All language subtitles for 5 Blender and 3D Modeling 1

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.