Your 1st Hour in Blender - 3D Basics Beginner Tutorial

Key Takeaways

what's up everybody it's your boy nate now most of you guys subscribe because you have been hooked onto 3d animation and are as inspired as i was when i first saw this this is tears of steel and when i first saw this in 2008 my jaw dropped not only because the vfx animation and just all around everything was just so freaking awesome but because it was made using an entirely free 3d software called blender and you know we're going to be doing today we're going to be diving right into blender starting from the absolute basics so don't worry if you guys have never touched the software before shoot don't worry if you haven't even downloaded it because it's a pretty quick and easy download and it's also free hey who doesn't like free oh shoot wait and if you guys have not subscribed make sure you guys go ahead smash that subscribe button turn on post modificat modification turn on post notifications so you don't miss out on any of the super dope stuff that we got planned all right you already know what time it is let's go [Music] so i first started learning 3d animation many many years ago in a far away time called 2008 back when phones were still phones software's he only paid for once and pretty much 3d animation was impossible for anyone who wasn't related to bill gates but you know what inspired by a childish will that anything was possible all thanks to naruto i ended up diving into the interwebs finding out about a software called blender which hey if you guys have stumbled on this video you probably found out about this software as well and you know what it helps you make some really cool now i could go on and on and on and get super technical about like ik rigging and modeling and three-point lighting but i figured it'd be much more helpful and fun to actually just dive into a project about blowing up and you know what you're gonna learn how to do this today roll clip i've been missing not to walk with a minute i've been building all the blocks like me ellie ain't got water dripping out the city oh my god oh my god [Music] whatever [Music] okay so first thing to actually do in order to make this let's go ahead and open up blender now when you first open up blender you're gonna get this pop-up window bam we can just go ahead and click general on it instantly you're gonna see we have a simple scene set up for us with a camera a light and a 3d cube you can destroy pretty much anything in blender using this method but today i'm going to show you how to do it on something really simple and really practical like a wall so let's hop right into it modeling this wall it should be easy enough i'd say right now a wall would just be a skinnier version of this cube here that means that we probably only have to scale down the width and it's going to look a little bit more wally so to do that i'm going to press s on my keyboard and that's going to pull up the scale properties of this cube and now as i move my mouse up and down or left and right or whatever it's going to be scaling the cube but since we only wanted to scale down the width i'm going to press x on my keyboard and you're going to see it's only going to scale it on the x-axis if i press y on my keyboard it's only going to do it on the y-axis so let's go ahead and get this nice and looking like a wall here since i'm noticing that it's uh just scaling all over the place you can press shift tab on your keyboard and that's gonna make it snap to nice whole even numbers that's gonna come in nice and handy once we get into doing the physics of this okay cool so this is nice this is looking more like a wall so to look around this wall you can middle click on your mouse and drag around and you're gonna see that the camera kind of orbits the center here i'm a little bit too far away so i also want to zoom in and use that same middle wheel but by scrolling up bam the cube looks a lot bigger okay cool so this is looking pretty nice but i'm noticing that this wall right here is floating a little bit so i want to go ahead and make it look like it's more on the ground plane here so to do that is pretty easy i'm going to press the number pad 1 and that's going to put me into my side view this red line here is this x axis let's go ahead and move this cube up to move the cube you can press g on the keyboard that's gonna pull up the transform properties and as i move up my mouse you're gonna see it's starting to move around so let's just press z on the keyboard and bam you're gonna see it's only moving up and down and using that same technique as earlier i'm gonna press shift tab so that it locks into nice even numbers that is looking nice right there cool so this is looking pretty good so now that we have the wall here let's go ahead and destroy it there's a whole bunch of ways to destroy it i actually looked up a few different ways before making this tutorial and for some reason i was surprised that not enough people were telling you the easiest way to do it which is by using a plug-in called cell fracture to get this plug-in is actually really really easy as well all you have to do is go all the way up to preferences which you can find under the edit tab here and once you click on that go to the tab that says add-ons right here on the left you're gonna see a tab that says add-ons all the way up in the tiny right-hand corner you're gonna see this magnifying glass there's just a search