Beginner Blender Tutorial (2026)

So, this is Blender. It can do 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, shading, and rendering. And I'm going to show you how to do all of those things whilst you make your very own doughut. And I know this looks complex and challenging, but I promise you it is achievable for even a complete beginner that has never opened Blender such as yourself. And I know this because millions of beginners have already made their doughnut because this is the fifth version of this tutorial. I remake it for every major Blender release. This one for Blender 5.0. And speaking of which, if you have already made a donut from a previous version rather than make another one, I've actually just released a course designed for postdown beginners. So, if you're interested in that, you can click the link below. For everybody else, you need to download Blender. So, if you haven't already, click the link below. That'll take you to blender.org and then just hit the big download button. Now, if you're on Windows, that'll download an executable, which you should install. If you're on a Mac, it's an application you drag to your applications folder. And also, if you're at school or you're on a work computer that won't let you install anything, you can still use Blender. If you download the portable zip version of Blender, then just unzip it. You can run Blender from the folder. Pretty cool. Anyway, however you got Blender, open it, and you should see this. Then just click anywhere off the splash screen to close it. And you're in Blender. Hey, welcome. So this big section, this big gray area here, this is your 3D viewport. And it's where you'll spend probably 98% of your time because it's the it's the 3D world. Whether you're making a character, you're building an environment, it all happens right here. Um, so the first thing you need to learn is how to move around in this space. And you can orbit by middle mouse pushing. So your scroll wheel, if you just push it in until it clicks, that's your middle mouse button. And then if you just drag that around, you can orbit. If you don't have a middle mouse button, a lot of people don't. They're on like a laptop with a trackpad or something. You guys will struggle. It's definitely easier if you have a mouse. Uh but in a pinch, top right hand corner, you just mouse over this little circle and then just click and drag on that. Um that'll do the same thing. Or the third alternative way to do it, edit preferences and then underneath input emulate threeb button mouse and then if you hold down alt and then leftclick drag um that will do the same thing. I don't want that. By the way, whilst I am here, a value that you will want to change if you're on a 4K monitor, you will probably have noticed that like Blender looks like this where like everything is really super tiny and you have to squint to see it. So, underneath interface, I change my resolution scale to at least a 1.5. Um, usually like 1.8. Um, but for tutorials, I go even higher so you can really see everything. But it's obviously much easier to use when you can see things clearly. Okay, so middle mouse drag, that's how you orbit around. You can see we're focusing on our cube at the moment, though. So, how do we move to somewhere else? You do that by shift middle mouse drag, and that will pan you somewhere else. You can also over here on the the side there, click that little hand. That will do the same thing. But yeah, shift middle mouse drag or middle mouse drag to orbit. And what about zoom? You can probably guess, you might have already done it by mistake, but just zooming by scrolling in and out on your wheel. Or again, you can go to the little magnifying glass there. Just click on that and do that. Or alternatively, control middle mouse and then that will also move you in as well. So, I've thrown a lot of keyboard shortcuts at you already. Middle mouse for this, shift, middle mouse to pan, um, scroll. If you don't want to have to remember all the hotkeys, cuz I'm going to throw a lot more at you. If you don't want to have to write them down yourself, I have done it for you. So, I put together a Google doc with all of the most common hotkeys and short key shortcuts that you might need to use. Um, and it's free. So, just click the link below and you can um, print it out. You can stick it on your wall. Um, a lot of people do that and it's u big time saver. Okay, now it's really common to like get lost like one way is to like end up upside down like this and then you're like which way is up? How do I you know if you just over here these little um these little this gizmo thing these these colored circle things with lines those are your axes. So if you just click on one of those that'll reorient yourself. So the zed, that's the top axis and then you just you're back, right? You know which way is up because it's it's it's that way, right? Which way that one is pointing. Another way, like if you got like really off into the weeds, like you were over here, and then you're like, how do I how do I get back to where I was? Um, if you've got an object selected and you just want to focus on like just fly to it. Um, and this is a really common hotkey. You use it all the time. Uh, it's numpad period, and that'll just fly you to that. If you don't have a numpad, like even a lot of keyboards today, they don't sell them with numpads anymore, I guess, cuz people aren't accountants. They don't need to quickly type in numbers. But I love them cuz it's really useful for Blender. Um, if you don't have one, [laughter] um, you can also use the tilda key, which is that little key underneath your escape key. So, if you hold that down and then just drag over where it says view selected and then release, that'll do the exact same thing. So, that is how you can quickly change focus to the selected object. Um, and yeah, as I said, you do this all the time. Um, but yeah, I'm going to be using numpad period from now on. Okay, so we're making a donut. We do not need our cube here. So, let's delete it. You can just hit delete on your keyboard. Um, or what I like to do is hit X, which is the alternative way. And, um, it's just easier cuz my finger is like right there. I know it's another hotkey to remember, but you delete stuff a lot as well, and it's