Blender 3D Text Tutorial (Dirt Text)

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello Gary Simon here of design course.com today we're going to do just a real quick blender text tutorial we're going to make it look like dirt and earthy or whatever uh so it's only going to be about 10 minutes I I'm actually really busy so I'm going to speed through this video tutorial really quick but you can always just pause and Rewind and whatever you need to do all right so uh if you haven't yet check out design.com and subscribe here on YouTube all right let's get started all right so basically if you never you've used blender before real quickly uh if you want to select objects you right click them by default if you want to move around you use your third Mouse button or middle Mouse button if you want to zoom up you use your scroll wheel and if you want a pan you hold shift in that third Mouse button so it'll take a little while to get used to to be able to quickly move around but that is expected so I'm going to hit file new reload startup file just we're looking at the same thing I'm going to delete that Cube by hitting delete and then enter and then this here is your origin point and that's where any object that you add will go if you hit shift a you can add a mesh and we want oops no I'm so used to adding meshes we want to add a text right there so if we zoom up we'll see it's laying flat if you hit R for rotate you can move it around like this if you hit X you can only move it around on the x axis and if you want to be precise you can hit 90 for 90° up and down on your keyboard and hit enter all right so right now we're in object mode we want to switch to edit mode you can also do that by toggling and hitting the key tab all right so if we want to delete the text and change it we can just type it here to earthy something relevant for what we're about to do and now if we come out here drag this thing so we can see the options and the panels what we want to do is Select this right here this will allow us to add some 3D depth by extruding it out a little bit and you could also add depth this way as well right so if yours looks like something like that that's fine and now what we want to do is hit alt and C on the keyboard and make this into a mesh from curve made a serf text now what that does is once we go back into tab mode we no longer can edit the text we can only see all these crazy vertices hanging around so what we want to do now is UV unwrap it so what is that well if you ever want to add a texture onto this you need to unwrap it and that's basically inclusive of all type of 3D objects whether it's a square initially that we saw or anything else so if we uh take this left click and drag out to the right you'll see the window splits and we can change the view over here so by default it's just a duplicate of this uh viewport right here and if you want to change it to UV image editor I we'll see this grid Square type thing this is where we see what the unwrapped UV mesh looks like from this object so if we hit a twice we can select all uh of everything and then just hitting it toggles on and off deselect all or on or select all so make sure it's all selected hit you on your keyboard and hit unwrap that's what it looks like so it's crazy um if you hit U again you can experiment uh smart UV unwrap hit okay looks a little bit better and you can just play around with these results once we get the actual texture in so now that it's un wrapped real quickly I want to take change the blender render site or blender render engine to the Cycles Render engine and basically I exclusively pretty much work in Cycles Render and so now what we want to do is get out our image for our texture so I've got out uh CG textures.com just requires a free uh registration to download some of these and they have all these different textures for use in 3D uh or not or 2D as well uh if we click on soil and we click on I believe it's rough we'll see and yep that's it and then over here we have these three textures I'm going to choose one in the middle I've already downloaded this and I have't in a project file so just click this download after you created a registration and then what we want to do is change this viewed here to the node editor and what obviously it's blank here uh so what we want to do is real quickly just to make this easier I'm going to right click hit join area and then left click over here I'm going to pull drag down it's a little bit easier to work this way so if I change this again to the node editor we'll see nothing here what we can do hit tab up here and we'll go over here to the material section and hit new then we see these two what are called nodes that show up over here we can move them around stuff what we want to do is hit shift a we want to add texture image texture and then left click and drag this color to that color input over here and then you can hit open which will bring you to your project folder or you can navigate to it and this is what I want and then if we come over here change from solid to rendered we'll see we have our texture that's now UV mapped onto that text all real quick I want to lighten things up so if we come over here to the ru Tab and increase that maybe we'll make a like a green color sort of all right so this looks okay and of itself but if we want to really mess around with it more we can play around with these nodes so if you hit contr if you hold control left click you can sever that connection we're going to add a mix Shader in between shift a and we'll take in Shader and mix Shader all right just moving things around put that right there put this one up here not the fact right there to this bottom Shader one right there and then hit shift a and we're going to add a glossy sh Shader so a mix Shader allows you to add two different shaders one final thing I want to do is add a displacement so hit shift and D to duplicate that over there and we'll just add this to displacement as we can see we kind of have an interesting look here already as if there's rocks or something in here and then of course you can play around with the color uh you could do all sorts of crazy things obviously I'm just going to leave mine near White all right and let me go ahead and right click in that area and to join this area down and I'm going to go over here real quick to the render settings change from CPU to GPU and that makes it a lot faster if you have a GPU a graphics Pro uh a nice graphics card and you don't have this option all you have to do is go to file user preferences and under system compute device choose Cuda and you have your uh cards here I have two GeForce GTX 580s all right and I basically over sampling that's the one thing I want to change preview is what we're previewing right now there's only 10 samples by default which makes it look grainy but but if we include it to 100 or so it looks a lot better but it takes a little bit longer to render same thing for render when you go to finally render it you can really turn that up to maybe a thousand all right so one final thing I want to do real quick is just uh add a plane so if I switch back to solid hit shift a plain hit s for scale and just type in 20 it'll be pretty big and we'll go over here to the materials hit new and we'll come over here and change this to a mix Shader then we have our two Shader inputs down here so you don't always have to use the uh the node editor as we did before you can mess around with stuff over here we'll make that first one a diffuse which is down here the second one a glossy which is right there so now if I preview things go to rendered now it's actually sitting on something if you right click the text it doesn't show you in rendered view if it's selected but it is selected because it changed textures here if you hit G that's the shortcut for move you can move it up so it's kind of sitting right there even though the Y is kind of caught off I'm not really worried about that uh but yeah that is it so that's how you can quickly take like a a texture and just map it on to some type of object to make something uh kind of cool and obviously in this case irrelevant maybe you had to do like a poster or something or but but yeah we have earthy text looking earthy of sorts and uh that's it for this T I know I kind of move fast but I have to be somewhere uh so yeah you can always just pause and stuff but uh anyhow I'm Gary Simon of designc course.com if you haven't yet subscribe here on YouTube I'll see you tomorrow [Music]