Episode: 4177
Title: HPR4177: Blender 3D Tutorial #1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4177/hpr4177.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:53:08

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,177 for Tuesday the 6th of August 2024.
Today's show is entitled Blendered Tutorial.
It is hosted by Delta Ray and is about 71 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Delta Ray provides an audio tutorial of how to use the Blendered software.
Hello HBR listeners.
There's a program called Blender, which is a piece of open-source software that's been
around since the 1990s.
Basically, an all-in-one visual effects suite application.
It mostly focuses on doing 3D modeling, texturing, rendering, and animation.
But it can also be used as a video editor and camera tracking and physics simulation
and all kinds of air things to achieve that means.
It's mostly targeted at people who want to create 3D art.
In this episode, instead of talking about Blender though, I'm actually going to give
you a tutorial on how to use Blender and how to get started with it.
Now normally, these types of tutorials are given visually on YouTube or Vimeo or using
screenshots on a website.
But I thought I'd try something a little bit different.
If having to constantly look over to video or to screen another window, you'd be able
to just listen and actually follow along to what I say.
While you're looking at the Blender window, I thought this could create a better experience
for you.
Make it easier for you to retain the information that you're being presented with.
The first thing that you'll need to do is think about what kind of computer you have.
Does it have a 3D accelerator like a nice GPU?
Are you on a laptop?
Do you have a mouse that's independent of the computer?
Do you have a numpad?
Like a keyboard with a numeric keypad or do you have a separate numeric keypad?
If you have a GPU and a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard with a numpad, you're
going to find it a little bit easier to actually do some of the activities in Blender.
That's not to say that you can't do it with a laptop, but it'll be more challenging.
And if you don't have a very fast computer, things are going to go a little bit slower.
But you can still do them.
To start out by downloading the Blender software, this is available from Blender.org, B-L-E-N-D-E-R.org.
And by the time you listen to this, there could be a different version.
There's likely to be a different version because the Blender development happens very quickly
and they release new versions frequently.
As of this recording, it's currently a Blender 4.2 LTS.
And you could download the LTS version, which stands for long-term support, similar to
how there's Ubuntu LTS and so on.
And then you'd be able to be certain that you'd be using the same version that I am in this
recording.
But you go to the Blender website and you should see right on the front page, a link for
download.
Just click on that and then it'll take you to our page where it asks you which platform
you want to download for.
It usually auto detects what operating system you're using and you can just click on download.
While that's downloading, just to give you an idea of the type of art you could end up
creating with Blender, if you've ever watched a movie like Shrek or Frozen or Wondered
how they do all the VFX shots and modern movies with 3D scenes and camera tracking and
stuff like that, that typically is done with a program like Blender.
Blender is meant to mimic the abilities of and exceed the abilities of commercial software
like Maya and there used to be a program called Alias Wavefront and there was one called
Imagine and 3D Studio Max and so on.
Blender became open source back in 2003, I think, after a massive community fundraiser
that raised $100,000 to buy the license out and turn into an open source program.
Since then, it's seen a massive amount of community development contributions and
the interface has improved dramatically.
It's now on par, I think, with some of the commercial applications that are out there if not
exceeding them in some ways.
Basically, what you have access to here is software that would have cost you several
$1000 back in the day, maybe $10,000 back in the 90s, maybe $2,000 to $3,000 in the 2000s,
but you have the ability to create 3D renderings and animations and do video editing and stuff
like that in a very powerful way.
So probably by now the package has finished downloading, what you would basically do is
go into your downloads folder and untar, untar, un-gzip, the tar archive that was downloaded
and then CDN to that directory that creates and then open it up in your file manager or
go into the command line and CD into it and run .slashblender.
And that should open up Blender.
If it doesn't open up Blender, if you get some kind of error, then that's a bit beyond
this tutorial.
You'll have to search online to see what the problem might be.
It's likely to be an issue with your graphics card or your graphics card drivers that you're
using.
Those problems can be explained away and there's probably a forum post for it someplace.
So if you just copy the error that you're getting into your favorite search engine, you're
likely to find a solution.
So the first thing that comes up is you're presented with a big window that probably
takes up the whole screen and a splash window which says Blender and has the version number
up in the upper right-hand corner.
And with a pretty rendered scene right now, it's a goldfish in a coral reef or some
kind of goldfish-like fish.
Then below that has different types of templates that you can use to start with Blender.
For now, you can just click on Under New File where it says General.
You can click General and it'll just give you a basic default scene.
You can also just click on the fancy splash heart and it should make that window go away.
And you'll be presented, at least the de facto standard for Blender is to have a scene
with a default cube as they call it.
And then off to the left of that, you'll see like this pyramid-like figure or triangle
with the triangle on top of it that's shaded in.
And that's the camera.
If you go to hit F12 on your keyboard right now, it'll actually render the current scene,
the default scene.
A new window will pop up and you'll see that from the camera's point of view, it's looking
at that cube and it's basically tracing the rays of light that will bounce off the
cube back into the camera from whatever light sources you have in the scene.
And so it creates this three-dimensional view of a cube.
You can go ahead and close this window, the Blender render window.
And what we're going to do is create a simple scene with the letters HPR and make kind of
a little logo scene for HPR.
So instead of deleting this default cube, we're going to scale it down.
And the first thing I want you to get used to is maybe the Blender interface here.
