Original subtitles

Blender and 3D Modeling

In this lesson, I'll introduce you

to the wonderful world of the free software Blender.

It's a fantastic program that can be intimidating at first,

but don't worry, I'll be with you all along as we go through

and learn basic modeling techniques, some sculpting,

and also how to navigate around in the software itself.

Without further ado, let's get started.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the Blender interface.

I'll use the latest version of Blender and I suggest you do the same.

Head on over to blender.org to find the latest version.

There are always tons of updates being done to the software,

so check out which latest version is released

and follow the instructions to download and set it up on your own system.

When you fire up Blender, you'll always see this startup scene. You get a little camera, which is this object that you see here.

You have a default cube object and also a little point light here.

You noticed that when I selected the objects in the scene,

it highlighted them up in our Outliner in the top right of the screen.

There's a little icon next to each one to tell you what kind of object this is.

For our camera, we have a little Camera object here.

For the default Cube, we've got this inverted triangle

and that is the same icon you'll see

for any 3D object that you add to your scene.

Then, for our Light, we have a light bulb here.

There are a couple of lights

and each light object will have that same icon next to it.

Once you start adding tons of objects to your scene,

keeping an eye on those icons is useful.

Also, keeping good organization of our collection will be paramount.

I'll talk you through the best practices for that

as we work forward in our final project development. I also wanted to show you

how to navigate around in the Blender interface here.

It can be very overwhelming making the transition to 3D.

I started out doing a lot of work in 2D originally,

so you're looking in one direction,

you don't have control over the camera placement,

and you're in a fixed viewpoint for this.

Once you move over to 3D, you have infinite control

and ultimate unlimited power, so that's a bit overwhelming.

At the same time, it's also fantastic

because you can do pretty much anything with 3D software.

You can create wonderful scenes.

We'll work towards a fun project throughout this course as well.

First, the basics.

Let's see how to move around in a scene and understand what we're looking at.

As a note here, as I'm working through this,

keep an eye on the bottom left of my screen

and you'll see this mouse icon.

If I click on the screen, say I hit the left mouse button,

you'll see it pop up there to tell you I've clicked the left, the middle, or the right button.

Anytime I do a keystroke with my keyboard,

you'll see that pop up there.

Keep an eye on that if you're not understanding

what keys I'm clicking or how I'm moving around.

The first thing I'll show you is how to navigate around the Viewport.

There are a couple of ways to do that.

The first one is to orbit around the scene.

To do that, you can hold down your middle mouse button

and move the mouse around.

This allows you to orbit around your scene.

If you're want to move up and down,

you can see around the Viewport in that way.

If you hit Shift + middle mouse button,

this allows you to pan left, right, up, and down

in this same distance away from your objects.

You can see what I'm doing there.

Lastly, one of the most important things to do is zooming in and out.

For that, like scrolling up and down on a webpage,

use your middle mouse button to scroll upwards to zoom in,

and then scroll out to zoom outwards.

That's a lot of fun to do. There are ways to change your Viewport to snap it to a certain perspective.

If I hit 0 on my numpad,

that's on the right of your keyboard not the top numbers,

the little calculator interface there.

If I hit 0 on my numpad, it snaps me to the camera view,

so I'm looking down now

through what the camera's seeing in my scene.

If I hit 3 on my numpad, this is looking at the side view.

If I hit Ctrl + 3, this flips me around to the other side.

If I hit 7, now I'm looking top down on my view.

Up here, it's telling me it is Top Orthographic view.

If you get disoriented as to where you're looking

and it's dizzying, you can look up and it tells you what you're looking at.

Again, if I hit Ctrl + 7, now we're looking at the underside,

the Bottom Orthographic mode.

Let me move back around here.

We'll hit those keys quite a bit

as we're modeling things to get scaling right

and make sure our perspective looks great through our camera. If this is a bit overwhelming, there are a lot of shortcut keys

and you're taking notes and listening, I've included a helpful document

that shows all of these shortcut keys up on the Blender site.

You can download it, put it on a second monitor,

or print it out and have it near you as reference.

Though I've been working on Blender for some years,

I still forget what the different hotkeys are.

It's helpful to reference that if you're stuck on how to move around

or use some of the shortcut keys in your interface.

