Making YouTube Thumbnails

Hey, what's up? I'm lower his bones and this is how I make thumbnails for my youtube videos YouTube thumbnails are an ever-evolving medium. Trends come and go, so this isn't a definitive guide on how to make the best thumbnails, by any means. This is simply just a breakdown of my creative and technical process. Because it's a question I get asked a lot. So, yeah, here's how I do me. So, firstly, I guess the obvious reason we're making a thumbnail is to advertise a video that we've made or we're going to make, which means we need to consider the title of the video as well. You know, these two things, the title and the thumbnail, they need to support one another. There's no point making a video about surviving. 100 days of Minecraft and then the thumbnail is a photo of whatever you had for breakfast, you know They they got a match They got to support one another some people suggest figuring out what your thumbnail and title are going to be before even starting the video And I don't think you have to follow this as a hard rule, but it does make sense It does kind of help to have some idea of what you're making Before we start making it if that makes sense. And so with that in mind, what are we making for this example? I made a little house. It's kind of It's actually kind of big I make mostly let's play style videos Which is often centered around some kind of build or game progression or whatever. So I just went for you know, your classic pig house I have also switched on the barebones resource pack because that is a huge part of my visual style at the moment so everything is gonna be slightly lower resolution so if I was doing this for real I've got my video idea I've got an idea for the title or multiple ideas for a title and now it's time to come up with an idea for the thumbnail that's usually just something in my head but if it helps you to sketch it out or draw it or visualize it some way go for it because I want to showcase my build here my epic build is kind of the main focal point of the thumbnail I want a screenshot of it. I want to use it as the background plate, but as you can see as I'm in survival It makes it a little bit annoying to run around and sort of check all the different angles Maybe I've got some scaffolding and I can pull her up and see if I like it from higher angles So because it's a bit of a challenge doing this in survival I'd recommend either making a duplicate of your world and that you can be in creative mode for Or having some kind of free cam mod or using replay mod. I've been using replay mod for a long time So that's what I prefer. I can just hit start recording Do whatever I want and then when I'm happy I can hit stop recording Saving quit and now I can just load up that file in replay mode and just fly around. I'm in spectator mode I can change my FOV and get any shot I want and I've even got my little man in the front there I can turn them off if I want there we go invisible Boom look at that way easier now. We need to start thinking about our framing You know where do we want the focus to be is there stuff in the background that's too busy things that are distracting We also need to consider how it's going to be seen on the YouTube platform. Videos often have this little duration overlay which takes up like a small amount of room on the bottom right of the thumbnail. Earlier I changed my FOV and I zoomed in. So, just like with real life cameras, we can change our zoom or our field of view. Play around with whatever works best for your scene. I find that zooming in to like 50 or lower removes a lot of the background and really compresses your scene. Whereas if you go sort of like 80 and wider. You're gonna expand the scene a lot you're gonna see a lot more of the background for this shot I think I want something that's sort of between 40 and 50 Something like that and I usually add my plays to the shot So I'll frame up with some room on the left-hand side so that can be added later Or I could add it right now replay mod is perfect for capturing gameplay But we are also part of the gameplay so we can get shots of our player doing stuff So for example if I wanted a shot of me in front of the pig house I can just hit record there. I can do like a little run if I want some motion do this and now here in view I can hit play and I'm gonna do a really cool run look at this. Oh So good. What a great run I can now frame it up somehow I can change my FOV if I want it zoomed in something like that and There you go So that is a really good way of getting everything in one shot and even if you use shaders you can turn those on I have so many things where my shade is there we go. That's how we look with shade is very nice very nice We can even slow it down So sometimes I'll slow it down to point one if I'm doing this technique And that way you can get like a really accurate sort of pause on the players movement and find exactly how you want it to look So that's really cool If you're wanting to do a more simple approach this one might just be for you In fact this thumbnail which is the most viewed video on my channel was made with this exact same technique I just I just started a raid in a village Flew around recorded it with replay and then went back through and found the thing that I thought looked the most interesting Took a screenshot and there it is crazy now at this point if you're still watching the video It means that you're probably waiting for me to talk about custom player posing which is coming up next Or you just really like my videos, in which case, thanks, maybe consider subscribing. This right here is what I mean when I talk about custom player posing. So it just means that the arms and legs of the player model kind of go beyond what is a default in the vanilla game. There's actually a lot of different ways you can go about creating this effect. I'm going to show you three different ways that I've used that kind of go from an easy to a slightly