I'm not going to go over everything in detail, but just kind of familiarize yourself with
it.
So if you move your eyes to the upper left-hand corner and you see the Blender logo in
the menu, you'll see that there's a basic application menu with file edit render window
and help.
Usually you don't use that very often except for to save your scene.
And the render menu is often used for actually rendering the scene.
So you'll notice if you click on render that there's next to each of the options, there's
like a hot key for it.
And it's really good to remember all these hot keys.
If you're, you know, you use a text editor like EMAX or VAM or Nano, you're used to using
hot keys and you're kind of making the keyboard and extension of your hands.
And Blender works very much that way.
The more experienced Blender users tend to use all the hot keys instead of using all
the menu options because by doing so, you're able to move very quickly and actually create
a scene very quickly.
So it's good to get in the habit of using these different hot keys.
So F12 is one they already told you about.
And then next to the main menu where it ends with help, you'll start to see some tabs
starting with layout and ending with scripting.
And these are basically different layouts for the window to basically put your workspaces
in different modes.
So layout is the default one.
If you click on modeling, it'll kind of change the window layout and it'll change what
the cube looks like.
Now it has some dots around it and what's called the 3D viewport.
That's like the main area that you're working in.
You'll notice that the dots are now around the cube.
That means it's in what's called edit mode.
And you can see that indicator not just in the 3D viewport but also in the upper left-hand
corner.
You see that there's now another space where it says edit mode.
We'll skip that for now and keep going but if you click on sculpting, the blender has
the ability to make like, you know, kind of organic sculpts and kind of like working
with some clay and doing stuff with clay.
That's a bit more advanced so we're going to skip that for now.
UV editing, this is where whenever you want to apply like an image to an object to make
it so that, you know, like you want to put a logo on an object or maybe wrap a face around
an object if you want to make something look like a realistic human face.
You might come into here to do that kind of stuff.
Texture paint, this is very similar to UV editing where you're basically like painting
a texture on top of, kind of like if you were using Gimp, you know, you would, after
you add a texture image to your object and set up in the shader, you could actually paint
on top of that image and do different things with it.
Shading, this is where you actually, you apply different color and texture attributes
to the actual model to make it look realistic or to make it look like something instead
of just a plain, you know, gray color.
We'll get into that later in this tutorial.
Animation, this lays out the windows so that, you know, you can animate your scene.
If you press the spacebar right now while in this tab, you'll notice that it actually
starts moving the timeline scrubber over in real time of 24 frames per second.
This is basically showing how the animation would work.
Press the spacebar again to stop the animation and you can go down to the bottom and click
on that blue line, like in the number area, and just basically move it back to one or
zero, that way you're back at frame one.
And then rendering, I don't usually use this tab very much, but I guess it's for if you
were doing phishing touches on a render, usually the, I guess it depends on whether you
want to have the render window pop up or have it show up in this tab or something like
that.
Usually I just have it pop up.
Compositing, this is like post processing area for doing extra things after the render
happens.
Like for instance, if you want to add a fog glow or, you know, chop up the image or add
some sparkle or something like that, that's what the compositing steps are for.
That's what composing is all about.
In the next one, the next tab is geometry nodes.
We're not going to get into this in this tutorial, but this is a very powerful system that
has been added to Blender to help with creating, like automating the process of modeling complex
things.
You could dedicate pretty much a whole podcast to just geometry nodes or actually any of these
aspects of Blender, but geometry nodes especially.
That's a relatively new thing and there's a lot of tutorials that are popping up out there.
Some of which are older and are based on older information, so you kind of have to be careful
what you're following, see which version that tutorials is made for before following along
with it.
Then scripting, Blender has a Python engine built into it or at least a Python interface built
into it.
You can actually write code, write in Blender and have it do stuff like if you wanted to duplicate
an object in a ray and make it follow some math macro algorithm, you could do stuff like
that.
Basically, the sky's the limit.
If you click on the layout tab again all the way back on the left, then I'll talk about
other parts of the overall Blender window.
The 3D viewport, that's the part with the cube in it and over on the left hand side,
you'll see a tool bar with a few options going up the left hand side.
This is for, if you want to change between select box and cursor, cursor is, if you look
in the 3D viewport, you'll see in the center of the screen like this red and white circle
with a crosshairs, that's the cursor.
It's basically wherever the cursor is at in the 3D viewport is where it's going to add
an object.
You can also use the cursor for like rotating around the cursor, like more advanced modeling
and animation techniques can use the cursor.
We're not going into that now.
You also have the operations for move below that with the arrows pointing off in all directions
and rotate and scale and transform, which is basically like moving the object around
the scene and so on.
Annotate, measure and then add primitive, we'll get into this later.
I'm mostly going to have you use the hotkeys because I think you'll find, especially in
the hacker public radio community, you'll probably appreciate being able to use the hotkeys.
If you look over to the right hand side of the window at the top, you'll see where it's
a scene and view layer, we're not going to talk about that in this tutorial, but if you
look below that, this is called the outliner, where it says scene collection and then has
a hierarchy of objects and stuff.
If you click on camera, you'll see that it actually highlights the camera in the scene.
Click on cube, it'll highlight the cube and click on light, it'll highlight the light.
This is just basically, it gives you an overview of the different objects in a scene.
Once you get to have more complex scenes, this is very useful to go through and check on.