bar so you're going to want to look for a plugin called cell fracture so let's just type in cell and instantly you're going to see it pops up on your computer it's going to probably be an empty checker box so just go ahead and check the middle of there and just like that you gotta plug in holy blender is amazing i don't know why other softwares don't make adding add-ons just like this freaking easy so once you have that all you got to do is close out of this and you instantly have cell fracture okay cool so i could just run cell fracture on this now and it's just gonna go ahead and break up the wall randomly but i could also tell it where to blow it up more specifically kind of bob ross it so let's go ahead and i'll show you exactly what i mean all the way up in the top left corner you're gonna see this little drawing pencil icon and that's pretty much the annotate tool using the annotate tool i can just draw right onto this spam we get these 3d lines getting drawn so i'm just going to undo that here really quickly because even though i want this to be drawn on the uh on this wall here i want it only to stick to the surface if i click all the way in the top left here you're gonna see where it says 3d cursor you can go ahead and click on this select surface what that's going to do is make sure that when we start drawing with this annotate tool it's not drawing all over the place but instead just to the surface of this wall here that we modeled to make these drawings a little bit easier i want to frame this wall a little bit more center in my view so to frame this in view we can go ahead and hold shift on our keyboard while holding down the middle mouse wheel that's gonna let us pan around this cube let's get this nice and center okay so now we got the shot looking nice let's draw on this cube and show blender where we want this to be broken up you guys can just go ahead and have fun with it there's no mistakes here you notice really just get in there you know take out all your frustrations on this cube it's right here in the center that's where i'm going to make it and uh yep and then afterwards you know i'm just gonna do these big open areas i'm just letting all my peace and and happiness radiate outwards much like this wall will in a second okay so so that's looking pretty good now i'm gonna go all the way up here to this button that says object all the way down to quick effects and you're going to see at the very bottom here it says cell fracture and this new pop-up window pops up and it's going to show all these freaking options which looks confusing but trust me we don't need to worry about all these we're in fact just going to change a few of them now one option that you're going to see is pretty obvious is instead of using own particles and child particles let's go ahead and click annotation pencil and all that's going to do is tell cell fracture to use that drawing that beautiful masterpiece that we just made earlier to determine where these uh fragments or pieces are going to be now on source limit i'm going to change this from 100 to 200 but you can go ahead and make this whatever number you want this is pretty much just going to say how many pieces you want cell fracture to make out of this object i think 200 is good because you know sometimes keeping it 100 just ain't enough nowadays um okay so on recursive shatter i'm going to change it from 0 to 1. what that's gonna do is tell it to go ahead and break itself up on itself now you can leave this at small whatever you really want it to be um it could be random as well go ahead you can have fun with these settings here oh and the most important setting of all is that you want to make sure that in scene collection you go ahead and give this a name so let's go ahead and name this pieces like reese's pieces babe we should get reese's to sponsor us that'd be cool and pretty much what this is gonna do once we give it a name to this collection is it's gonna take all of those pieces that we made and put them into a group that way it's not just gonna be all over the place which is gonna give you a nightmare that is it and now we can just go ahead and click ok and let cell fracture do its thing yeah that actually looks pretty dope holy so this is looking pretty cool but you're gonna notice that it's also kind of a mess so let's go ahead and clean this up the first thing i want to go ahead and do minimize this collection here on the right with this arrow that says pieces and then i can go ahead and click outside of this just so that we deselect all of those pieces as well so right now we're done using the annotation tool and making all of these drawings so let's go ahead and click on the normal select tool which is right up here in the top left and to get rid of those annotations i'm going to press n on my keyboard and click on view and then down here in the bottom you're going to see annotations where it says note i can either just turn this off and it disappears or i can go ahead and delete it whichever you guys want doesn't really matter at this point because we don't need those anymore now that's looking a lot better but this wall still is super fuzzy and that's because we have the pieces on top of the original wall that we had it's like kind of getting rendered on top of each other so it's looking all kinds of funky you can look here on the right hand corner that original cube that we started off with is going to be there you can