more advanced technique. So let's check those out. Up first we have the green screen technique and you've probably seen something like this being used in movies. Where they capture the performance of an actor and then replace the green background with all the CGI and special effects and all that kind of stuff. So we're doing the exact same thing here like we did with replay mod. We hit start recording, we can run around, do all the poses, get what we want and then in replay mod we can play the scene back, find exactly what we want and then with the free cam we can find the the pose that we like or the angle that we like, take a screenshot and cut it out to be used later. The thing I love about this method is that it's all vanilla, you know It's all captured in game so we can use the vanilla mobs and blocks and stuff and capture the behaviors and animations As if they were really in your scene Make sure though that you match your FOV of these shots to the same one that you used for your background Otherwise, they won't feel like they were taken at the same time in the same scene and they'll feel Kind of disconnected. I also just want to shout out the Fresh Animations resource pack for these custom mob animations. Absolutely amazing pack. Game changer. Go check it out. Next up, number two, we have Blockbench. If you've never heard of this before, as far as I can tell, I'm pretty sure this is one of, if not the best programs available for painting and texturing and modeling low poly things for games like Minecraft. As you can see, I've got a skin in here already loaded. But if you wanted to import one, you go up to file, you go new. Across and then down to Minecraft skin. At the top it says the model, we can choose whether we want the wide or the slim option and then it gives us a whole bunch of other things if you want to mess around with that. We can choose Java or Bedrock. Resolution, the lower the better. Texture is where you import your own player skin or whatever. And then we hit confirm. I've already done that and here it is. Looks great doesn't it? If once you've imported your model something doesn't look right, something might be missing, go across here to the right and make sure all of these different layers are turned on. And hopefully there you can find whatever it is that is missing. So that is how you get your skin imported How do we pose it? Well up the top here on the right? It says pose we can click that now We're in the pose tab and there's a few default ones that we can actually just click on and it's gonna show us It's gonna give us these poses for free. We don't have to do any work We can just click through the ones find something that we like look at this The yippee pose once we get the thing that we like we can sort of frame it up And then we go up here to view I believe Screenshot model take that and there we go. It's saved to clipboard We can save it we can edit it and it's saved as a PNG file as well Which means that as a transparent background we can drop that on to our Thumbnail that we're working on or any other kind of art that we're working on So that is number two and now last up we have blender which is definitely the most complex of the three But everything I learned about blender I Learned from YouTube videos. So if I can do it, so can you so once you've installed and loaded a blender? You're gonna see something like this a little simple scene with three things in it It's gonna have a camera a cube and a light Let's go ahead and delete the cube because we're never gonna need that Goodbye cube. Now we've just got our camera and our light. The next thing we're going to need to do is import our skin And I do that by using a free plug-in called MC prep There's tutorials on YouTube already on how to do this So I'm not going to go into the details next thing you're going to do is come down here to spawner and you want mob Spawner now it doesn't show all the mobs straight away. That's fine You want to go click on this and choose player mobs and then hit reload assets and it's going to show them all here The one we're looking for the one that I use is the the slim skin the simple play slim And then we click spawn simple player slim and there we go. We've now got a model in the scene Although it's got no color or texture or material on it up here on the top, right? We have a few different shading options So we've got the wireframe a solid view a material preview and then this is kind of like the rendered version But we'll just go for the material preview for now Then i'm going to swap out the default skin for my one. There's a few options here It gives me a few kind of just pre-loaded ones I can choose from file or I can search by username choose the skin that you want to use I'm using my one And there you go. You've now got your skin loaded onto a model inside of Blender, which is awesome. These random triangle things inside the model, these are the bones. So this is how we pose and animate the character, which we'll get to later on. But the thing that I like to do first, before I start doing any of that, is actually setting up the camera, setting up the scene, because that's what we are rendering from. We are rendering from the camera view. So there's a little icon over here on the right-hand side, or you can use the shortcut on your number pad. If you click that... Is going to put us into the view of the camera So this is what the camera is seeing if I hit f12, it's going to render the scene Not a very good shot right so we don't want that we want a bit of you this right here is our camera object this Is what we are rendering our scene from so when I click the camera option It's gonna snap us into that if you go across to this view button here We're gonna go down to lock to camera view camera lock camera to view I mean and now we can move that around and actually Sort of reframe our shot for what we want to see so that's pretty cool and also essential Continuing on from that we want