Transcript for:
Beginner's Guide to Blender - Part 1

this video is a complete beginner's guide to blender four it's the first in a two-part series and is designed to be very methodical introducing skills slowly with a steady progression until you finish this fun scene which you can see behind me I'm a 3D artist with over 20 years teaching experience and I've tried to put all that knowledge together so it should hopefully be accessible to all users with absolutely no knowledge of Blender at all it's split into chapters so you can continue where you left off and if you like this approach then do check out my other courses discount links in the description this tutorial is sponsored by Nvidia and I'll be showing you how I'm using AI Den noising powered by my Nvidia RTX 40 series GPU for the best experience so the very first thing you want to do is go across to blender.org and download blender if you haven't already at the front of the site you will see the download option for the latest version if there is anything in this tutorial which has changed in newer versions then do check the description where I'll write notes of any changes if you go into the download section you can see the latest version here and you can also download Mac Linux and other versions here so when you first load up blender you get a splash screen like this and you'll see the version you're using up the top corner here you'll see your recent files over to the right and you can generate a new file based on the template on the left here it's also worth noting that you can recover the last session in case things crash and you can also open up files here I'm going to start with a general file you can click on this or you can actually just click on the scene itself because that is a general St up file so the first thing you'll notice is this big viewport here that's the 3D viewport we've got some other windows to the right here as well and one down at the bottom here I'll talk about those later to navigate the viewport it's generally much better with a three button Mouse if you haven't got a three button Mouse you can go up to edit preferences under input there's emulate 3 button Mouse there also if you haven't got a numpad which is used quite often in blender there's emulate numpad up here if you tick one of these it should be saved automatically because if we look down here you've got autosave preferences turned on by default so you can just close this down once youve ticked things so to navigate with the three button Mouse we use the middle Mouse button hold that down and we can rotate around and we've got a focal point of the cube at the moment you can kind of move the focal point by holding down shift and middle Mouse and you can strafe around if you're using the emulate 3 button Mouse you'll have to hold down alt and left click to emulate the middle Mouse button if you got a wheel you can wheel in and out for zooming if you haven't got a wheel you can hold down control and hold the middle Mouse button to zoom in and out there's lots of extra Options under the view menu up here there's things like frame selected which you can see is numpad period key if I press on that that will frame just this selected object which is the cube I'll zoom out with the middle Mouse button and show you that you can select different objects with left click so there's a light up here this is a good time to introduce you to the outliner which has our different objects there's the cube that we had selected earlier there's the light and I can also left click in here to select the different objects the last thing we have in our scene is a camera up here so we got a camera light and Cube I can box select objects by left clicking and dragging over several objects and you can see they're all selected now and if I press the home key or go up to the view menu and frame all you can see that it will frame everything and the focal point is now in the middle here we've also got a few options to the side here so there's zooming in and out and if I click that I can zoom in and out or move the view you can see I'm doing the same thing as the middle Mouse button I can also go into the camera and look through the camera by clicking this icon here and coming out by clicking it once again there's also a perspective and orthographic view at the moment we've got this perspective as we view off into the distance if I change it to orthographic you can see it all looks a bit strange but it's very flat and the lines are all straight so they don't go off into the distance there's no Vanishing point I'll change that back to perspective as it's much less confusing but it's very useful for lining up objects we've also got our cartisian coordinates up top here if I press the middle Mouse button you can see those moving around it's very useful to get used to the idea of the different axes as they're labeled here the positive of the axes are highlighted with their letters and these are the negatives just here you can actually click on these letters so if I click on the Zed which is the up and down axis I'll now view my objects from the top so I'm viewing them basically from up here and that's middle Mouse button again to move out of those views these options are also on your numpad so I can press 7 for top view one for front view and you'll see the minus y is looking at us here so the positive y goes away from us so again one for front view shows us minus y and three will show us side views so we're looking along the x-axis there and you'll get used to those as you move along and practice so you might want to just pause the video here and have a quick play with those controls and make sure you're happy with them so let's start adding a couple of objects first of all I'm going to hide the light in the camera is they can get in the way and be a bit confusing I can come up to the outliner here and it's got a little I icon I can press that and it will hide it in my viewport the camera icon is hiding it in my render I'll just quickly bring back the camera to explain that when we want to render our scenes so turn them into a picture or a video we