just click on this little eyeball icon and that makes it disappear now one thing to note though once we click render it is still going to show up but i'm going to teach you how to get rid of that using the visibility properties in a second so this little icon that looks like a square an orange square with like these other orange squares outside of it if you go all the way down to visibility you can see where it says viewports renders you just click those boxes damn they're not gonna show up anymore okay cool so we have a pretty nice broken wall but there are absolutely no physics applied to it yet so if i press space on my keyboard nothing happens as expected so that brings me to my next super fun part of this project which is adding physics to objects so to add physics we can just go ahead and click on one piece here and on the left hand side here you're going to see this little circle with like another circle orbiting an icon if you click on rigid body press space on your keyboard bam that piece falls and if we hit space again on the keyboard that animation is going to stop let's go ahead down to this timeline here and click and drag just to bring this animation all the way back to the beginning that's looking pretty good but we want the rest of the wall to fall so with that same piece selected i'm going to right click on the collection that we made earlier which you can find all the way in the top right hand corner here and then i'm going to click on this icon called select objects bam you're going to see everything get highlighted except for that same piece that we had selected in the beginning it's going to be a brighter orange than everything else that's in orange so next let's go all the way up to object underneath the tab rigid body we're going to click copy from active and what that's going to do is copy those same physics properties that we applied to that one piece to the rest of those pieces that we made if you click play on your keyboard bam the whole wall falls but since we don't want this wall to just be falling into an abyss we want it to hit a floor let's go ahead and make one so to create an object press shift a on your keyboard and bam you're going to get this pop-up menu with a whole bunch of options so we can go ahead and create a ground plane by clicking on mesh and then going to plane it's the first option here so now we have a floor but it's definitely looking way too small so let's use that same method that we used earlier to scale it up i'm going to press s on my keyboard but this time rather than just dragging my mouse outwards i can also press the numbers 10 or 1 0 and it's pretty much just going to scale it up by a factor of 10. that's looking pretty good okay cool so let's go ahead and press play and the wall falls right through the floor which looks cool but it's not exactly what we wanted to do we want the wall to actually collide with the floor and you know make it look like it's crumbling so to do that it's actually really easy we can go ahead and click on the plane and then go back to that circle with an orbit icon click on physics properties and select rigid body now if we press play the whole floor is going to fall with the wall too so let's go ahead and fix this by changing it instead of leaving the type go ahead and click on active and you're going to see underneath it there's gonna be an option called passive which pretty much just means that the floor is not gonna be a moving object but it's still gonna have some physics properties with it and now if we hit play on our keyboard yo holy this is looking freaking dope now you guys can leave it at this but i am noticing that his kind of breaking up a little bit quirky it looks a little bit weird here and i think it's because of two main issues with it one it's sliding around all over the place and then two those physics are looking a little bit off to where like some of the bigger pieces are falling like really quickly and the smaller pieces are falling at like just the same rate and i think i know why so once we set those physics for that initial piece and copied it over to all the other pieces it actually copied over the same mass and the same friction settings which we probably don't want we want smaller objects that have smaller masses and bigger objects have bigger masses and that's just going to make sure that things look and move the way that they would in a kind of like a real world setting of course you can make it like however you want it but this instance let's go ahead and try to make it look a little bit more realistic so to do that it's actually pretty easy let's go ahead and make sure that we move out our ground plane because it looks like it got created and put into that collection of pieces just by default so to do that just go ahead and click on it outside of that collection that way once we go into adding these physics properties the ground plane doesn't get adjusted as well okay cool so that's looking pretty good let's go ahead and increase the friction of these pieces so to do that it's pretty easy let's just do the same thing as earlier click on any of the pieces here i'm going to go ahead and select on any piece here and go into the physics properties but this time under surface response instead of leaving it at 0.5 i want to crank this up to something like 0.8 let's go ahead and right click on the collection select objects go up to object rigid body and copy from active