to go across here to this little green camera icon click on that I go to background images and add image I like to load my background my screenshot into the scene so that I can move the camera around and sort of see exactly Where my play is gonna be there's no sort of guessing or just hoping it works out I can see exactly how it's gonna look when I render it out So this is for me a very important step to the process. You can also change the focal length on the camera. So If you want that wider shot you can go this direction In fact that kind of looks a little bit better or I can go super zoomed in like this Just bear in mind that the focal length here inside of blender does not exactly translate to the FOV in Minecraft because uh 127 FOV in Minecraft would be incredibly wide but here it's very zoomed in so it's kind of like backwards in a way Okay, so I'm pretty happy with that. I think it looks okay when I'm happy with that I go across here and make sure I turn off the lock camera view Otherwise it's gonna break every time that we sort of snap out of it now. Let's get posing So we want to select our model our objects here It is over in our collection and we want to go to this object mode drop down and choose pose mode So there we are all these bones are now active and I can start waving the hands around Look at that. So this is how we sort of get these custom poses And sort of find things that we like or don't like and we can just make little edits Not really sure what I'm trying to achieve with this pose, but that's kind of the beauty of it You can just experiment And just mess around until you find something that you like. This is so stupid. You know what? Because I loved that Yiffy pose so much from earlier, I'm gonna try recreate it here in Blender and I think I think I nailed it. Look at that Yahoo, we got the Yahoo pose. Awesome. So I I think that's awesome. I think it's great from here I would happily just render this pose But depending on what kind of style you're going for and I mean like are using shaders Is there gonna be lighting any kind of effects with compositing depending on all that kind of stuff? you may want to go a little bit further into the The lighting of it all up here we want to switch to our render mode here You can see that my character is in shadow if I snap out of the camera view You might be able to see that the lighting is coming sort of from the from behind me from the side But nothing on the front so now this is our light we need to change its position And try and make it look like the Sun is coming from in front in fact. It's not even a Sun It is currently a point light so we need to switch that to a sunlight very bright very bright All right here we go let's turn that way down there we go we're in our camera view now and I'm moving it around and you can see as I move it it changes the angle of the lighting and so the goal with this is to try and match the lighting of your scene I don't have any shaders in the scene I'm not using that with the background so it doesn't really make sense to have harsh lighting like that because it doesn't match the background they kind of yeah they just don't make sense the two different things if though I had taken the screenshot with the shaders on It would make sense right now I am actually matching the lighting so this is kind of the process that I would go through to try and Match these two things together obviously there's no ground shadow we're gonna paint that in later on But this is kind of how I would go about Blending two scenes together the one that has a shade is in-game and the other one that's using lights here in blender I'm just gonna speed through this next section because I don't think it's super important I hope that's okay every single thumbnail that I do is is more or less different And so there's a couple of things that carry over But there's also a lot of things that change along the way and so the overall goal that I'm trying to achieve here is to match the lighting And the colors of the player to the background and so I'm adding a light I'm shining it around I also added a ground plane a flat plane object and I added a green material and so that is acting like If the Sun was bouncing off the green grass back onto the player and then I also added some Environment sort of blue even though we don't think about it like this We only think about the Sun as the the light the blue in the sky also Is lighting us right so everything around us it doesn't matter what color it is is reflecting light so you can kind of consider everything to be a light source of some kind and Whatever color it is that is emitting onto your object or the player in this case now for the final piece of the puzzle Which is bringing it all together in compositing I like to do this in Photoshop the whole Adobe subscription thing is a little bit of a scam So if you want to use another program feel free to I just really like Photoshop. It's really powerful. It does everything that I need to and more but again There's like plenty of free alternatives or cheaper alternatives out there. This is just the one that I like So we've got our layers in here. I've got my render and I got my background So those are currently two separate objects, which is great So it means I can edit them separately not having to worry about them interfering with each other now Just like with the lighting and blender each time you sort of composite something like this It's gonna be different And so here are just a couple of things that I do pretty much every single time that make this process a little bit easier, help with the efficiency, and contribute to, I guess, the style that I'm trying to achieve with this. So, number one. Inside of Photoshop, if you right-click on the background, so not inside your working kind of canvas, but outside of that, it gives you some different background colors that you can go between, but it also gives you the ability to set a custom color. And