Those are some of the basic moving tools.

If you're new to Blender, slow things down, navigate around,

and understand what you're looking at.

Once you're comfortable,

we'll move on to manipulating 3D objects in our scene.

I'll remove this default cube for now by hitting the shortcut key X

and committing that change by hitting the left mouse button.

We just eradicated the default cube from our scene

and we'll add it back in

by hitting another shortcut, which is Shift + A. This opens a nifty interface,

which you'll be seeing a whole lot as we work through our final project,

which is the Add menu.

We've got many objects we can add in to our scene.

We'll cover a couple for our tutorial

but I urge you to experiment and explore the other ones too.

The main ones we'll focus on are adding in meshes, curves, images.

We'll add both Reference images and Images as Planes as a background.

You might not see this as it is an add-on

and I'll show you how to do that.

We'll also be adding in lighting design to our scene.

We'll be working with these lights.

We'll also add additional camera views if you'd like to do that.

Let's add in a new Mesh and we'll choose a Cube,

so we'll add back in that default Cube as well.

If you look at the top left, we have this dropdown up here

which is telling us the object interaction mode.

By default, when you open up Blender, you'll be in Object Mode. In Object Mode, you can move things by hitting G

and this moves things around.

You can hit S to scale things up and down like that,

but the real object modeling manipulation

occurs in Edit Mode.

To get into Edit Mode, you can hit Tab on your keyboard

or you can hit this dropdown and select Edit Mode from the dropdown.

By default, in Edit Mode, I'm in Vertex select mode,

meaning I can only select the points of my mesh here.

You can see that this is where that is noted too.

This little point here is allowing us

to click one of the eight points on this cube here.

If I hit 2, this switches me over to Edge select mode.

For Edge select mode,

you can select multiple edges on your object like that.

You also have Face select mode,

which if you hit 3, you can get into that too.

This allows you to select the faces on our cube.

That's a quick way to select objects like that. Let's talk about how to manipulate these and get to doing very basic modeling.

To move things around, if you select a face like this

and then I hit G, as we had in Object Mode,

this allows me to move it around.

If I want to constrain that motion to one axis

and pull this face out across the X-axis,

you can hit G and the axis that you want to move this along,

the X-axis for me, this red line here, I'll hit X,

and this allows me to pull this along the X-axis, which is great.

If I hit Ctrl as it's moving, it snaps that motion

to the grid lines that you see on our axis as well.

This can be useful to keep accurate dimensions

and working with a blueprint or something like that with our model.

To commit my change,

I'll hit the left mouse button to select that.

Now, we've moved that edge out.

Another useful thing that we'll be doing quite a bit

is extruding different things in our scene,

which is basically extending out and adding additional geometry based off of an edge or a face.

There are a couple of ways to do that.

You can do this off one of the little icons on the side.

This is extruding.

If I click that, we can extrude stuff out this way,

which is nifty.

There are other tools that we'll get into for the modeling.

The way I like to do this the most is with the hotkey E

and this allows me to extrude along this axis here.

Now we've added in some additional geometry.

We've got a bit of something going on here.

It's super basic, but it gives us an idea

of how to create extra geometry,

which we'll do as we start to model the room elements for our scene.

Another useful thing I do quite a bit is insetting faces.

To do that, you can hit I on the keyboard

and then move your mouse around up and down

and this allows you to inset a face.

Now you see that this face here has been shrunken down.

We've got this additional geometry to play with.

Then, I'll hit E again to extrude. I can now extrude this single face inwards into our cube

or outwards to push it out.

That's looking pretty interesting too.

Another thing I do is beveling.

This is rounding out or smoothing edges of your scene.

I'll hit 2 to switch over to Edge select mode

and hold down the Shift key and select the edges around this face.

Now we have this ring around the faces selected,

and if I hit Ctrl + B,

this allows me to bevel the scene that you're seeing here.

If I scroll up and down on my mouse,

this adds additional subdivisions to our bevel.

It smooths it out.

It's sharp as you can see, very cut-off,

which might work well when we make some columns for our scene.

If I scroll up a bit more, this smooths it out.

If I hit click to commit that change,

you'll see there's hidden down in the bottom left this little toolbar.

If I click on that to open it up,

you'll see a lot of different options are now available too. We can apply Bevel to just the Edges or Vertices.