always render looking through the camera so have a quick think how do I look through the camera hopefully remembered it's this icon over here that's also zero on the npad if I press that I can look through my camera and that's what will be rendered if I want to turn my scene into a picture or animation and again I can just middle Mouse button to move out a camera view so if I click on the camera icon here that will remove it from the render so when I render my scene that object won't be seen we'll talk more about this later but for now I'll just hide it in the viewport and I'll hide the light as well because we don't need that so we're left with our single Cube so pause the video catch up with me making sure you've hidden your camera and your light okay so let's add some other objects into our scene to do this we can go up to the add menu up here and we've got lots of options you can also find this menu if you use the shortcut keys holding shift and pressing a now like I say there's lots of things we can add we're going to stick to the mesh menu here and that's the most commonly used so we'll start at the top and I'll add in a plane now it looks a bit strange and it almost looks like nothing's happened but you can see it's added a plane in the middle of our Cube here and basically when you add an object it always adds it where your 3D cursor is which is this icon in the middle here you can move that by pressing shift right click and now if I press shift a to add mesh and then let's add a circle you can see that it's added a circle at the 3D cursor position it also looks like we've lost our plane but it is in the scene as you can see up here it's just within our Cube so pause the video catch up with me adding in a plane and a circle so how do we move these objects well I can left click them and although I wouldn't recommend this you can turn on under the viewport gizmos the move icon here and you can then click and drag the different axes here or grab in the middle there and move it perpendicular to your camera I'll undo those movements though by pressing control Zed and under the move gizmos you can see that there's a rotate and scale I'm going to turn those off though because I find them very distracting and it's much better to get used to the keyboard commands you'll be a much quicker blender practitioner the keyboard command for move is G so I can press G and start moving that around and you can see the plane behind it now and you can see I'm just moving it perpendicular to the camera if I press X now that will constrain it to the x-axis remember you've got your cartisian coordinates at the top here so you can see which axis you want to choose I can also now press a number such as five to move it five grid units along the x-axis I could at any point as well press the minus key to have minus5 blender units along the x-axis once you're happy then you can press enter so you can type in all your commands like that so pause the video and catch up with me moving your Cube five blender units in the negative X okay so how do we remove any movement that we've made and put it back to the center well there's two ways the quickest way is holding down alt and pressing G I'll do that with the circle here because it's slightly out of position so alt G will remove any movement so holding down the alt Keys is often the remove or do the opposite of something so holding down alt while pressing G will remove any of the grabbing that you've done the other way is to bring up my side panel you can press on this little arrow here or you can press the N key and that both hides it and shows it under the item panel you can see the location of my objects and I can actually type in five in the X here here and that will move it five grid units across this way the grid units should correspond to a meter hence why there's an M after the number you'll see we've got rotation and scale there as well the keyboard shortcuts for that are the r key and the S key so they're nice and easy to remember so as a quick challenge to you I want you to add in all the other mesh objects and I want you to spread them out along the x-axis with a 5 m distance between each of them but before you start that I'll just show you that you can move the 3D cursor back to the center Center which makes it a little bit easier by holding down shift and S you'll get a pi menu and you can say cursor to world origin and it jumps back to the middle now when you add objects they'll be right in the center there so pause the video and add each of those objects okay so I'll zoom out a little bit with the wheel of my mouse I'll move across slightly I'll press shift a to add mesh and then UV sphere I'll press g x and 10 this time to move it across like this shift a to add mesh icosphere you can see the difference between the UV sphere and the icosphere there GX minus 10 move that across there shift dat to add and then cylinder gx1 15 shift dat to add cone GX -5 I'll zoom out a bit more add in the Taurus GX 20 and add in the grid looks the same as the plane but I'll talk about that in a moment G x minus 20 and shift a to add monkey and we got this fun monkey's head which you can see there so gx25 so you should have them all lined up like so okay let's select our monkey as that's quite fun and I want you to frame selected pause the video and have a go at that so that's the period key on your numpad and it zooms Us in and moves the camera and that becomes our focal point okay now I want you to go to to side view have a go that so side view is the x-axis here and it's numpad 3 so numpad three and I can look along the x-axis notice it puts us in orthographic View and I can change this to go back to perspective and press it again to go back to orthographic as soon as I come out of that side view you can see we come back to perspective as we can now see a vanishing point so go back to side view now I want to rotate my object so I can press r to rotate and you can see it's rotating perpendicular to the camera so it's rotating along the x-axis like this I can then press G to grab so I can move it above the y-axis as if that's an imaginary floor