helpful to not have to find that key. So, X, and then delete. And now I want to add a new object. And I can do that by going to add at the top of the screen there. Or alternatively, the hotkey, another one to throw at you, shift A, and that'll just put it wherever your cursor is. And it's the exact same list. But this list here is, I mean, it's extensive. There's stuff in here that I have never used in my 21 years of using Blender. speaker. Never ever used it. Don't know what it's for. Um, most of the time what you're looking for is underneath mesh. So, these are your primitive mesh objects. And generally, when you're making something, you pick one of these that most resembles or is closest to what it is you're making. Like, if you're making a mailbox, you might start with a cube. You're making a a lamp post, you might start with a cylinder. We're starting. Well, we're trying to make a donut. So, we need to start with a Taurus, which is basically a donut. Look at that. So, that's cool. It's a wimpy looking donut though, right? It's a very, very flimsy. We want to make it look uh more thicker, right? So, in the bottom left hand corner, there's a little box that says add Taurus. And this has additional options for us. Now, if you accidentally clicked off after you added the Taurus, that box is gone. Um, you can momentarily bring it back by hitting F9, but that's only if you haven't changed something. So, essentially, yeah, it it's called the last used function in Blender. So, immediately after you do an action in Blender, sometimes you see in the bottom lefthand corner additional options which you can tweak and change things if you need. So, if you don't see it, it just means you've done something else and it's gone. Um, but yeah, you can bring it back uh momentarily by hitting F9 sometimes, but I usually just like redo it. Um, anyways, so first thing I want to change is uh the size of this thing. So, it is 1 m, which is like 3 ft for the Americans. It's a big donut. Um, probably shouldn't be that big. It should be about 10% of that. So, 0.1, which is 10 cm, roughly about that. And then if I zoom in by scrolling forward, I just need to change my minor radius until it looks somewhat like a donut. So I want to just uh orbit up right and around. So I'm just middle mouse moving so I can see the inside. Then I'll just scroll in like so until Yeah. And I'm just going to change this value until it looks like uh like a donut. Now you can see as I move this like it's going really quick and I can't get it on the right value. So, when you're clicking and dragging on a value in Blender, if you hold down shift, that will use smaller increments. Um, and that's another one you use all the time. Um, because it's, uh, yeah, sometimes you need small values and it's helpful to get smaller increments like that. So, that's pretty good. I might go with that. Yeah, about a 057. Okay. And then the other thing you can change here is like the resolution of the donut. Um, you know, you can go like really PlayStation one graphics maybe. Um, I'm going to keep it at 48, but I'm going to increase the other one to about Yeah, let's go 18 like that. Um, 16, 18. Yeah, we'll go 18. Um, and that's just a little bit more resolution, and it's just going to help us a little bit later on when we start to shape um the donut. Okay. But once I've got that, I can just click off. And now those options are gone. We've committed. That's it. That is the starting point of our donut. Now, the next thing you're probably wondering is it still kind of looks like PlayStation One graphics, Andrew. Um, and that's because it has flat shading. So, basically, there's two states for a mesh. Um, there's smooth shading or there is flat shading, and it defaults to flat. If you want to change it to smooth, you just rightclick the object and then go shade smooth like that. And there we go. It's fixed. So it basically shades smooth without getting too technical. Anytime there is like two faces, it just kind of smooths out that point like fakery. So it's not actually adding any additional computation times which is important. Um but it's appearing to the eye to be smooth. Okay. So um in previous doughnut versions we would uh start making the icing. And although that's fun to make like dribbling icing, um it can be a little complicated. a lot of users uh ran into their first uh roadblocks at that that time. So instead, we're going to do something a little bit easier to start with um and more practical, and that's to make a coffee mug. So, we need to add in a new object, which if you can remember from before, it's the add menu at the top there, or the hotkey as I like to use, shift A. And then underneath mesh, you're looking for something that most resembles the object you're trying to create. No prizes for guessing, the cylinder. Okay. So, it comes in very very big. It's uh completely engulfing our donut. So, again, in the bottom lefthand corner. Uh click that little add cylinder. And then I'm going to change the radius first of all just to bring this back. You can like do this after the fact like resize something. Um but it just helps to, you know, at this point see it all together. Um I think I'm going to make it around holding down shift and just kind of drag it back and forth. Yeah, about.13 or exactly.13. Uh and then the depth. This is just the height of it. And again, you can change this later on, but just want to see it roughly the right size. The big one that's important is the vertices. And we're actually going to make this look more low res. Now, why would we make it look more low res? Um cuz now it's obviously very jagged. The reason for this is that very soon we're going to be adding in something called a subsurf modifier, which adds over the top of our existing mesh. it adds more geometry like it doubles the geometry and it kind of smooths it out. So actually if you start too high like this then you're adding like doubling that geometry and doubling it again and then you can quickly end up with something that's too computationally heavy. So when you're working and you know you're going to be doing something subdiv sometimes it helps to start like chunkier low res. Um anyway just just trust me and set it to uh 14 like that. Okay great. So, we've got another object and they are completely