The other thing that you'll see here is that much like you'd have visible layers or something
like that in a paint program, the iris logo and the camera logo that's next to each of
the objects, like off to the right, those actually control whether you can see something
in the viewport or see it in the render.
For instance, if you click on cube and then you click on the iris logo, you'll see that
it goes away in the viewport, but if you hit F12 now, it'll still show up in the render.
This is useful if you're trying to declutter your scene in the viewport, but you still
want stuff to show up in the render, you can turn things on or off.
Go ahead and close the render window if you hit the F12 button and you can recheck the
iris icon that's next to the cube icon.
The same is true for if you click on the camera icon and disable the cube and the camera
in the render window.
If you disable that camera next to the cube and you hit F12, nothing will show up, right?
You don't see a cube or anything like that, so go ahead and close the render window
and you can recheck the camera icon next to the cube, but this is how you can control
things as far as visibility goes.
There's other ways of doing it, but this is for keeping yourself organized.
If you look below that, you'll see a rather detailed window with a whole bunch of icons
and a toolbar and stuff like that on the left-hand side of it with some colorful icons
and then on the right-hand side, a bunch of text and different input areas and stuff.
I guess the first thing I should probably mention about 3D applications because all 3D applications
are a victim of this.
Doing 3D is hard, there's lots of attributes that you have to adjust and settings that
you have to adjust to set up a scene and to model things, and so that's reflected in
the sophistication, the complexity of the interfaces.
People like to criticize Blender for having a complicated interface, but honestly, all
of the 3D, more advanced 3D application and modeling software out there has a very complex
interface that you have to learn.
There's a learning curve to it, and so it's kind of unfair to judge Blender like that,
but I guess if you're paying $2,000 for something like Maya, you don't want to think that it's
complicated, right?
You just want to learn how to use it to get your money's worth.
So maybe Blender gets the raw end of the stick there for being free.
Anyways, we're not going to get into this too much yet, but just know that those icons
on the left hand side of this function window, what's this called?
Properties window, I guess it's called the Properties window, has many different functions
like if you see the camera, then that lets you set render settings.
If you click on the printer like icon below that, that shows you the output settings like
what kind of resolution you're going to have, and then we're going to skip over a few
here and go down to where you see right above the wrench icon, the blue wrench icon, there's
an icon that when you highlight over it, it's orange and it says object, and if you click
on that, you'll see it takes us back to the default view that we were in for this object
for the cube.
There's settings for where the object's located, how it's rotated and stolen.
The other thing that we're going to care about today is if you go down near the bottom
of the icons on the left hand side of the Properties window, then you'll see a checker board,
you'll see a checker board basically, and then above that you'll see kind of a smaller
checker board wrapped around a ball, that's the materials window, and if you click on
that, this is where you actually set up what an object is going to look like, like not
its geometry, but its texture.
You should see like where it says material, and then below that you'll see base color,
and it'll be white, like this actually controls what the basic color of this object is going
to be, and so if you click on base color, and then a color selector will come up, you
can just move around inside the color selector and choose a color, like let's say we'll make
it red, just drag the circle in the center of that color selector down to red, and then
you can click back where it says base color, and it'll make the color selector go away,
you could also hit escape, and it'll keep your selection.
I'm sorry if you hit escape, it won't keep your selection, but basically just move out
of the color selector window, and it'll keep your selection.
So now we've set the base color to red, but we don't actually see any changes, right,
in the 3D viewport, it still looks like it's gray, well that's because by default it puts
you into a mode called just the viewport shading mode, where it's basically just showing
you the basic geometry of objects, and it's not trying to render them or represent what
the textures of them look like, and this is controlled by some icons that are up, if you
look in the 3D viewport with like the grid and stuff of the scene, if you look up in the
upper right hand corner of that, you'll see three circles like in a horizontal line that
are kind of outside of that window, and one will be highlighted by default, it's all
filled in, and this is basically where you select the different types of viewport shading.
So if you click on the one next to it that looks like a wireframe, like the one to the
left of that, all the way to the left, it'll change the viewport shading mode so that
things just show up in wireframes, so like the cube now just has like a wireframe outline
of the object.
Go back to the one to the right of that, you'll have the shaded mode basically just showing
solid view, to the right of that you'll have what's called material preview, and this
basically uses your video card to create a quick kind of game like rendering of your
scene, when you click on that you should see the cube change to the color red or whatever
color you chose, and then the one next to that all the way to the right is actually the
rendered mode, so you don't have to leave it on this all the time, but one of the features
of Blender is that it does, it can do real time rendering of the viewport as you're moving
around, so you know you're in the scene and you can see this stuff, if you go to move
around the cube and stuff like that, it's going to re-render the scene kind of in real
time as you move through it.
Okay, go ahead and click back to the filled in circle or the solid view up in that set
of four icons for controlling the view, because I don't want to slow down your computer
too much while you're doing this, otherwise you know if you're in rendered mode it might
be kind of slow for you, we'll get to changing that in a bit.
So now what we're going to do is we're going to take this cube and kind of smoosh it so
that it becomes the floor of our scene, and the way you do that is you scale the cube,
so press the letter S for scale, and then if you move your mouse around you should see
that the cube gets bigger and smaller and you can kind of control it by just moving your
mouse back and forth.
What I want you to do is restrict the scaling so it's not happening on all axes, but it's
only happening along the X and Y axes.