like this so pause the video and have a go at doing that okay so I'll come around to the front let's take our plane here and I'm going to scale it up 10 times so I'm going to press s to scale you can see it's scaling there and then type in 10 and it scales it up nice and big okay so this is a bit of practice I want you to place these objects so they're randomly placed but sitting on top of the floor so you'll have to move some of them up and I want you to take the cylinder and the Taurus and rotate them and have them resting on the floor the Taurus will be upright and the cylinder will be kind of lying on its side hopefully that makes sense before we do that I'm going to delete my circle here if that's a little bit difficult to select you can always selected in the outliner and press delete and I'm going to get rid of the grid as well I'll do that because it's almost identical to a plane it just has more subdivisions which I'll talk about later so I'll press delete on that and for the rest of the objects you need to place them on your floor as your challenge okay I'll press n to get rid of my side panel as that's a bit distracting and I'll start off by selecting the monkey and moving that into position now you might think if I press G to grab and move it into position like this it'll be on top of the floor but if I come around to the side it's not so we need to be a bit more careful than that so I'll undo that movement and it moves back to this position I can press G to grab in the x-axis and it will constrain it to the axis therefore be sitting on the floor because we already rotated it over here so it's a good idea to go to side view to move the objects above the floor the floor is in line with the y- axis here so I can press G to grab and move that upwards in The Zed axis and make that sit above the floor however this one we need to rotate 90° so I'm going to press R then 90 to rotate it 90° and then press G to grab in the Z axis move it above the floor so about there looks about right the cylinder we need to rotate that 90° so R 90 and again it's rotating perpendicular to the camera so it's rotating along the xaxis because I'm inside view I'll press G to grab move that above the floor and I should be able to box select these next objects and that's got all the objects just there go to the side view and press G to grab in The Zed axis and move those above the floor like this okay so they're all sitting on the floor now I can go to top view and start just placing them on the floor in a random position so I'm just selecting them pressing G to grab and moving them into position and now I have a nice little scene just here now if you're particularly proud of what you've done and you want to save your work you can go to file and then save as with most programs and you'll see your files here it's a little bit different to what you might be used to with Windows but you can easily scroll down and find recent files or your hard drives here I'll just say this is tutorial one okay so we can navigate the viewport we can add objects and we can move and rotate and scale them what about coloring in or texturing as we' call it well at the top of our screen you can see that we've got different workspaces as they're known where we do the coloring in as it were is under the shading workspace and you can see the workspace change we've still got our outliner over the right hand side here and the properties panel which we'll talk about a bit later we've also got a file browser so we can browse textures and drag them in and put them on our objects and it's worth noting that in the top left hand corner you have all the types of window available to you and you can see this one is the 3D viewport and this one is the file browser this one down here is the image editor so we can see the images that we're using in the one next to it which is the Shader editor and this might look different to you depending on what you have selected in the scene I've got my tourus selected and that's got no material at the moment now things can get extremely complicated in the Shader editor but we're going to keep it fairly simple now one really important aspect that you need to understand about materials is that we create a material and it's like a paint bucket and that paint bucket will paint different objects but if we were to change the paint bucket or the material then each of the objects that share that material would have that material change I'll show you what that looks like so for example if I start with the default Cube now that has a material already and it's just a white material that we can see there and its name is material in the naming panel here now in this drop down next to it I can show you all the materials in the scene and there's only one if I click one of the other objects they have no material they look exactly the same because the default material is the same as the material shown when you have no material so let's start off selecting the default Cube and rename the material by clicking in this box and I'll call it red and if you can't see the nodes then you might need to zoom out a bit or remember you can press the home key to frame all selected or the period key will do the same thing and remember you can find that Under The View menu frame selected and frame all if for any reason these aren't selected so if I press alt a that will deselect all we can't now press the home key or the period key a is the keyboard shortcut to select all and then I can select those options so if for example we were off screen here I can press a to select all and then the period key and it would frame the selected objects to navigate this once again it's the middle Mouse button to move around and zoom zoom in and out or again hold down control and press the middle Mouse button let's zoom in and look at this material then so this is a node based material system it goes from left to right so if I change something here that will then be changed by this one here which then goes to the material output which shows us the color at the moment we've only got one node but it's got lots of options we can