so my custom color is white. That's because the whole YouTube platform is white. I think there may be a dark mode. If there is, I don't use it. Don't. Don't cancel me. Why do we want a white one? Well obviously because we want to see what it's going to look like on that YouTube platform. But also as a reference to see how bright the image is. Everything looks bright on black. Even if it's not white, if it's close enough you go, yeah that's really bright. But once you set it against a white background, everything's not going to look as bright anymore. So that's one thing that I like to do is just change it to a white background or at least toggle between the dark gray and the white so I can sort of. Get a good reference for how bright the image actually is. Alright, so next thing it currently looks like my player is just floating in the air There's no shadow no contact shadow So we're gonna draw some some shadows in and try and blend these two scenes together even further So what I like to do is just add a solid color. You can use just like a random paint layer Let's invert the mask here control I and what I like to do is try and blend these colors together as well So we think of shadows as being black But when you zoom in here, it's actually the blue, like how we talked about the blue sky reflecting. So that is what's going on there. We're going to try and choose a color that is sort of bluey green. Doesn't have to be perfect, just kind of trying to get the idea. And then on the mask layer, I'm going to draw in a shadow. I'm going to try and match the angle of these shadows here, but it's going to be a little bit off because it's not super important. So let's just do something like this. And then we'll go to the leg down here and then we're gonna go to the mask We're gonna fill it with white so that the the color shines through Not bad. Not bad. We're getting there So let's get our brush tool now and then I'm going to just kind of blend it in a little bit more something like this Can make it a little bit lighter around there And then I'll turn down the opacity of the whole layer and we should get something that is Just a little bit That's not bad, that kind of blends the two things together. I'm happy with that. Obviously the shadow doesn't quite match the same angle as what's going on in the background here but again people are seeing the thumbnail like this big for one second so it doesn't really matter. You've probably seen this effect before, it's really popular not only with Minecraft thumbnails but just thumbnails in general, this white stroke that goes around the outside of like a person's head or the player. It's cool, it's fine. What I like doing though is a little bit different is using the inner shadow option here. And it's similar effect, but it only sort of shows it on Well, it gives you the ability to show it sort of like the Sun is hitting the edge of the person from that angle So this is a cool way of like getting a similar effect But it does not do the whole player and you can just you know dial it in to your preferred amount And just like that we have just like a nice little highlight edge that separates us from the background But it's not super invasive. It doesn't go everywhere you And yeah, subtle but helps pop us out a little bit more. If you want to take this effect a step further and do it on things in the background, you can make a new layer like this and then I get like a small brush somewhere like, you know, three or four pixels and turn the hardness up to 100 and I will just get like a white, a white brush. You can just paint in on the edges of things where the sun's gonna be hitting like this. Doing it this way takes a while, but if you're trying to copy what I do, this is, I spend a lot of time doing this and just painting on lights. Subtitles by the I'm over the whole scene so this is a big part of how I make my thumbnails look the way they do But yeah, look at that now we got pig He's sort of shining like that if I toggle it on and off you can see the effect that it has And you can even do it with black as well if I invert my colors Um, you can do it on the dark edges and sort of, you know, reinforce the shadows that you have And you're seen and yeah, yeah, that's how that goes the last thing I want to say about doing these thumbnails is just not to be too precious with it I know that when you play survival Minecraft every block that you place and change in your world sort of has meaning is important But as you can see here with this pig there's like this random tree in the background That's kind of like cutting into the face. Is it distracting? Maybe a little bit who's to say when you're viewing it at this big. Maybe you can't even see it But for me right now, I'm seeing it and I'm going, it's kind of annoying me. It's kind of distracting. And I guess my first thought would be, I don't want to change it because it's not like that in my Minecraft world. People are going to know that I cropped this tree out of the image. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't contribute anything. It's just a random tree. And so we can get in there and we can cut it out and no one is going to care. Less distracting maybe let me know in the comments, but stuff like that I'm totally fine with don't get too hung up about being too precious about your world. But yeah, that's it That's how I go about making my thumbnails. If you have any questions, let me know down below You can obviously take this to the extreme or do way less work It's really up to you. And again, every thumbnail is different. Just be creative do it your way find better ways of doing it than this This is just how I do it at the moment. For those of you that are interested and have access to Photoshop, I'll have a link to this project file down in the description so you can download it and check it out and break it down that way if you need to be able to see it and play with it. But yeah, thanks for watching, peace.