So to restrict it to just the X and Y we're going to basically turn off the Z axes and
to do that we'll press Shift Z, and now when you move the mouse around you're going to
see that it basically keeps it kind of in the same height, but you can make it bigger
along the X and Y axes.
Go ahead and just scale it up a bit until it kind of fills up a lot of the scene, maybe
not all of it, and then click your left mouse button if you're using right-handed mouse,
and that'll keep the settings.
Now we want to scale it along the Z axis to make it shorter so it's not as thick.
So it hits S again and then presses E without pressing Shift, and that should scale it so
you can make it thinner and you basically bring the mouse cursor in towards the cursor
or in towards the center of the object until it's kind of thin and then click the mouse
button to accept the change.
The next thing we'll do here is move down the floor a little bit so that the next object
we put in isn't covering it up, isn't covered up by the cube here.
So to transform this down, you press the G key for Grab, and then press, and if you move
around your cursor, you'll notice that it just kind of moves it everywhere, and basically
you're moving it in a relationship to the viewport and what you're looking at.
But we want to restrict the movement so it's only up and down.
So the way we do that is press Z on the keyboard, and now we're only restricting the movement
to the Z-axis.
So move it down until it's just below the grid itself, the display grid, so that you
can kind of see the grid above the floor that we create here.
And go ahead and click the mouse button to accept the change.
And now we're going to add a new object.
If you press Shift and A, capital A for Add, you'll see an Add menu come up basically
where the mouse cursor is, and you'll have a bunch of options for the different types
of objects that you can add to the scene.
Go down, select Text, and you should see basically right next to where the cursor is,
the word text will show up as actual text.
And this is an object.
To modify this, to modify the text, we'll press the tab key to go into edit mode.
And basically this works like text in a word processor or something.
Hit the backspace key a few times to erase the word text, and then type in the capital
letters HPR.
And then when you're done, press tab again to go out of edit mode.
And so now we have a text object that's called HPR.
We're going to now rotate that so it's perpendicular to the floor.
So you can press R for rotate.
And we want to rotate it, like if you move your mouse around, you'll see it kind of rotates
it right along the screen and stuff like that, but we don't want it to be like that.
So we'll press X to restrict it to just rotating around the X axis.
And now if you see, you have this rotation where it's actually going around the X axis.
But we want to perfectly align it like 90 degrees.
So one thing that you can do is just type in an angle, and so I can just type in 90 and
hit enter, and it'll rotate the object 90 degrees along the X axis.
So you can get a precise rotation.
Well if you render the scene right now with F12, you'll see that you probably just have
like an HPR text that's on top of a red cube, and that's maybe kind of boring.
But it shows, you know, what you've done so far.
So go ahead and close this render window, and over on the right hand side where you
had the properties window for, you know, all the different settings, you'll see that
for if you have a text object selected, that there's an icon above the materials button
that just looks like the green letter A, and if you click on that, that's how you affect
change to a text object.
And what we're going to do here is we're going to extrude out that text object so that
it has some depth to it.
And so look for the drop down section that says geometry, and click on that.
And you'll see that there's an option that says extrude, and it says 0m.
And Blender has its own units that are, I guess, based on meters.
But really it's just kind of arbitrary because you're just working, you know, this isn't
really a CAD program with like proper units of measurement and everything, at least
not in the sense that CAD user would expect.
So I mean, you can think of M as being meters, but really it's just kind of arbitrary,
but it's Blender units basically.
So if you go down and you basically click and hold down that extrude setting, then you
can move your mouse, and you'll notice that when you do this, it actually makes, you
know, if you move it to the right, the value increases.
And if you look over at the viewport, you should see your HPR text actually getting thicker.
And so make it, you know, not too thick, make it maybe like 0.2m, which is 0.2 for the
saying for the extrude.
And we also want to make it look kind of, you know, a little bit fancier.
So underneath where it says bevel, there's another section under geometry that says bevel
and it says round object and profile, where it says depth, click on the value for depth
where it says 0m and do the same thing, scroll it to the right until maybe it's just like
0.04 just to kind of round out the edges of the extrusion.
So it's like a little bit nicer.
You're probably thinking, well, I can't really see the HPR logo very well or something.
What you can do is move around the scene in the viewport by using your middle mouse button
to basically click in that window and move around and you should be able to like rotate
around in the scene.
Now you're not moving the camera.
You're basically moving where you're viewing the scene from in the viewport.
And so we'll get to moving the camera later, but you can, you know, set this up so you
can see a little bit better.
If you want to zoom in, you can use your mouse wheel to actually zoom in on the scene and
zoom out just by, you know, mouse, say mouse wheel up and mouse wheel down.
Now if you're not comfortable with using the mouse button for moving around, you can
also use the three, the axes icon that's in the upper right hand corner of the viewport
window.
You'll see like this colorful axes x, y and z.
If you click in that area just with your left mouse button and hold down and then move,
it'll also move around your view.
There's also these icons below that, like there's the magnifying glass with the plus.
If you click on that and hold down, you can zoom in and zoom out of your scene.
So this allows us to see what we're doing a little bit better.
But you should have, you know, a simple HPR logo and you can press F12 to render again
to see how that's changed in the viewport.
It's not looking great because, you know, the light is in a good place and so on.
So what we're going to do now is close this render window again.
And in the outliner, maybe click on the word light to control your lighting area.