change so the base color being the obvious one I'll click on that and that goes to our color wheel it's worth pointing out that if I zoom in and click on that the color wheel becomes bigger it's fit distracting because it's overlapping our object so I'll just move out a little bit and click on it and you can see it's a bit smaller I can then drag this point across to the red so in this color wheel the more saturated you want the color the more you go to the outside of the circle and you can see the color of the cube changed to less saturated the closer into the middle I am so go nice and red and then you've got a value slider down the side here which will take it from dark to light generally you don't go all the way to light you save that for compositing that's why the default is somewhere around here okay so we got a nice red material here I'll click on one of my other objects so the monkey for example and now I can add a new material here or I can use this red material that I've already made over here so I'll click on that and lots of beginners make the mistake of thinking well I want to change the color of the monkey so I'll change this here to purple but both of the objects are changing that's because remember this is a paint bucket and they are both being affected by this paint I'll undo that change with contrl zed let's say I wanted a different material for the monkey well I would have to select the monkey and add new material over here there's two options to this if I add a new material pressing the new material button here whilst I've got a material open here it creates a new material based on this red material here however if I close this material down it goes white back to default and create a new one it starts with a completely new one like this so I'll call this blue and I'll change that across the blue okay so pause the video here catch up with me and go across to the shading workspace select the default Cube and change its base material to a red and rename it red and then select the monkey give it a new material calling it blue and change that to Blue as a challenge I want you to change the Taurus giving that a new material and give it maybe a purple pause the video and have a go with that okay so hopefully got an okay with that let's select the Taurus give it a new material and we'll go cross to the purple okay let's very briefly look at some of the other options that are available to us here there's a metallic option and at the moment it's dialectric which is the word for non-metallic objects and generally this slider is either all metallic or not metallic so we Chang that to all metallic and you can see how that changes we can also turn the roughness right down and it makes it really shiny like this so all these sliders go from 0 to one which is full and in this case fully rough and you can see it being quite rough there or no roughness which is fully shiny so as a quick challenge to you I want you to give all the other objects a different kind of material and maybe experiment with the roughness and metallic okay so hopefully got an okay with that so we select a new object we click on new and we change the color this time I'll change it to a mid- green like this a sort of pale green and we'll make it a bit darker I'll put the roughness all the way down so it's a shiny plasticky sort of looking material that looks interesting interesting it sort of twinkles when you move around it's nice and hopefully you've added colors to the other objects as well now you might notice that you don't really use these side panels much especially as a beginner you probably just want more space for your Shader editor and your 3D viewport we can easily get rid of these panels there's a couple of ways the easiest is to come to the corner where your cursor changes to this Crosshair like this and then you can left click and drag over the other one like that and you got this little arrow which says which one do you want to keep and we want to keep the 3D viewport so we'll overlap that one and we can do the same for this one down here so I can click and drag and move it over the other one but I'm going to right click to cancel that and I'm going to make a mistake I'm going to click and drag and pull out a new window so just be aware that you can pull out new windows like this so we can overlap this one to that one and overlap this one to that one like that if for any reason you made a mistake choosing the wrong way then you can choose the Shader editor from in here so pause the video and change the layer out of your workspace slightly okay so now's a good time if I zoom out a bit so I can see most of my objects to think about the display settings and the render settings now when you come across to the shading workspace here it puts us into this viewport shading Mode called material preview mode if we go back to the layout workspace you can see it's all gray and that's got what's called solid display mode there are two next to that one is wire frame this can be very useful for lining up objects and selecting objects that are in the background to other objects and next to that there is x-ray if I go back to solid mode and turn on x-ray it sort of goes see through which again is very helpful to select objects in the background as you can see here so I can kind of Select through the cube I'll turn x-ray off though and let's go back to the shading work space which defaults to material preview mode so material preview mode means we can preview the materials the more you put into your scene and the more materials you put on those objects the more complicated your scene becomes and therefore the more processing power your computer will take to render the image that you see on the screen that's one reason why we have material preview mode and rendered mode if I scroll down a bit and find my light which is just here you can always bring this panel down if you need to see more of the outliner my light's just here and I can make that visible in the scene but you can see that it's not having any effect on our object objects material preview mode does not take into account the lights