Because it's a question I get asked a lot. So, yeah, here's how I do me. So, firstly, I guess the obvious reason we're making a thumbnail is to advertise a video that we've made or we're going to make, which means we need to consider the title of the video as well.

You know, these two things, the title and the thumbnail, they need to support one another. There's no point making a video about surviving. 100 days of Minecraft and then the thumbnail is a photo of whatever you had for breakfast, you know They they got a match They got to support one another some people suggest figuring out what your thumbnail and title are going to be before even starting the video And I don't think you have to follow this as a hard rule, but it does make sense It does kind of help to have some idea of what you're making Before we start making it if that makes sense.

And so with that in mind, what are we making for this example? I made a little house. It's kind of It's actually kind of big I make mostly let's play style videos Which is often centered around some kind of build or game progression or whatever. So I just went for you know, your classic pig house I have also switched on the barebones resource pack because that is a huge part of my visual style at the moment so everything is gonna be slightly lower resolution so if I was doing this for real I've got my video idea I've got an idea for the title or multiple ideas for a title and now it's time to come up with an idea for the thumbnail that's usually just something in my head but if it helps you to sketch it out or draw it or visualize it some way go for it because I want to showcase my build here my epic build is kind of the main focal point of the thumbnail I want a screenshot of it.

I want to use it as the background plate, but as you can see as I'm in survival It makes it a little bit annoying to run around and sort of check all the different angles Maybe I've got some scaffolding and I can pull her up and see if I like it from higher angles So because it's a bit of a challenge doing this in survival I'd recommend either making a duplicate of your world and that you can be in creative mode for Or having some kind of free cam mod or using replay mod. I've been using replay mod for a long time So that's what I prefer. I can just hit start recording Do whatever I want and then when I'm happy I can hit stop recording Saving quit and now I can just load up that file in replay mode and just fly around.

I'm in spectator mode I can change my FOV and get any shot I want and I've even got my little man in the front there I can turn them off if I want there we go invisible Boom look at that way easier now. We need to start thinking about our framing You know where do we want the focus to be is there stuff in the background that's too busy things that are distracting We also need to consider how it's going to be seen on the YouTube platform. Videos often have this little duration overlay which takes up like a small amount of room on the bottom right of the thumbnail. Earlier I changed my FOV and I zoomed in.

So, just like with real life cameras, we can change our zoom or our field of view. Play around with whatever works best for your scene. I find that zooming in to like 50 or lower removes a lot of the background and really compresses your scene. Whereas if you go sort of like 80 and wider. You're gonna expand the scene a lot you're gonna see a lot more of the background for this shot I think I want something that's sort of between 40 and 50 Something like that and I usually add my plays to the shot So I'll frame up with some room on the left-hand side so that can be added later Or I could add it right now replay mod is perfect for capturing gameplay But we are also part of the gameplay so we can get shots of our player doing stuff So for example if I wanted a shot of me in front of the pig house I can just hit record there.

I can do like a little run if I want some motion do this and now here in view I can hit play and I'm gonna do a really cool run look at this. Oh So good. What a great run I can now frame it up somehow I can change my FOV if I want it zoomed in something like that and There you go So that is a really good way of getting everything in one shot and even if you use shaders you can turn those on I have so many things where my shade is there we go.

That's how we look with shade is very nice very nice We can even slow it down So sometimes I'll slow it down to point one if I'm doing this technique And that way you can get like a really accurate sort of pause on the players movement and find exactly how you want it to look So that's really cool If you're wanting to do a more simple approach this one might just be for you In fact this thumbnail which is the most viewed video on my channel was made with this exact same technique I just I just started a raid in a village Flew around recorded it with replay and then went back through and found the thing that I thought looked the most interesting Took a screenshot and there it is crazy now at this point if you're still watching the video It means that you're probably waiting for me to talk about custom player posing which is coming up next Or you just really like my videos, in which case, thanks, maybe consider subscribing. This right here is what I mean when I talk about custom player posing. So it just means that the arms and legs of the player model kind of go beyond what is a default in the vanilla game.

There's actually a lot of different ways you can go about creating this effect. I'm going to show you three different ways that I've used that kind of go from an easy to a slightly more advanced technique. So let's check those out.

Up first we have the green screen technique and you've probably seen something like this being used in movies. Where they capture the performance of an actor and then replace the green background with all the CGI and special effects and all that kind of stuff. So we're doing the exact same thing here like we did with replay mod.