And basically what we're going to do is move this light to be in front of the HPR logo
so it lights it up.
So if you press G while you have your light selected and then you can just move it down,
basically you don't have to move it along any axis.
You can just kind of move it down and you'll see visually how it's in front of the HPR
logo and then click the left mouse button to accept the movement.
And now if you render, you'll see, okay, this is starting to look a little bit better.
You know, it's starting to be the HPR.
You can make out the letters at least better.
So go ahead and click on close on the render window.
And we want to make it so that the HPR logo itself is a little bit nicer to look at.
You know, it's not just boring text.
So click on the HPR text object and now we're going to go over to the material settings.
Basically over in the right hand side where I said there's that checkerboard icon and
right above it, there's that round ball with the checkerboard on.
That's the material settings.
So here you should see, you know, you come in here and there's no material set up.
So you can click on new to create a material and maybe rename it by clicking in the spot
where it says material dot zero zero one and just changes to like say HPR or color logo
or something.
And instead of just setting like a color here, I'm going to show you how you can do some
cooler things with Blender using the shader tab.
So if you go up to the top of the Blender window and click on the shading tab, it'll take
you over to a different view where it shows like, you know, your icons over on the file
system over on the left hand side and stuff like that.
Basically you can ignore the stuff off to the left for now and just focus on the view
port window and the what's called the nodes window below that.
And the nodes window is pretty cool because it's actually the shader editor window.
But I mean, what these are, these are nodes and it acts like a pipeline or like a factory
or something like that.
If you always like the ability of of Unix command line processes to like pipe the input
of one thing into another, I think you're really like this and it can be a lot of fun to
like, you know, set up pipelines of nodes to do different things.
So you should have a node that says principal BSDF and this is basically kind of like your
basic material properties.
Like if you come in here and click on the base color and change it to red blue, let's
change it to blue, then you should see that the logo in the 3D view port has changed
to blue.
Well that's that's nice, but you could do that in properties window.
So what we'll do is we'll make it so that instead of it being just one color, we're going
to make it so that each of the letters is a different color.
And the way we're going to do that is by setting up a node called a color ramp and a gradient
node.
So we'll first add the color ramp node and you can just basically put your mouse in the
nodes area like the shade, what's it called, the shader, editor, window with the nodes
and also press shift A for add.
And this will bring up a menu of different things that you can add, divide in the categories.
So go down to converter and then scroll up to where it says color ramp and it'll basically
give you a color ramp that you can move around and put in place to the left of the principal
BSDF node.
If you happen to accidentally click on the window before you move your color ramp down,
you can select the different nodes by clicking on their title area or some blank part of
the node and select it like it would an object and then press G and move the node around.
This is another good reason to be able to learn Blender's different hot keys because
they get used everywhere and so it's useful to actually learn how to use the hot keys
so that when you're going around you can do stuff a lot faster.
Okay, so what you'll see is the color ramp next to the principal BSDF node.
You'll see these little circles at the edges of the nodes that say like color, alpha,
base color and stuff and they have different colors to them.
Basically you can connect these by, for instance, clicking on the color and do this,
go ahead and do this now.
If you click on the color circle and hold down your mouse and you should see a little
line come out like curved, you can connect it up to one of the different circles on the
principal BSDF node.
In this case you want to hook it up to base color and that basically is taking the output
of the color ramp node and putting in the base color.
But you don't really see anything happen and the reason why is because there's other
nodes that we have to set up to make it, you know, to transition the color in the way
that we're intending it to.
I mean, like anything else on a computer, the computer does exactly what you tell it to
and sometimes you make assumptions that you're telling it off but really you're not.
So now that we've connected those you can press Shift A again to bring up the search window
but this time instead of going through the menus I want to show you another way of using
this add menu.
If you click on search and just click on it, it should change the menu to like a search
thing and you can type in what you want.
So we're going to say type in gradient which is GRADIET and you'll see it shows you the
option for texture gradient texture.
Go ahead and click on that and then now move this gradient texture to the left of the
color ramp.
Again, if you accidentally clicked it in the wrong place and you want to move it, you
can just select the node, press G and move it around.
And so take the factor output, the FAC from the gradient texture and connect it up with
the factor input on the color ramp.
So again there's two options for the output of the gradient texture, the outputs are on
the right hand side, the inputs are on the left hand side.
So you connect FAC on the gradient texture with FAC on the color ramp.
And now you should start to see changes happening on your model.
And if you've ever worked with gradients like in GIMP or something like that, there's
a concept called color stops and in the color ramp node in the shader editor, you should
see there's like a black color stop and a white color stop.
These kind of look like pencils, like the end of a pencil.
And you can actually click on one of those color stops and drag it like left and right
and change where the color stops starts and stops.
This is basically to control where a color starts and stops.
If you select one of these little color stop indicators, it'll change the color that
shows up below that, like in below where it says POS and above FAC.
And you can actually click on that and select what color you want to be.
So let's change the one that's on the right side, the right most color stop.
Let's change that to blue.
And then click on the black color stop and we'll change that to red.
So in the color selector, since black is going to be all the way down, you're going to have
to do, I'm sorry, I should have done this for white too.
So I need to remember what I need to tell you.
So to select blue, basically in the color selector, you need to turn the saturation level
all the way to the top.
And so the color selector has like the wheel, like the wheel thing, and that also has a
slider on the right, which controls the value.