in your scene unless you set it to and the reason again is for viewport performance as well as being able to see your materials in their basic form because lights especially if they're cuted lights could change the look of your materials now in the shading workspace in material preview mode you have this little ball down here and that is called an hdri a high dynamic range image that's in the background of our scene and you can kind of see it very BL there what that's doing is giving a very natural looking light to this scene so the bright Parts which you can see up here are giving off a bit of light these greeny parts are actually giving off a little bit of colored light and the darker parts are giving off much less light until you go all the way to something that's very dark perhaps over here that's giving off hardly any light at all so these hdris give a really nice looking natural light to your scene so in material preview mode that's how our scene is lit but we can't at the moment see any Shadows so it's actually a little bit difficult to separate the objects from the floor and see that they're sitting on the floor from different angles now with my light turned on if I go to rendered view which is the one next to it we can see the results that we will end up seeing when we render through the camera so if I press zero on my numpad that's the camera view and that's what our render will look like and now we can start to see these Shadows I'll press zero again to come out of that and if I click on the light and press G to grab you can see those Shadows move moving around at the moment this isn't too tough for the computer to handle especially given the render engine that we're using which I'll talk about in a second but just pause the video here catch up with me looking at those different viewport settings and bringing the light back in and going to rendered view now you'll notice in rendered view that we haven't got that nice background we've only got this light lighting the scene if you want to change the background at all you have to go into the Shader editor and under this drop down here where it says object we can change that to world again I can pressed the period key to frame selected or the home key to frame all and you should be a little bit more familiar with this setup now we got this background going into the world output instead of the material output which we had before we've got a strength option here which is the strength of the background I can change that to black or back up to one you can actually go above one as well and it becomes brighter and brighter and we can also change the color here I notice that it changes the color of the shadows and the objects as well it gives them a Bluer color I'll undo those changes though and we'll go back to gray to give a nice natural look we really want to add an hdri to the beginning here I'll select all with a and press G to grab to move those across the side slightly and I want to bring in a new node in here so there's the add menu here and under the texture we want to add in a new environment texture it's not an image texture although it is a type of image it is an environment texture which is slightly different so I'll click on that and bring it to the front here when I hook this up from the color to the color by clicking and dragging the background turns purple that's because there's no image in here yet and we need to open one up now to find great hdri images poly Haven is certainly the best place in my opinion Link in the description if I scroll down you can see they've got textures available as well and some models but over on the left here we've got browse hdris all of these are hdris which have a different sort of feeling to them this is a very gray look this will give a very bright sharp Shadow from the Sun here and you can see the results of the hdris in the bottom here on these different textured spheres and you can probably see that this one is slightly more green because of this Meadow background compared to this one which is much more gray and this one has a really bright spot because of the Sun so let's download one of these hdis I'll download this Dam bridge here it can be any of them it doesn't matter too much up in the top right hand corner you've got a download option here I would suggest sticking with with the 2K you don't need to go higher than that unless you're doing hyper realistic scenes and even then it's questionable so I'll download this file now back into blender if I press open I can find that file I have a folder full of hdris that I put in my bookmarks and you can easily add folders to your bookmarks here and get rid of them here so I'll click on my hdri folder find that damn Bridge just here incidentally you can click up the top here in the display mode and you can see detailed list or just an ordinary list or the pictures themselves which is much easier so with that selected I'll press open image and now you can see that nice hdri lighting are seen in the background there so pause the video and make sure you've caught up with me adding an hdri image to your background okay so I'm going to click on the cube now and I want to change the material but you'll notice I can't see my Shader editor but you'll notice I can't see the material in the Shader editor so we need to remember to change this back from world to object and then I can see my material just there I'm going to change this so it's really shiny so roughness all the way down and we can see a bit of shininess there and I'll turn the metallic all the way up so it should be super shiny but unfortunately I can kind of see the background reflected in it but I can't see the floor being reflected let's see what it looks like in material preview mode and it's much the same I can see the background being reflected but not the floor so back to rendered view the reason for this is the way the render is set up once again by default it's a little bit basic so that it's as easy as possible for your computer to render the image that's on the screen to change the render settings we come across to our properties window here so