exercise to try

these concepts out. i will start with the cube S and then Z to scale it down on the Z axis

Ctrl A to apply the scale to make sure that we can sculpt on it, then i'm going to jump into the

sculpting mode and choose a brush. let it be the clay strips brush as the most basic, one i will also

go ahead and enable the Dynamic Topology at the top of the user interface and we'll change the

detail size to 8 just to give it slightly more details, the dynamic topology feature means that

the topology of the mesh will be updating on the fly as we are drawing on it, or rather sculpting

and if you wish you can preview the wireframe here in the viewport overlay settings. i'm using a

tablet for sculpting, but you can do the same thing with the mouse if you don't have a tablet around,

so i'm trying to sculpt a simplified mountain with keeping the rounded shape in mind,

i'm trying to filter all the shapes that we need to sculpt through the filter of that

roundedness and softness. imagine that this is like a grammatic rule that we try to follow in

designing all the 3d forms in our scene. this is also kind of dominant stylistic element of how

we treat the shape language. you can write down the keywords that will help you to arrive at

this key feature that you would like to implement, for example roundedness also means that

we can distribute the colony of the spores that that have a spherical shape on top of our mesh

because that roughly corresponds to the shape idea that we are pursuing and this is an example

of adding some very basic property to our model something like smoothness, in this case

but practically this property that we choose, it can be anything and we will explore

some options later on in the tutorial, but for now let's render this mountain out, but first actually

maybe we can do something else with the shape, maybe we can shade it smooth, probably no need

as the hard triangles caused by the flat shading mode create a nice contrast to the overall

fluidity of the shape, i like it a lot, contrasts are still important. ok what else can we do? maybe

we can apply a little bit of spiral rotation if we can put it like that to the model and what if

we want to make things a little bit swirly? we can do it as well, we can get as creative as we like,

chances are it will push the shape in an unexpected direction, but let's try it

by using the Rotate brush i am adding a little bit of swirliness to the whole thing, i think

the result is quite nice, but anyway i have chosen not to go with the spiral thing for the

final render. yeah so here is a quick sculpt of the mountain which has the shape language like that

you name it very flowing rounded, a little bit twisted, something of that sort

and now let's try i wanted to say a more mechanical shaped language, but

rather hard-edged shape language, a little bit more rocky. i will start off with extruding a

polygon in the edit mode and then extruding it a few times more until i get this spike made of

a few polygons and then i will extrude some more edges out to give it a little bit of depth.

you can press S to scale up and down the edges, R to rotate them G to move the vertices and edges

very quick operations indeed and i'm trying to keep a minimal number of polygons here just to

demonstrate the concept of keeping the shape of this mountain very sharp. imagine that this is

our dominant stylistic direction and we are trying to follow it faithfully and we are trying to avoid

the smooth shapes like a plague, just for the purpose of this exercise,

so i'm imagining that this could be claws of some mythical creature or something like that

everything that helps you to arrive at a certain mood,

keeping the model relatively low poly or actually very low poly really helps with maintaining the

sharpness, we can even fracture the form of this thing by copying this spike a few times

because fractured also makes it look sharp i guess so that also helps. so here is a mountain made in

a different technique, poly-modeling instead of sculpting, but mainly what's important it follows

a different shape language, this stylized mountain is made out of triangles, sharp angles and pointy

tips, i hope you enjoyed this exercise, here is a quick comparison of the different attempts at

stylizing the shape in totally different ways i should say. well stylization of shape can be

more complex than that, for example you can add some weird properties to the original idea

for example you can mix the shape of a tree like Braydan Barrett did uh with some other elements

like i don't even know what is it exactly, some guts, it's a matter of blending the original idea

with some unexpected shape to create a highly stylized version of the original thing, the bowel

shaped tree, why not. or a spaghetti shaped tree for that matter, the concept still remains the same

you take the idea of a tree and you add the shape properties of some other object, spaghetti

in this case, to create a spaghetti tree, it's a little bit more complicated than adding a simple

characteristic to the original shape, but not that much complicated, actually it's a very fun process.

or how about the tree mixed with a cube? well you can say with a default cube, if you work in Blender

so the shape of a tree blended with the shape of a cube may produce something like a cubic tree

that is deeply exciting if you ask me, a brilliant example of stylization of shape by Brayden Barrett

actually why not do something like that in our next exercise

so here we go, let's have some fun with stylizing the shape of trees, you'll just need Blender and

some time at your disposal and these are some sketches, you can use them if you wish or you

can create your own blocky tree, basically the point of this exercise is to go beyond a simple

characteristics like smoothness and angularity and combine the totally different unexpected

things together. how would the tree look if this tree was made of cubes or not necessarily made

of cubes like in Minecraft, but what if the idea of a tree was processed using the shape

of the cube as the main rule of how its shape is stylized something along these lines i guess.

feel free to use imagination and don't hesitate to show us the results of this quick little exercise

we would be stoked to see your vendors and models. even feel free to upload them to Sketchfab so we

can have a look in 3d. oh! it will be awesome, i hope you will have fun with creating the cubic trees

i have created something like this after trying a few times and i have rendered it using the

isometric camera. okay, well and if you still feel uh that you may want to explore an opposite idea

then do the same thing, but this time take a sphere as the key idea of stylizing the shape,

make a gorgeous spherical tree to really nail down the concept of the shape stylization. again

i have created something like this and it brings us to the conclusion. thank you so much for

watching this tutorial on stylization of shape from the creating stylized 3d art course by me

Manu Järvinen, Gleb Alexandrov and Aidy Burrows for creativeshrimp.com