We hit start recording, we can run around, do all the poses, get what we want and then in replay mod we can play the scene back, find exactly what we want and then with the free cam we can find the the pose that we like or the angle that we like, take a screenshot and cut it out to be used later. The thing I love about this method is that it's all vanilla, you know It's all captured in game so we can use the vanilla mobs and blocks and stuff and capture the behaviors and animations As if they were really in your scene Make sure though that you match your FOV of these shots to the same one that you used for your background Otherwise, they won't feel like they were taken at the same time in the same scene and they'll feel Kind of disconnected. I also just want to shout out the Fresh Animations resource pack for these custom mob animations.

Absolutely amazing pack. Game changer. Go check it out. Next up, number two, we have Blockbench. If you've never heard of this before, as far as I can tell, I'm pretty sure this is one of, if not the best programs available for painting and texturing and modeling low poly things for games like Minecraft.

As you can see, I've got a skin in here already loaded. But if you wanted to import one, you go up to file, you go new. Across and then down to Minecraft skin. At the top it says the model, we can choose whether we want the wide or the slim option and then it gives us a whole bunch of other things if you want to mess around with that. We can choose Java or Bedrock.

Resolution, the lower the better. Texture is where you import your own player skin or whatever. And then we hit confirm.

I've already done that and here it is. Looks great doesn't it? If once you've imported your model something doesn't look right, something might be missing, go across here to the right and make sure all of these different layers are turned on. And hopefully there you can find whatever it is that is missing. So that is how you get your skin imported How do we pose it?

Well up the top here on the right? It says pose we can click that now We're in the pose tab and there's a few default ones that we can actually just click on and it's gonna show us It's gonna give us these poses for free. We don't have to do any work We can just click through the ones find something that we like look at this The yippee pose once we get the thing that we like we can sort of frame it up And then we go up here to view I believe Screenshot model take that and there we go.

It's saved to clipboard We can save it we can edit it and it's saved as a PNG file as well Which means that as a transparent background we can drop that on to our Thumbnail that we're working on or any other kind of art that we're working on So that is number two and now last up we have blender which is definitely the most complex of the three But everything I learned about blender I Learned from YouTube videos. So if I can do it, so can you so once you've installed and loaded a blender? You're gonna see something like this a little simple scene with three things in it It's gonna have a camera a cube and a light Let's go ahead and delete the cube because we're never gonna need that Goodbye cube. Now we've just got our camera and our light. The next thing we're going to need to do is import our skin And I do that by using a free plug-in called MC prep There's tutorials on YouTube already on how to do this So I'm not going to go into the details next thing you're going to do is come down here to spawner and you want mob Spawner now it doesn't show all the mobs straight away.

That's fine You want to go click on this and choose player mobs and then hit reload assets and it's going to show them all here The one we're looking for the one that I use is the the slim skin the simple play slim And then we click spawn simple player slim and there we go. We've now got a model in the scene Although it's got no color or texture or material on it up here on the top, right? We have a few different shading options So we've got the wireframe a solid view a material preview and then this is kind of like the rendered version But we'll just go for the material preview for now Then i'm going to swap out the default skin for my one.

There's a few options here It gives me a few kind of just pre-loaded ones I can choose from file or I can search by username choose the skin that you want to use I'm using my one And there you go. You've now got your skin loaded onto a model inside of Blender, which is awesome. These random triangle things inside the model, these are the bones. So this is how we pose and animate the character, which we'll get to later on. But the thing that I like to do first, before I start doing any of that, is actually setting up the camera, setting up the scene, because that's what we are rendering from.

We are rendering from the camera view. So there's a little icon over here on the right-hand side, or you can use the shortcut on your number pad. If you click that... Is going to put us into the view of the camera So this is what the camera is seeing if I hit f12, it's going to render the scene Not a very good shot right so we don't want that we want a bit of you this right here is our camera object this Is what we are rendering our scene from so when I click the camera option It's gonna snap us into that if you go across to this view button here We're gonna go down to lock to camera view camera lock camera to view I mean and now we can move that around and actually Sort of reframe our shot for what we want to see so that's pretty cool and also essential Continuing on from that we want to go across here to this little green camera icon click on that I go to background images and add image I like to load my background my screenshot into the scene so that I can move the camera around and sort of see exactly Where my play is gonna be there's no sort of guessing or just hoping it works out I can see exactly how it's gonna look when I render it out So this is for me a very important step to the process.