So basically, when it's all the way at the top, that means like you're going to have
full color.
Once all the way down at the bottom, you're just going to have blackness.
This is the way that you control the lightness or the darkness of a color.
And then the hue is controlled by moving around that circular area.
Okay.
So when you click on black, you're going to need to turn the value all the way up to the
top or close to it.
And then in the hue, select red.
And so now we have kind of this interesting transition from red to blue, happening in
the letters.
But let's say we want to make it so that each letter is independently its own color without
actually doing something with the model itself.
We just want to do this in the color ramp.
So if you click on the red color stop, the one all the way to the left, and then above
it, click on the plus there, that'll add another color stop that's in between that color
stop in the next one.
So that one will probably show up as purple.
But if you click on that color stop and then change its color to green, like, you know,
change the hue to green, then you should have, you know, kind of a rainbow-like effect.
But let's say we want to be individual colors.
So right now it's doing this linear transition mode where it's actually making a gradient
that goes between the color stops.
Let's make it so that it's constant.
So if you click on the drop down, this is linear, and this is called the interpolation,
change it to constant.
And now you should see there's like a hard change between red and green and blue.
But the blue doesn't really show up much because it's all the way to the right.
So bring the blue color stop to the left a bit until it actually covers up the R, but
none of the P, and then do the same thing with green, make it so that it goes to the left
more so it colors up, you know, covers up all of the P, but not the H and so on.
So now you should have three independent colors for each of the letters in HPR.
All right, great.
Press F12, we can render, see how it looks.
Okay, starting to look cool.
Okay, so now let's make the scene a little bit more interesting.
Well, actually, let's make, let's do another aspect of textures, and we're basically going
to add some micro displacement or bump mapping to the texture.
Basically, if you think about geometry of an object, you have the macro geometry, and
this is the way I think of it, you have the macro geometry like the big changes, the
big form of it and stuff like that.
But then you also have micro geometry, which is like cracks and bumps on a model and stuff
like that that are so small that it doesn't make sense to model them, but you can use
like the shader editor to make those effects.
So if you click somewhere in the shader editor and then click press Ctrl A and then click
on Search, and we're going to type in Bump, that shouldn't say Vector Bump, and we'll
select that, and then put that below the color ramp, and then press Ctrl A again, and
we're searching, well, in this case, instead of Search, we're going to move down to texture,
the texture menu, and you'll see in the sub menu of texture, there's several different
types of textures, where we're going to select their Veronoi texture, which is like a,
it's named after the person who came up with it.
So click on Veronoi, and this will bring up a pretty big window with a lot of different
settings, or a pretty big node with a lot of different settings.
Select the Bump normal output with the normal input on the principal BSDF node, and then
connect the distance output of the Veronoi texture with the height input on the Bump node.
And if you wait a few minutes, you should see this will really drastically change the
look of the logo.
I mean, you could leave it at this if you want, but let's make it a little bit less intense
by turning the strength in the Bump node down, so you just click on that Strength setting,
and you hold down the mouse and move it over, probably to about 0.1.
And then if you zoom in on the HPR logo, so you can actually see it, then go over to
the Veronoi scale and increase that so that it's probably about 60 or 70 or so.
It's kind of odd, but increasing the scale makes the Bump smaller, so it's a little bit
counterintuitive there.
The other thing I'd like you to do is change the Euclidean setting above that in the Veronoi,
where it says Euclidean, change that to Minkowski, yeah, that's good.
So if you change the Euclidean to Minkowski in the distance metric setting in the Veronoi
texture, then it looks a bit more like kind of a seat cushion or something like that,
so it kind of looks like a fabric a bit.
You can do things like increase the detail if you want or whatever, and there's also
like a roughness setting and stuff like that.
You can play around with those if you want to, to, you know, whatever floats your boat,
but don't change it too much for now while you're just learning.
All right, so now if we render this, now you notice it has like a nice texture to it.
So maybe, I don't know, it might be a little bit too deep of a texture or something, so
you might turn the strength down if you want to make it a bit more subtle.
You don't want it to be too obvious, just subtle, you know, so it looks, looks nicer.
Okay, so maybe like the strength should be 0.055 or something like that.
All right, the other thing you can do if you want to give a precise value for a setting
is you can just click once in that setting box, and it'll basically highlight the value,
and then you can type in what you want.
So like if you wanted to click on the strength setting and just like single click it and then
type in 0.055, you can go exactly to what you want.
Now let's go back to the setting for the floor and change it to be kind of grayish or
something like that.
Go back to the 3D viewport and click on the cube or in the outliner you can just click
on the word cube for the cube object.
And now go back to the material button in the properties window that circle with the checker
board on it and where it takes it back to surface.
Go ahead and change that base color for this object back to put the hue back closer
to the center and maybe reduce the value.
So it's a bit more of a gray.
Okay, one thing you'll notice here is that this object has a different material than the
HPR object.
Like if you click on one object, you'll see that a different material has been assigned.
This is something the blender lets you do is if you want to assign different materials
to different objects, you can duplicate them and you know take one that you've already
done and assign it to a new object and stuff like that.
If you click on that little drop down menu that's right next to material where it says material
like in the text input box and you'll see that gives you a list of your different materials,
you could actually select HPR if you wanted to for the cube and now you have like the
color ramp going across the cube as well but we don't want that so make sure the material
set back to material and we can change the name of that material by clicking in that text
input box and just changing it to let's call it floor and so that's the floor material.
