Original subtitles

Blender and 3D Modeling

I want to show you how to quickly add in a texture to this.

I pulled up this bottom menu so that we can see our shading layout,

which is this Shader Editor.

By hitting that dropdown, you can switch between modes.

I'll be using the Shader Editor.

Click on the object to add texture.

Here, let's add a simple texture to this cube.

I'll click on that.

We can now add in a new texture and give it a name.

I'll call this Test Texture.

It's important to keep good naming for the textures as you go along.

You will see when we added that in, we were given two nodes here.

This is Blender's node interface.

It's how Blender represents textures in our scene.

You have what's called a Principled BSDF shader.

It has a whole host of different slider properties that you can influence by moving a slider here on your scene

clicking out into a Material Output.

This is where everything will be piping out to, Material Output.

You can affect the Surface and the Volume of your object.

This is useful when we add atmospheric effects

like fog and the God ray effect that you see.

That'll be affected through that.

You can also displace geometry through here in cycles

by influencing this Displacement method, which is very nifty.

We can also pipe different inputs into all these properties,

which is what we will be doing for a lot of our texturing here.

For starters, I'm keeping things simple

and adding some of the basic nodes from Blender's node editor here.

Similar to how we added in objects to our scene, if you hit Shift + A,

you open the Add menu for all the nodes.

You can see a bunch of different things to add into our scene. We will be adding in some Image Textures later on.

This is the primary texture that I use mostly,

Image Texture plugged in.

To show you how to influence some of the textures,

let's bring in this Brick Texture.

Let me pipe the Color, this yellow output here,

into our base color.

Now you can see

it's added in this brick effect across the texture.

This is an interesting way to add some bricks to your scene.

You can change the spacing of these as well.

If I change some of the properties here,

I can change the scaling of these bricks.

I can change the width of them.

You can also change the color of these here.

If I want to make these bricks blue, I can do that as well.

You can also influence other properties.

I'll get more into detail on how these work later on,

but I want to show you how to add something in simply

like a texture like that.

I want to show you how to add in some overall World lighting to this. Now, the only lighting in our scene is being cast

from this little point light here.

What I use for all of my scenes

are what are called HDRIs, which are these environment textures.

It's like a huge 360 image that wraps around your scene

and applies a lot of nice lighting to your scene.

Why I like to use HDRIs

is because of the variety of colors that you get from it.

It makes your scenes look more photo-realistic

when you have a whole splash of colors.

As we have talked about earlier, observing the world around you,

you notice that the sky, for example, isn't just one color.

If you look at it, it has all different shades

of blue, grey, purple, red.

There is so much different stuff going on in the sky

that by using one color for the sky, let's say by default,

I'll click on World Properties here.

Right now, our sky is this grey color but let's brighten this up

and make it a light blue sky.

This doesn't look realistic because it's just using one color, so when we are splashing this on our object,

it just looks CGI.

It's looking too fake.

We want to control this a lot more by using HDRIs.

If I click on this yellow thing you see here,

it allows me to change the texture I'm piping into our world's texture.

For example, when you are looking at the nodes here on this object,

our world has node inputs as well.

If I click on this dropdown here and then go from Object to World,

this is what is going on to influence the texture that you see.

We are plugging a color with some strength.

If I crank this up, it's its brightness,

into our Surface output.

We want to change this node into an environment node.

I can do that by clicking on Environment.

This allows us to open up an image here.

I have a couple of HDRIs downloaded

and I have linked a bunch of awesome ones that are free

in the resources for this unit as well.

You can peruse those and find a whole bunch of HDRIs that work for your scene, your sunrises, sunsets, mid-day things,

and all kinds of things that add lighting to your scene.

Take some time to experiment with those.

Now, I'll hit Open and navigate to where I saved my HDRIs.

You can see I have different ones saved here.

Let me just open this second one, which is gamrig_4K HDRI.

Now, if I use the middle-mouse button and look around,

it's added this HDRI as a background to our whole scene.

I'm looking all around it.