instantly all these now pieces have a little bit more friction and they're breaking up and not sliding all over the place a little bit better but we still have a huge problem which is the mass each of these objects you could individually go through and calculate and honestly you'd have to be some sort of math list to do that or you can let blender do all the hard work for you with a simple button which you can find right here by going all the way up to object rigid body and click calculate mass and then you're gonna have all these different options pop up which you can click on any of them played around with concrete before it looks pretty cool you know brick is also pretty cool they have common soft i'm gonna go ahead and click on brick press and yo once we hit play on the keyboard instantly the wall breaks way way better smaller objects move faster bigger bigger what the bigger smaller objects move faster bigger objects move slower and we have way less jittery slips here and there so if you also want to get into like seeing more of the details you can click on any of these objects here look at the mass just change you know like the smaller objects literally have smaller masses which is freaking cool okay so let's go ahead and get rid of that side panel i'm just gonna go ahead and press n on my keyboard to get rid of that if i want to preview this wall breaking in a little bit more beauty and glory we can click on the different viewport shading options which is all the way up in the top right hand corner here i'm going to click on the far right one and this is going to make it render using blender's built-in eevee render it's one of my favorite ones it runs super fast okay so one thing that you guys are gonna notice from the examples i showed you is that we have this really cool time ramp effect going on where it's like something smashes into this wall and then it just like explodes out super slow motion kind of like a movie looks super dope so let's go back to the easier render viewport mode just so we can add in this really nice time ramp effect okay so to add that time ramp effect we can go ahead and click on the scene properties which is this icon right here and underneath the rigid body tab if you click on this little arrow here it's going to expand out some more settings one of those settings that we care about is speed and right now it's just set to 1 which is pretty much real time speed so let's go ahead a little bit forward in the timeline and this little dot here right next to speed i'm gonna go ahead and click on it and you're gonna see it changes to a diamond and then in a timeline here we have a new diamond made which is pretty much just a new keyframe now if you guys haven't heard of keyframes before all they are are little points of data that say be here at this time at this place specifically so for this keyframe it says for the speed to be set to 1 at frame 14. so now let's go forward a little bit in the timeline and change this one to something like point two and press this diamond icon again to lock in that keyframe so now if we press the space bar and press play on our timeline we're gonna see that the animation slows down to about 20 which is pretty cool but i kind of want it to slow down even more so let's just go ahead and change this point two to something like point zero two which is going to be just two percent speed and again i'm going to press that diamond icon to lock in that new keyframe okay cool so that's looking a little bit better but i'm noticing that it happens a little bit too late for me so i want to shift these keyframes and to do that it's pretty easy just go ahead and select them and then click and drag any direction to move them i want to move these back a little bit and that's going to be shifting them earlier in the timeline okay cool so once i press play i'm noticing that there's some weird physics going on probably because of the time ramp's getting like coded into this it's like messing with it so let's just go ahead and select one keyframe and just kind of vary the distance between these two here it might take a little bit of finagling here and there because it is running like a simulation so up to you guys with how you want it to look but once you get it looking into a nice place for yourself you can go ahead and get into rendering this animation out now normally rendering is like a whole nother topic in itself you can get into the nitty-gritty of rendering but for this example let's just go ahead and make something super simple and easy to set up and it's going to work for us about like 90 of the time okay so the first step is to turn on the viewport shading here which is going to show us what our rendered image is like more closely going to look like looking a little bit too dark so let's go ahead and add in some lights you can use that same method earlier to add in the ground plane but instead we're going to add in a light so i'm going to press shift a on my keyboard it's going to pull up this pop-up menu underneath light i'm going to go ahead and click on point and that's going to create a new point light right in the center of our project here and just like that boom you got light so let's go ahead and move around this light i'm gonna press g on my keyboard and then just move my mouse around i'm gonna press x and y to like lock it into those uh those specific axes there so i'm moving a little bit easier here and this is looking pretty