Alright so to get a sense of you know let's zoom out a bit so we can see the entire 3D view
port and we're going to want to change where the camera is to let's make this a lot more
dramatic.
We're also going to change where the light is so first of all click on the camera and
then on your number pad you can press and I'll tell you what to do if you don't have
a number pad in a second so on your number pad if you press the zero it's going to take
you into camera view so you can actually see what the view is from the camera and you'll
notice that your view is your view port now shows like a rectangular box and that's basically
what is inside of the render area and if you don't have a numpad then what you can do
is in the menu for the view port where it says view select add an object click on view
and go down to where it says cameras in the menu and then click on active camera and
you'll notice that that's where the hot key is for numpad zero so click on active camera
and it will actually take you into the camera view and so blender has this nice feature
where you can fly your camera using tilde so if you press shift and then the tilde which
is the upper left hand key on your keyboard almost keyboards at least then it puts you
into like a game mode view changer and now if you move your mouse around you'll see that
it kind of changes what your view is and this is very similar to like a first person shooter
now where you can use the keys W A S D to actually move forward and move left and right
and stuff like that so to move forward you press W and it's kind of going into your scene
if you want to put the camera so it's actually in front of the HPR logo and facing it then
you basically look down into the left of the logo and then go into the scene by pressing
W and then moving over and seeing where you're at you know is it is it right and once you
get close enough you can start to strafe left and right by using the A and D keys to basically
move to the left a bit and then you can use the Q and E keys to move up and down and so this
lets you set up the camera in a nice way so that you can just move through your scene
and you don't have to like fiddle with how is the camera pointing and what's the angle
and stuff like that you can just use these nice you know view keys so once you get set
up so basically I want you to set up so that the HPR logo is right in front of you like it's
you know it's parallel to to the view plane and you can see it so once you have that set up
and it's kind of filling up your screen a bit click the left mouse button to accept the view
change and again if you if you don't like what you see and you want to change it again you just
press shift till day and you move your camera around all right so if we press F12 at this point
now we have you know the HPR logo right in front of us and it's looking you know
very very dominant in the scene go ahead and close the render window and we're going to make
this a lot more dramatic so if you click on the light object basically in the outliner where it says
light and then press G to start moving it move it down and then use your middle mouse button
to move your viewport so you can actually see you can like rotate around the HPR logo
and see around it and get to the point where you can actually have the light in the left hand
part of the viewport and the cameras over there and so press G to start moving the light and move
the light so that it's actually behind the HPR logo on the backside of it if you render this now
you'll see that you know we have HPR you know behind with the light shining from behind you see
the shadows coming at us rather dramatically and that's kind of cool and stuff but it still looks
kind of cheesy and generic and stuff it's not quite ready to go the other thing you'll notice is
that the HPR letters aren't actually touching the floor so we're going to fix that right now
if you can go back to your camera view and then from your camera view click on the HPR logo
and press G and then Z to make it so that it goes up and down and just move your you know just kind
of eyeball it move the HPR logo until it just goes through the floor and then bring it back up
so that it is just resting on it and so now we can press F12 and we'll see like you know it's
actually resting on the floor properly close the render window now we're going to add some fog
effects to make it you know look a bit more dramatic and a bit more professional but because we're
we're now going to do some more advanced kind of volume metrics and stuff I want to switch over to
a different render engine that Blender offers so Blender has two basic render engines that are
included in it one is called EV I guess named after the Pokemon character and then the other one
which is older but more accurate is called cycles you use EV when you want quick renders
and you don't care about more advanced features like transparency and and you don't need reflections
and fog effects to be as accurate but you use cycles when you do want to be more physically accurate
but it takes longer to actually render so in order to make that change you go over to and actually
maybe the first thing we could we should do before this maybe I should have told you this earlier
is let's save the scene so to do that go up to file and up and the upper left hand corner go
up to file and down to save you know bring up a window where you can actually save your scene
and let's just call it like hpr logo and then say save Blender file okay so now you can press
control S if you want to save your scene throughout the throughout this tutorial okay so over on the
right hand side of the screen back in the properties area where that has all those icons that are
colored different colors click on the camera icon where it says render and where it says render
engine click on the render engine where it says EV and change it to cycles and under cycles you
should now see a couple more settings pop down if you have a GPU that like you know an Nvidia
or ATI GPU that can do you know 3D rendering and stuff like that then try changing the device
from CPU to GPU compute and this may or may not work if it doesn't work you might need to look up
how to set this up on your own computer but for now just use what you can but GPU compute will
make it so that the scene gets rendered a lot faster under render settings Blender sets the
settings pretty high by default so we're going to actually turn those settings down so that it
doesn't take as long to render so under where it says sampling and then viewport and it says noise
threshold and max samples and stuff like that change the max samples under the viewport section
to be 10 so by default it's a thousand twenty four which is pretty high let's just set that to 10
and that's basically when we go over to rendered view it's only going to render 10 samples to just
give us a rough idea then under the render settings where it says max samples and says four thousand
ninety six hey a power of two right click on that and change that to let's say two fifty six
because you'll notice that there's a check mark next to denoise one feature that Blenders added
in the in recent years is the ability to do advanced denoising algorithms that are available
in modern CPUs and stuff like that and so it uses that to be able to reduce noise and so as a result
you don't have to render as many samples and you can get much faster renders okay maybe control