You can also change the focal length on the camera. So If you want that wider shot you can go this direction In fact that kind of looks a little bit better or I can go super zoomed in like this Just bear in mind that the focal length here inside of blender does not exactly translate to the FOV in Minecraft because uh 127 FOV in Minecraft would be incredibly wide but here it's very zoomed in so it's kind of like backwards in a way Okay, so I'm pretty happy with that. I think it looks okay when I'm happy with that I go across here and make sure I turn off the lock camera view Otherwise it's gonna break every time that we sort of snap out of it now. Let's get posing So we want to select our model our objects here It is over in our collection and we want to go to this object mode drop down and choose pose mode So there we are all these bones are now active and I can start waving the hands around Look at that. So this is how we sort of get these custom poses And sort of find things that we like or don't like and we can just make little edits Not really sure what I'm trying to achieve with this pose, but that's kind of the beauty of it You can just experiment And just mess around until you find something that you like.

This is so stupid. You know what? Because I loved that Yiffy pose so much from earlier, I'm gonna try recreate it here in Blender and I think I think I nailed it. Look at that Yahoo, we got the Yahoo pose. Awesome.

So I I think that's awesome. I think it's great from here I would happily just render this pose But depending on what kind of style you're going for and I mean like are using shaders Is there gonna be lighting any kind of effects with compositing depending on all that kind of stuff? you may want to go a little bit further into the The lighting of it all up here we want to switch to our render mode here You can see that my character is in shadow if I snap out of the camera view You might be able to see that the lighting is coming sort of from the from behind me from the side But nothing on the front so now this is our light we need to change its position And try and make it look like the Sun is coming from in front in fact. It's not even a Sun It is currently a point light so we need to switch that to a sunlight very bright very bright All right here we go let's turn that way down there we go we're in our camera view now and I'm moving it around and you can see as I move it it changes the angle of the lighting and so the goal with this is to try and match the lighting of your scene I don't have any shaders in the scene I'm not using that with the background so it doesn't really make sense to have harsh lighting like that because it doesn't match the background they kind of yeah they just don't make sense the two different things if though I had taken the screenshot with the shaders on It would make sense right now I am actually matching the lighting so this is kind of the process that I would go through to try and Match these two things together obviously there's no ground shadow we're gonna paint that in later on But this is kind of how I would go about Blending two scenes together the one that has a shade is in-game and the other one that's using lights here in blender I'm just gonna speed through this next section because I don't think it's super important I hope that's okay every single thumbnail that I do is is more or less different And so there's a couple of things that carry over But there's also a lot of things that change along the way and so the overall goal that I'm trying to achieve here is to match the lighting And the colors of the player to the background and so I'm adding a light I'm shining it around I also added a ground plane a flat plane object and I added a green material and so that is acting like If the Sun was bouncing off the green grass back onto the player and then I also added some Environment sort of blue even though we don't think about it like this We only think about the Sun as the the light the blue in the sky also Is lighting us right so everything around us it doesn't matter what color it is is reflecting light so you can kind of consider everything to be a light source of some kind and Whatever color it is that is emitting onto your object or the player in this case now for the final piece of the puzzle Which is bringing it all together in compositing I like to do this in Photoshop the whole Adobe subscription thing is a little bit of a scam So if you want to use another program feel free to I just really like Photoshop. It's really powerful.

It does everything that I need to and more but again There's like plenty of free alternatives or cheaper alternatives out there. This is just the one that I like So we've got our layers in here. I've got my render and I got my background So those are currently two separate objects, which is great So it means I can edit them separately not having to worry about them interfering with each other now Just like with the lighting and blender each time you sort of composite something like this It's gonna be different And so here are just a couple of things that I do pretty much every single time that make this process a little bit easier, help with the efficiency, and contribute to, I guess, the style that I'm trying to achieve with this. So, number one. Inside of Photoshop, if you right-click on the background, so not inside your working kind of canvas, but outside of that, it gives you some different background colors that you can go between, but it also gives you the ability to set a custom color.

And so my custom color is white. That's because the whole YouTube platform is white. I think there may be a dark mode. If there is, I don't use it. Don't.

Don't cancel me. Why do we want a white one? Well obviously because we want to see what it's going to look like on that YouTube platform. But also as a reference to see how bright the image is.