good i kind of just want it like a little bit forwards in front of it just illuminating the scene here and once i got that one looking pretty good i can click on this light bulb icon down here and here we have a few options that are going to let us change the light i like blue and red so i'm going to go ahead and click on color here drag this over to the blue that looks pretty cool to increase the radius of this and the power of this just to make this light a little bit brighter oh that's looking nice so next i'm gonna duplicate this light by pressing shift d on my keyboard while i have it selected and now when i move over my mouse you can see the light is just getting moved over so let's move this duplicated light over here and we're going to set up a super simple three-point light setup i'm also going to change this color to blue pretty much i'm just moving around my camera trying to get a good angle on it so i can see where i have uh this light here let's just duplicate it again cool i just want to add a little bit more light back here so we can move this light over this way okay so that's looking nice i want to frame this action in view for my camera so to do that let's go into our side view first by pressing the number pad 1 on the keyboard if you guys don't have a number pad because you're on a laptop you can also just go ahead and use these icons up here for x y and z or the wire the x1 is gonna give you that same look here okay so that's looking cool now let's select that camera that we had in the scene that was generated for us earlier and with that camera selected i'm going to use the hotkey control alt 0 and what that's going to do is frame in our camera to match the same viewport that we had earlier okay so that's looking pretty nice now let's go into the render options which is this tab over here and i'm going to turn on ambient occlusion instantly we get nice and fast shadows i'm also going to turn on screen space reflections mainly because i use a material that had like reflections but up to you guys i'm also going to turn on motion blur and high quality normals which is underneath the performance tab here and then i'm also going to go down to shadows and turn on high bit depth which is going to make those shadows look a little bit better and have more blacks and depth in it okay cool so this is looking pretty nice but we can also make this look a little bit nicer with some materials so to add materials to this you can click any piece on this and underneath your materials tab which is down in the bottom here you can go ahead and click open up the preview now i recommend if this is your first time messing with materials just to go ahead and play around with the settings so you can see what each of them does but definitely up to you guys with what you want to do i think right now this red actually looks kind of cool and let's also add in a material for the ground so i'm going to go ahead and click on that plane we created open up the materials tab click new bam and so we got a material for the ground for this one i think i'm actually going to want to make it shiny i'm going to leave the wall looking a little bit more flat but i want these reflections to show up okay cool so the floor is looking nice the wall is looking nice but i'm noticing that the lights are showing up in this reflection and i don't want that to to happen so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take this light here and i want this light to act more like a sun and not like a point spotlight now for these other ones i kind of want to style it a little bit more i want the shadows to follow the direction of this wall falling so i'm going to move up this light just a little bit so i'm getting those shadows to match that angle there okay so this is looking pretty cool but the floor is definitely looking way too shiny so let's make it a little bit darker uh by changing the base color from white to black and hey while we're doing that why don't you guys also subscribe to black mixture now it's not the smoothest plug ever if you guys made it this far in the video you most likely are gonna enjoy our other videos so go ahead do yourself a favor smash that subscribe button turn on post notifications and also do us a huge favor by smashing that like button and letting us know down in the comments if you like this video or not anyways let's get back into the software okay cool so the floor is looking nice the wall is looking nice but the background is actually still too bright it looks kind of grayish so we can go ahead and change the background of the whole scene by going up to this setting right here which is the world properties gonna see it says surface background color it's blank but underneath strength it's set to one so if you go ahead and lower this down to zero instantly the background becomes black this is looking pretty cool so now on to exporting this out i'm gonna go ahead and click on the output properties and it's gonna be this little icon that looks like a printer and an image coming out of a printer by the way it might be my favorite icon in the entire suite of like blender icons there's a lot of cool icons but this one i feel like it's just freaking cool i don't know why more 3d softwares don't make they're rendering like a printer icon because that's kind of what rendering feels like you know printing okay so what size do we want this image to be in you can leave it at the defaults 