We can change the profile of this Bevel by adjusting the Shape,

so we can have it bevel inward like that,

which will be helpful when we model our columns,

or likewise, we can move it up this way to harshen that out

and make it a lot more rounded outward that way.

You can also change the Segments here, which are the subdivisions.

You can also change the overall effect of this,

so I can make a huge bevel or a very subtle one like crown molding,

which we'll do when we do the crown molding for our scenes.

It's nice and very nifty.

I often do a lot of work here when I make columns for my scenes.

That's a lot of fun and quick and easy to do.

Let me click to commit that change as well.

Be careful, once you click off of that, you will lose that menu there.

If you accidentally did that, you will have to Ctrl + Z to undo it

and Ctrl to go through that process if you made a mistake here.

You do commit those changes when you click off of it. I wanted to show how to add in some subdivisions to our scene.

We'll be doing this quite a bit when we're adding in grass

and foliage to our scenes.

I've added a plane by doing the Shift + A method from before

and I'm in Edit Mode here.

If I right-click on our plane, this opens up an Edge Context Menu

with a lot of different types of things that we can do with our scene here.

One of the things I'll be doing is subdividing.

If I hit Subdivide, it opens a menu at the bottom,

which says the Number of Cuts that you can do.

For a plane or something like this, I like to add 100 cuts

and you can see that's added a bit more to our mesh here.

Before we had one face,

now we've got a bunch of little faces in our scene

and this gives us more flexibility.

We're starting to do different displacements on this.

We'll be modeling some beach terrain for our final project where we'll try to add some details like ripples or divots to our sand.

We want as much geometry to work with as possible.

A quick note about subdivisions,

you can overwhelm your computer by adding in a bit too much of this,

so be mindful not to add too many subdivisions.

If your computer starts to lag or slow down,

you can scale things back a bit and then work that way.

We've added in this plane here.

This is a super simple little way to subdivide that as well.

One thing I forgot to mention with the cube

is adding in some Loop Cuts too, which we'll do a bit with our modeling.

To do that, we'll hit Ctrl + R,

and you can see it's added this yellow outline around our cube.

If I move this to a different axis, it now selects vertically across here.

We can choose where to make this cut in our scene.

I can see where I'd want to commit this.

If I left-click, it allows me to drag this around our scene. If I hit left again, it's officially added in that Loop Cut.

If I go back and try to add that again, you can scroll upwards...

If you hit Ctrl + R

and if you scroll up while in this mode, you can add more cuts to the scene.

This is adding more subdivisions to our geometry.

Now that you have committed this, hit G to shift this around.

G + X to constrain that motion to the X-axis.

That's another quick way to add some geometry.

We'll be doing this as we're starting to do some detailing

to the objects in our scene.

I’m adding in those Loop Cuts.

You can see we've added more geometry to our original Cube.

A lot of simple little techniques here

and I encourage you to take time to practice this

before moving on to the next part,

which will be adding in some super simple textures

and lighting to our scene.

I want to show you how to do that simply.

If I click on this camera here, this is our Render Properties tab

and this allows me to see which Render Engine we'll use to render out our scene.

By default, Blender will use Eevee, a real-time rendering engine,

similar to Unreal Engine,

or other video game-type real-time render engines.

You get good results with Eevee, but personally, I prefer to use Cycles,

which is a much better ray-traced type of rendering engine

where you get a lot nicer lighting results

with a bit less effort than you do with Eevee.

For Eevee, you need to do more work to get realistic lighting

and to get the textures working.

We'll be using Cycles

and if you've got a good GPU, enable GPU Compute here

and on your device as well.

I also like to turn on Denoise,

so I'm not fighting through too much noise.

If you've got a video GPU, you can enable OptiX here.

Otherwise, you can use Openimage or Automatic,

so you won't fight through noise in the Viewport.

If I hit up on the top here, you can see the shading mode I'm in.

By default, it's the Viewport Shading mode.

If I go over to this little ball here with a light glint on the edge, this allows me to go into the actual render view.

This is what the rendering would look like here.

The scene is super basic.

The lighting reflecting there

is coming from this little light that is around there.

You can hear my computer firing up,

getting ready to start rendering stuff out here.