that's the property window on the side here the render settings is the second one down so if I click on that and at the top you can see we've got three render engines basically don't worry about workbench it's very rarely used unless you're working perhaps on an animation EV and Cycles are the two commonly used EV is really fast and is what material preview mode uses but it's not completely realistic it tries to fake realism Cycles is much closer to realism let's click on Cycles now if I click on Cycles you can see the results there but when I move around my viewport it takes a few seconds to update and it's all grainy what we are seeing though is some nice Shadows from this light just here as well as the hdri which are quite soft coming from the hdri what I mean by Soft is the edges are kind of soft and blurry we can also see some Reflections in this Cube here we can see the monkey and we can even see the floor looks like it's see-through there but if I move to a different position you can see it's just a reflection and you can see the Taurus in the background incidentally you can select an object with left click and right click on it and shade smooth if you want smooth shading and that looks a lot better but anyway back to Cycles what you can do to speed things up is if you've got a compatible GPU you can change the device to a GPU now if you can't see it in here then you may have to go up to edit preferences and under system under Cuda you should be able to see your GPU there I've got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 490 which is a really high quality GPU I would thoroughly recommend Nvidia not just because they're sponsoring this video but because they support Optics and if I go across to Optics and tick my GPU there and close this down I can then under the sampling section here so I can click on this drop down and go to sampling sampling is all this graininess that you see around here well I can turn on the D noise now already that's moving fairly quickly and it's not bad that's just the GPU working normally it's quite a powerful GPU but under this D noise dropdown I've got an option here turn the D noiser onto Optics now this is super quick it's almost as if I'm viewing it like it's real time and it gets rid of that noise really fast now initially you will see a difference between open image noise which is the default and Optics but you'll really notice the difference when you start adding more complicated scenes Optics can make a really big difference this brings us nicely on to today's sponsor Nvidia Nvidia studio is all about using the Nvidia RTX gpus to accelerate creative applications like blender using the power of the GPU and AI Nvidia are really leading the way when it comes to improving performance in blender and the great thing is blender takes advantage of the dedicated GPU hard Ware the ray tracing and AI cores make it even faster when you have an RTX GPU and enable Nvidia Optics blender will use the ray tracing CES in Cycles to accelerate how quickly lighting is rendered in the scene and use the AI cores to denoise the image even faster this gives almost realtime feedback even in complicated scenes this makes your workflow so much quicker and you can see here I'm using AI to Denise the image and it massively improves the viewport performance and also when it comes to rendering it really greatly reduces your rendering times which has been absolutely tremendous for me as a blender user I wouldn't choose any other GPU except Nvidia RTX okay so thank you for listening back to the render settings if I scroll down that's the viewport settings underneath that we have the render settings so when we do render out our scene which is up the top here render F12 is short we see through our camera and you can see the samples going up there that's how detailed our imag is and then the doise does its work afterwards of course we need to move the camera and also thought but we'll do that in a moment I'll just close this down so in the render settings we can also turn on things like Optics if you have that available the nice thing is you can set a time limit to your render so if I put this to 1 second and press F12 so it renders the image in just over 1 second and then it adds the D noising afterwards which has done a fantastic job you wouldn't really realize that this was a noisy image at all if I turn the D noise off we can see what that looks like in one second it's not too bad but you can kind of see the graininess there when you have a lot more comp licated scenes the D noising option is a godsend so I'll close that down turn back the D noiser and let's scroll up again so that Cycles the render engine I'll turn back to e for now and you can really see the difference in quality however we can improve this slightly one thing you'll want to turn on is the ambient occlusion if I turn that on and off you can just about see a little bit of difference around these sort of areas if I click on the drop down and change the distance and turn that up a bit you'll start to see the of Shadows emerge so what it's doing is in the crevices it's adding a bit of Shadow which makes it look a bit more realistic the other thing that's worth turning on is screen space Reflections and that tries to kind of fake the reflections that might come off these objects again it's not as good as Cycles but it does help quite a bit and you can see the floor and the Taurus in the background there it's all very blurry you can actually in the drop down turn off half trace and that makes him more detailed if I tap that a couple of times you can see the detail being added but it still isn't quite as good as Cycles but for now that will work for us and if You' got a bit of a slower machine you'll certainly want to use Eevee okay so pause the video here and just experiment a bit with those render settings and make sure you add those EV settings okay so we got a basic scene here how do we move the camera into a nice position well first of all let's look through our camera try and remember the keyboard shortcut for that so that's zero on your numpad I can press n to bring up the