ask for saving okay so now if we to show you what I mean if you press F12 you'll notice the window
will come up and it'll start rendering but it will be very fuzzy at first and start resolving
the scene as it goes and so up in the upper part of the window it'll say samples and it'll say some
number of two fifty six and then it'll kind of hang out there for a second and when it does the
final denoising you'll see a lot of the fuzziness goes away and now you have like a nice looking
scene but you'll notice that the the effect of the render is much nicer it has you know it kind
of reflects the colors and stuff like that from the logo and those are things that you get from
the cycles engine in addition to a whole lot more okay go ahead and close this render window
and now we're going to add some fog to the scene and so what I want you to do in the viewport
window press control A and go down to mesh and then add a cube and we're going to scale this
pretty big so the cube should be selected by default you can press S for scale and then scale
it up so it covers up pretty much your whole scene like you're gonna say well I can't see anything
now but this is basically going to be the fog and it has to go through the whole scene okay so once
it's covering up most things you click on it to accept it and now go over to the outliner where it
says probably cube dot zero zero one and double click on that to rename this to fog so you've changed
your your object name from cubes zero zero one to fog okay now we want to make it so that you
can't see that in the viewport so it's not like covering everything up so if you go down to the
properties menu and then click on the icon that's like an orange box with some lines in the corner
where it says object like there's an orange icon in the middle of the of the icon list and it says
object when you highlight over it it's right above the wrench this will change to the you know transform
relations collections look for the section that's called viewport display and click on that
and this will drop down a bunch of things that will show up in the viewport and you'll see a
setting that says display as textured change textured like click on that box and change textured
the bounds and so basically this only show this now you can see the hpr logo again and you're
basically only seeing the bounds of the cube that's the fog object okay now click on the material
button for the fog object you know that circle with the checker thing and now create a new material
and by default it's going to add this principal BSDF and you'll see the nodes for it but over in the
properties window over on the right hand side you'll also see this surface preview and for surface
as principal BSDF click on that principal BSDF and change that to principled volume so like a whole
bunch of options will come down when you see principled BSDF change it to principled volume and when
you do that you'll notice that in the shader editor window with all the nodes that the node for
principled BSDF has changed to principled volume but the volume output is still hooked up to the
surface input of the material output and so you basically need to change this so it so the volume
output goes to the volume input so what you do is you can either click on the volume output
and just drag a new line or you can start by clicking on the the right end of the node line and
just move it down to volume so again click on you know the principled volume volume output and then
drag a line down to volume on the material output the density of the principled volume is set to
1 by default and that's too high so let's change this to say 0.2 and then change the
anisotropy a few settings down from density that's set to 0 let's change this to 0.6
okay you don't see anything yet but if you go up to the upper right hand corner of the viewport
window where you set like the render mode of the viewport if you change that to the one all
the way to the right where it says viewport shading you can change this to rendered then you'll
suddenly see a dramatic change and you'll start seeing kind of a rendered output of things and so
now that it's starting to come together right all right so now let's move the light so that it's
kind of behind the p in hpr so you should be looking at the hpr logo through the camera view
what I want you to do is instead of trying to click on the light in the in the rendered scene
you'll click on light in the outliner in the upper right hand corner so where it says light
and now you have the light selected first thing I want you to do is press G in the 3D viewport
and then start moving the light down until you get the p the so until you get the light kind of
right behind the hole in the p there you go and then click on the left mouse button to accept the
movement and now we're going to increase the intensity of this light to by increasing the power so
if you look over in the properties window you should see like preview light and it has like point
sun spot area this is over on the right hand side first of all let's change this to be an
area light and basically this makes it so that instead of being a single point of light it's like
actually more like a light bulb you know where it's like the light is kind of fuse a bit more
and let's change that power setting to be let's say 2000 watts so you can just click on that
and change it to a two or change it to 2000 and then let's change the color of the light a bit
by clicking on the color and in the chooser moving it over to be a bit more yellowish you know
all right so now we're starting to see some really cool facts huh all right now if you click on
now if you press F12 you'll see you know a much more dramatic scene being rendered
and I think at this point and you'll see kind of like you know gods rays coming off of the Hs
and stuff like that you can go farther with this much farther of course but we're going to leave
it at this and let the scene render out until it gets to 256 and then does the you know the denoising
option if you want to you can change your render samples to be higher and try to get a higher
quality scene but I think for now this is good enough and you can see the potential of what you can
do in the render window if you click on image in the menu and then go down to save you can save
this output of your render and so this will bring up a window for saving the output the first thing
I want you to do is go over to file format and change this to JPEG because PNG images are pretty
big by default and you'll end up taking a lot of space and I'd like to be able to see what you
end up doing you know with your your render and so maybe you can post to Twitter or mastodon
replying back to the hpr post for this episode and just you know share your your rendering and maybe
put hashtag and hpr and also hashtag blender to kind of draw attention from the blender community to
to what's going on just name this file like hpr.jpeg and say save and now you can post your own
image to social media and I'd love to see it okay so there's a whole bunch more stuff we can do
with blender I'd love to hear from you if this was a useful episode if it was helpful in getting
you to learn blender better and how you like this format of just an audio tutorial for a visual
program if how you think it works okay take care and remember to try to post your own hpr episodes
because they need more take care bye
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