It's now this 360 wrap of everything.

That's cool to see as well.

It added in a more realistic lighting to our scene.

It's hard to tell as we don't have exciting objects in our scene,

but if we were to have rocks and different things here,

that would look cool.

That's an easy way to add HDRIs in here.

I'll be talking more about how to do this in later units too,

but I wanted to show you the importing process for that.

Next, we'll talk about the camera, which is the most important part here. It's how we'll be viewing our scene.

To get into the camera, as I said before,

you can hit 0 on your numpad, and this is the camera view.

What I like to do is have a Viewport here on the left

and a Camera view on the right with our Render view

where we look through the camera.

I prefer switching this off.

I'll make this my Viewport

and I'll make this my Render view on the right.

I am looking now through my camera here.

If I don't want to see this extra stuff

and to speed up my rendering, I can go into this Output Properties tab

and click on Render Region.

Now, it's cropping to render what's within our Camera view for this.

We can also change the formatting of our camera resolution.

X is the horizontal and Y is the vertical here.

For Instagram, I like to do something like 1200 × 1500.

This works well for the vertical crop on Instagram,

but feel free to do a horizontal mode as well. Our camera by default is looking at this strange angle,

so if I pull out these Transform properties,

you can see it's rotated a bit weird

and is at a strange location in our scene.

You can hit Alt + R to zero out your rotation

and Alt + G to zero out your location.

This is now set our camera within this cube that we've created,

but now if I hit G and pull this up out of our scene,

then hit R and X to constrain the rotation to the X axis,

and then type in 90,

we're looking perfectly perpendicular to our plane.

Let's shift this rotation by hitting R, Shift + Z, and then 90.

Let's move this along the X axis by pulling out here.

Now, we are looking more reasonably at our scene.

This is just nice and nifty here.

Let's move the cube aside and pull our plane in here.

Now we are looking at a bit more reasonable scene

that's level with the plane, the ground, and looking down. One thing I also like to do

when I add in cameras and look through the camera viewpoint

is to click on the Camera object.

Now, we've got this new tab that comes up here with this green icon.

If I click on that, it will let me adjust

the camera's properties like its Focal Length.

If I want to change this to a wide angle like 35 mm,

that I can do right there as well.

I can change what's called the clipping.

For example, if I put my cube at a distance,

it fades out into oblivion and we don't see it anymore

though it still exists in our scene.

We can adjust that clipping to finish further away.

Sometimes I put a ridiculously large number like 99,999.

Now, you can see our cube way off in the distance.

As I come from a photography background,

I like to have these Viewport Display Composition Guides up

as I'm looking through the viewfinder of my camera at a scene.

Now, I have the rule of Thirds and Center selected.

The Thirds divide my scene into this grid effect. Click out of render to see it better.

I have this grid of nine different tiles here.

They tell where the main elements are.

I try to place things

so that the focal points converge at these edges here.

They're almost divided into a tri-panel scene.

Usually, the foreground is here, you got the middle ground here,

and the background and sky elements like mountains, etc.

are in this top panel here.

I'm thinking like a photographer.

Then, I'll also enable Center, which if I click off Thirds,

denotes where our center point is.

That's useful to know where that is in our scene.

That's helpful for composition, which I'll talk about as we work on it.

It's important to tell the narrative of your story

to guide a viewer's eye through the scene

as if you are walking through the scene itself.

It's very important

and I take a lot of time setting the composition in my scenes.

I also spend a lot of time with the lighting design in our scene.

Make sure you are doing good design so that it looks further realistic. Don't worry, I'll walk you through how to make awesome lighting

as we work forward in our final project here as well.

That is just scratching the very surface of Blender.

There is so much to the software I didn't cover.

If you wanted to learn more and see what Blender offers,

you can go to their site blender.org

or access additional documents I've put here for this course

to learn other shortcut keys and things to help you

as you continue to grow and learn in Blender.

In the next lesson, we'll go over how to enable some fantastic add-ons

that will speed up your workflow not only for this project

but any project you cover down the line.