side panel I can then go to the view tab just on the side here and under viw view lock lock camera to view I can bring this out so you can read it all and tick that now with that ticked I can move around my camera as if it's a viewport so using the same Keys as if I were moving around the viewport so we can get it into a nice position like this and again press F12 to render and that's rendering using EV it took less than a second and of course I could change across to Cycles so I'll scroll up to the top go to Cycles and render that one out took a tiny bit longer but we do get a much nicer image Okay so we've got the basics of moving around the scene adding objects adding colors and render settings so let's try making a scene together I'll close this window down I'll go back into layout View and I'm going to select all my objects and add them to a collection so everything in the scene I'll select it all incidentally I've not got my camera visible so that's not including the camera and to move them to a new collection you press M to move to new collection create a new collection I'll call this objects on floor press enter and press okay now I can easily hide all those objects in both the viewport and the render so I'm basically back to my startup file so pause the video here catch up with me putting all your items into a new collection then hide that collection I'm going to click on my original collection to make sure anything I add now will be added to that collection and I'm going to add in an iOS sphere so shift data add mesh and then icosphere now before you do anything moving it around or scaling it just notice down the bottom left here we've got some parameters for our icosphere so if I zoom in I can change these subdivisions for example and it changes the detail level of my icosphere now one thing to note if I press EST scale for example this changes and we can't actually get back to it because we've changed our shape so we've set in the parameters for that icosphere so I'm going to press delete Del and add it again so shift data add mesh and then icosphere this is going to be our planet by the way make sure you've got three subdivisions there and we'll set the radius to 3 m so it's nice big icosphere there make sure you add an icosphere not a UV sphere because it's really fun to change the shape around of this okay so pause the video there and catch up with me adding in an icosphere with three subdivisions okay let's move this into the middle of our scene now you should be able to see that this iOS sphere has lots of separate faces and what I want to be able to do is to go into this object and make changes to those faces to go into this object we come up to the top here to the interaction mode and we change it from object to edit mode and you can see how the shape changes there oh I'm noticing my camera is not centered on my object so I press the period key to frame it so I can move around it easily now straight away you can start to see the points that we have on it those are called vertices and you can see next to the intera ction mode we've got three separate modes this one's selected and that's vertex mode the next one to that if I click on that is Edge mode and you can see all the edges being highlighted then there's face mode and I can now highlight the different faces by left clicking remember you can also box select like this and you can actually hold down control and box select to deselect objects that are selected the shortcut keys for getting to each of these is 1 two and three on your keyboard now if you are emulating the numpad they won't be available to you and you'll have to click on the icons but with vertex selected I can select a vertex and I can press G to grab and move it around I'll undo that movement the same with edges I could select a few edges and then G to grab to move them around but I can also s the scale and R to rotate remember that happens perpendicular to the camera so if I come around to the side here and press R to rotate I can make it stick out a bit more now with three edges selected like this if I go to face mode you can see it SS that face for me or I can select a group of faces like so so pause the video catch up with me going into edit mode and just having a bit of an experiment with those selection options do make sure that you revert back to this UV sphere here and save your work before you do any of those changes in case you're worried about messing things up okay now with our iOS sphere you can see that it's got a kind of rounded neat looking Pentagon of faces just here if I select those do make sure you're on face mode though that's face mode with three and we're going to make some craters on this planet incidentally these are all my reference images and i' just like to point out I've got this idea from this great artist here there's lots of people that have done this rocket launching idea which looks fantastic but I really like this planet this is from an artist Alex pushin I believe incidentally this is called a pure F board it's really useful because you can move it around on top of the program zoom in and out and you can click and drag images into it as well it is available for free link the description okay so with this pentagram selected here we want to be able to pull out a shape the way we do that is under the face menu there's an option to extrude faces and you can see the shortcut key for that is e so I'm going to use the shortcut I'll come around to the side here so you can see what's happening a bit more easily so I'll zoom in on this area and I'll press e to extrude and you can see this line up here when I move my mouse up and down now it pulls these faces outwards so we can pull those faces out like that and we got this funny sort of crater type thing here now you can scale this down so I could scale it down very slightly so I pressed s to scale and if you hold down shift you can scale in smaller increments so I can just scale it a bit like this so it's sticking in just a touch I'll try that a little bit further s to scale coming to about there okay so e to extrude pulling it out and then s to scale