Everything looks bright on black. Even if it's not white, if it's close enough you go, yeah that's really bright. But once you set it against a white background, everything's not going to look as bright anymore.

So that's one thing that I like to do is just change it to a white background or at least toggle between the dark gray and the white so I can sort of. Get a good reference for how bright the image actually is. Alright, so next thing it currently looks like my player is just floating in the air There's no shadow no contact shadow So we're gonna draw some some shadows in and try and blend these two scenes together even further So what I like to do is just add a solid color. You can use just like a random paint layer Let's invert the mask here control I and what I like to do is try and blend these colors together as well So we think of shadows as being black But when you zoom in here, it's actually the blue, like how we talked about the blue sky reflecting.

So that is what's going on there. We're going to try and choose a color that is sort of bluey green. Doesn't have to be perfect, just kind of trying to get the idea.

And then on the mask layer, I'm going to draw in a shadow. I'm going to try and match the angle of these shadows here, but it's going to be a little bit off because it's not super important. So let's just do something like this.

And then we'll go to the leg down here and then we're gonna go to the mask We're gonna fill it with white so that the the color shines through Not bad. Not bad. We're getting there So let's get our brush tool now and then I'm going to just kind of blend it in a little bit more something like this Can make it a little bit lighter around there And then I'll turn down the opacity of the whole layer and we should get something that is Just a little bit That's not bad, that kind of blends the two things together.

I'm happy with that. Obviously the shadow doesn't quite match the same angle as what's going on in the background here but again people are seeing the thumbnail like this big for one second so it doesn't really matter. You've probably seen this effect before, it's really popular not only with Minecraft thumbnails but just thumbnails in general, this white stroke that goes around the outside of like a person's head or the player.

It's cool, it's fine. What I like doing though is a little bit different is using the inner shadow option here. And it's similar effect, but it only sort of shows it on Well, it gives you the ability to show it sort of like the Sun is hitting the edge of the person from that angle So this is a cool way of like getting a similar effect But it does not do the whole player and you can just you know dial it in to your preferred amount And just like that we have just like a nice little highlight edge that separates us from the background But it's not super invasive. It doesn't go everywhere you And yeah, subtle but helps pop us out a little bit more.

If you want to take this effect a step further and do it on things in the background, you can make a new layer like this and then I get like a small brush somewhere like, you know, three or four pixels and turn the hardness up to 100 and I will just get like a white, a white brush. You can just paint in on the edges of things where the sun's gonna be hitting like this. Doing it this way takes a while, but if you're trying to copy what I do, this is, I spend a lot of time doing this and just painting on lights.

Subtitles by the I'm over the whole scene so this is a big part of how I make my thumbnails look the way they do But yeah, look at that now we got pig He's sort of shining like that if I toggle it on and off you can see the effect that it has And you can even do it with black as well if I invert my colors Um, you can do it on the dark edges and sort of, you know, reinforce the shadows that you have And you're seen and yeah, yeah, that's how that goes the last thing I want to say about doing these thumbnails is just not to be too precious with it I know that when you play survival Minecraft every block that you place and change in your world sort of has meaning is important But as you can see here with this pig there's like this random tree in the background That's kind of like cutting into the face. Is it distracting? Maybe a little bit who's to say when you're viewing it at this big. Maybe you can't even see it But for me right now, I'm seeing it and I'm going, it's kind of annoying me. It's kind of distracting.

And I guess my first thought would be, I don't want to change it because it's not like that in my Minecraft world. People are going to know that I cropped this tree out of the image. But it doesn't matter.

It doesn't contribute anything. It's just a random tree. And so we can get in there and we can cut it out and no one is going to care.

Less distracting maybe let me know in the comments, but stuff like that I'm totally fine with don't get too hung up about being too precious about your world. But yeah, that's it That's how I go about making my thumbnails. If you have any questions, let me know down below You can obviously take this to the extreme or do way less work It's really up to you.

And again, every thumbnail is different. Just be creative do it your way find better ways of doing it than this This is just how I do it at the moment. For those of you that are interested and have access to Photoshop, I'll have a link to this project file down in the description so you can download it and check it out and break it down that way if you need to be able to see it and play with it.

But yeah, thanks for watching, peace.

Transcript for:Making YouTube Thumbnails

Transcript for:
Making YouTube Thumbnails