1920 by 1080 or you can change them i'm just going to leave this at default because hey let's just get comfortable getting this image and seeing it fully rendered out so at frame rate you can either leave this at 24 frames per second or you can also bump it up to 60 frames per second which is what i did for the earlier examples but i would warn that once you do that sometimes the physics are going to render out a little bit differently than what you were looking at earlier okay so now super important underneath the output tab let's create a new place for these images because that's what blender is going to render out it's just like a sequence of images so i'm going to go ahead and select on this folder now we are all set to render so go all the way up to the top left corner and you're gonna see this tab that says render click on it second option there render animation bam blender is doing its thing and it is rendering out that animation now depending on how fast or how slow the potato your computer is this could take you know either a few minutes or a few hours or a few days but thankfully since you guys are watching the tutorial it's only going to take you about the time it takes for you to go ahead and smash that like button it's the last plug i'm doing okay a little disclaimer here here is the part of the tutorial where blender crashed normally that would freaking be a super depressing moment and i might have even just given up taking like a five day break you know having to start from scratch kind of sucks but thankfully blender has actually a built-in auto save feature so if you just go ahead and have that same experience happen to you you know what you don't have to just quit uh your dreams of becoming a motion designer all you gotta do is click file recover and you're going to see last session or auto save for me last session worked for you maybe auto save is going to work and you're going to see all the different auto saves and all the different sessions it's freaking dope thank goodness whoever made blender tom rosendahl chewboy up sponsor us because yeah the software is dope anyways so cool i'm gonna go ahead and open up that project using that auto save recover last session feature and now i'm just gonna re-render out this video to the right folder with the right settings bam this looks pretty cool i think it's all done i can see at the top here it's done with rendering so let's go ahead and bring it into adobe after effects to take a look at this so the first thing i'm going to do is make a new composition once the render is done it's going to be inside of a whole folder with a bunch of different images that same folder that we set in the output earlier all i have to do is drag in this folder into after effects and it's going to read it as an image sequence boom just like that it treats it just like a video file we can take a look at this and it looks pretty nice you guys can take this project wherever you want from here you can go ahead and style it like i did now if you guys don't have adobe after effects you can pretty much use just any sort of uh video editing software that about any of them should be able to read image sequences okay cool and now we have a super dope animation i want you guys to go ahead and pat yourselves on the back because you sat through the ins and outs of blender now you guys have the chops to make just about any super cool destruction animation there is one thing though that you can do to take this to a whole other level which is adding a ball to destroy the things like you guys are gonna see here and to do that it's super easy you pretty much just go ahead and use shift a to create a new sphere doing the same way that we did with the plane by making it instead we're gonna go ahead and click on sphere to create a new one now i'm gonna go ahead and add in some rigid body properties too by clicking on this tab here there's a whole bunch of different techniques for making a really quick like ball exploding effect but my favorite one to do is just by animating with the transform properties from zero to something like big enough to take up enough space all the while it's like in the center of the wall and what that's going to do is just mimic like an explosion going outwards yeah a lot of flexibility i hope you guys have fun blowing up if you guys liked the tutorial and want to see more make sure you guys leave us a comment down below we're going to love reading it even though we're at 175k subs we still read the comments and we still enjoy finding out all the cool you guys what you guys are working on after watching the tutorials so oh dms on instagram as well you know what else if you guys want to get a little bit closer to us go ahead and join the patreon because i'm going to be uploading this exact project file that i use in the tutorial right there to patreon as well as all the other project files for the other tutorials so anyways thanks a lot you guys it's a huge honor to get to show you some really cool techniques and also get to see all the dope stuff that you guys are going to be coming up with as always i hope to catch you all on the next one peace [Music] yo we are actually i don't even know what any other plugs i gotta say oh we're at 175k crystal's the best manager ever um send us your y'all are the best i don't know if they could hear that but dang it yeah i hope they could hear you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you