it down slightly and you can hold down shift for smaller increments and incidentally with this dialogue Box open here you can see how much I've scaled things if you want to roughly get the same amount as me so pause the video and catch up with me extruding out that small Pentagon section there now if I come around to the front you'll notice as well in the face options there's also an inser option and the shortcut for that is I so these are the most commonly used e and i let's show you what that looks like if I press I now it insets the faces bringing them in like this and then left click to set now just going to going to undo that a moment and show you a problem that lots of beginners come up against I'll zoom in a fair bit I'll press I to inser and then left click so it's set so I've accidentally inserted the faces but it looks like nothing has changed but if I go up to wireframe now it's a little bit tricky to see but if I come around to the side here you can see each of the faces has a dot in the middle of it and there's actually a face sitting in the middle of these two lines here and another one here so we actually have created a set of Faces in there when we inser so I'll go back to solid mode if you accidentally do that you can select everything with a then under the mesh menu there is an option to merge vertices the shortcut key is M and that's used quite often so try and remember that if you can by distance is what we want to use if I click that I've got a message down the bottom here remove five vertices so it has merged those vertices together I've also got a dialog box down here where I can up the merge distance if I keep bringing this up higher and higher you can see it starts to merge anything that's within 96 CM I'll undo that change of course and we're back to having our vertices merged I can always check that by going into wireframe and just checking oh and you can still see the fa in there I didn't actually merge them so back to solid mode select all with a and then M to merge by distance I need to change this to 0.1 I think it is and it's got five vertices removed okay so let's zoom in select those faces this time I'll press I and move my mouse across to somewhere like here which is great and then I'm going to press e again to extrude and pull it inwards this time so it goes roughly in the same distance again with this dialog box down here you can see a distance that I've gone in the local Zed axis I'll talk about that a bit later I might scale it down a little bit again so s to scale so we can kind of see the inside edges a bit okay so we created a simple Creator like that pause the video and catch up with me okay so a bit of practice I want you to do that across your shape so we'll do another one together I'll select these ones which are fairly consistent you have to be a bit careful because ones like this are a little bit crooked but that could be the look you want to go for but I'll go for slightly more even shaped ones so e to extrude to pull out probably about to there let's have a look it's a little bit too far so I can change the Z parameters just here pull it back in probably about there I think so we'll look at the other one this is a bit bigger so it's going to stick out a bit further maybe maybe a little bit in now I'm going to press I to inser bring that in and then e to extrude to pull it backwards to somewhere around there and we're creating these fun craters I'll do one more up here this is a fairly even one this time I'm going to do a slightly different and go inwards so I'm going to press e to extrude and move my mouse down to pull it inwards and then scale it down very slight slly so we're creating some fun crators like this I'll leave a fairly clear patch at the top that's where our Rocket's going to take off from but what I want you to do now is to go around your shape adding in some random craters like this so hopefully you gotten okay with that I'll just quickly do a few more this one here is a little bit close to that one so I might come down here I know it's a little bit of funny shape but let's just pull that out scale it in slightly I to insert pull that in E to extrude and pull it inwards let's grab this one here I'll just pull that in so e to extrude and scale that down this one here maybe e to extrude pull it outwards it's a bit too far so let's bring that down a bit you can click and hold on these numbers and pull them side to side to change the number a bit more quickly s to scale I to inser bring that in E to extrude S to scale a little bit there let's choose one from this side let's go for a sort of crookedy one and see what that looks like so e to extrude and pull that inwards and S to scale of it that looks quite fun still this one here maybe e to extrude S to scale I to inser and E to extrude this one here e to extrude and I'll scale that down maybe one up here e to extrude S to scale I to inser e to extrude and one at the bottom here e to extrude S to scale I to inser e to extrude now if for any reason you think oh one's sticking out way too fast so let's take this one here let's pretend it was sticking out far too far and we wanted to bring it back in now I can go in and select each of these faces and then we need to come around to the side here and then G to grab and move those in now to select Edge Loops like this a bit more quickly you can alt left click on a line going across a loop that you want to select so if I alt left click here it selects that entire Edge Loop across there so for example if I want to select these ones coming around here I can alt left click on those and then I can come around to the side here de grab and move it in or out I could even scale it down a bit if I wanted to I'll undo that because I think it was fine where it was okay so we've got a fun Planet hopefully you've come up with something similar yourself in the next video we'll be completing our fun planetary scene and I'll be releasing that in just a couple of days so make sure you've saved your work thank you once again to Nvidia for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching and I'll see you next time