overlapping. So, how do we separate things? Um, some of you might already know this. You can guess right left hand side there, there's a tool that looks like it would be able to move something. It's the move tool. So, this is one way to move things. You activate that and you get this little gizmo. And look, I can move it and I can separate them. Um, so this is moving things along the axes. Um, you can also uh just drag on that uh click and drag on that little white circle there. And then that's like freehand uh drag around. I will say most Blender users don't actually use and move things this way because it's a lot of effort every time you want to move something to like go to the sidebar, activate the tool, you know, click it, move it. It's like most people don't do that. Instead, they remember the hotkey and the hotkey to move in Blender. And you'll be using this a lot. So again, this is on my keyboard shortcut. Um, it's it's all in there. But the hotkey is G. G for grab. Now, you will notice very quickly that when you tap G, the moment you tap it, you are already in the move state. So, it's now attached to my cursor even though I didn't click. Okay. So, and here's the other thing. My cursor could be on the other side of the screen. Doesn't have to be anywhere near the object. And then the moment you tap G, it's now anchored to that cursor. Um, and even more I I think it's cool when you go to the other side of the screen, it actually your cursor appears on the other side. So it's just like an infinitely repeating um thing there. [clears throat] But at first this is like hard to wrap your head around because Blender does this for a lot of things like not just moving something but also rotating something. The moment I tap R, which is how to rotate something, or S. Okay, that's I thought I might as well just teach you all three at the same time. So, G to move something, G for grab, R to rotate, or S to scale something. But you'll see in each of those states, the moment you hit the key, no matter where your cursor is, it's uh it's in that state. And that's actually a good thing because as I said, the number of times you need to move things and rotate and scale things in 3D, if you had to every single time change the tool, then move your cursor over to it, click it, activate it, that's a lot of extra steps. So, it's actually really cool to have this like just one tap key and it's already activated. Um, anyways. Okay. So, but uh whilst I'm in uh the move state by tapping G, um I can also uh lock it to a specific axis just like um with with those arrows that you saw before. So, just when it's in that move state, you tap the the axis you want to move it on. So, that's the X axis. The Y brings it back and forwards and the Z is um up and down. Okay. And that's correct. Blender is Z up, Y backwards and forwards. Different 3D applications have different things. There's no like standard. But yeah, that's how Blenders is. And by the way, if you forget which letter is which axis, you can actually see them up there in that little circle there. So again, X, Y, and uh and Z. Anyways, I want to move this actually just a little bit further back right there. So I want my my donut to be the uh front and center, and I want this to be at the back there. But then, how do I change my view? So I'm no longer just pivoting on my donut. I want to shift my focus to that selected object. It's number pad period. Or again, holding down that tilda key under your escape button and then hitting uh view selected is the same thing. Okay. So, let's make this look like a coffee mug. So, we have to edit this object. And uh to edit an object, we have to change what mode we are in. So in the top leftand corner of the screen there's a little drop down which if you click we can change it into edit mode. Okay. So when you're in edit mode you can see the state has changed. The object that was selected now has a bunch of points and lines on it. Um and you'll also notice whilst you're in edit mode, you can't actually select any object. And it's it's worth pointing out this because this is a really common thing. A lot of beginners, they they say, "I I don't know what happened, but I couldn't select anything in Blender." And usually it's just they're in the wrong state. They're in edit mode. They forgot. And then they tried to like come over here and then click something and they're like, "Why is it not selecting?" Okay, so you have to be in object mode if you want to select an object. And if you want to edit something, you have to be in edit mode. Um, but going to this dropown and doing this time and again would uh again be annoying. So, Blender, of course, has a hotkey for it, and that is tab. So, tab will just cycle you in and out of object and edit mode, just those two states. Um, which is great because you need to use this all the time. So, you usually come in, do some editing, uh, go back into object mode, select something else, edit that one, go back to this. Um, so that's, uh, yeah, good one to remember. Tab. All right. So, in edit mode, when I'm in this state here, these little points here, these are called vertices. These are the points that make up the um yeah, the shape of the mesh, obviously. Um and then you've got um edges. And uh you can actually select um by changing the selection type from vertices, which is the default, to edges, clicking that little button. And then I can click on the edges or select faces. Okay? Like this. And again, Blender has hotkeys for everything. So, if you want to just know the hotkey, it's one to do verticy select, two to do edge select, and then three to do face select. Again, make sure you get my keyboard shortcut shortcut guide cuz it's uh it's a lot to remember. So, I want to select the top of this uh cup here. It's got a lid on it that I don't want. So, se in face select mode. Selecting that face, I'm going to hit X. Now, it's going to ask me what part do you want to delete? Um, which might sound redundant, but there is quite a lot of times in Blender you want to delete, even though you've selected a bunch of faces, you want to delete the entire vertices of those faces. So, we have to confirm. We want to delete just the faces from this list. And there we go. So, we've now got a cup with a hole in it. Great. But this cup will not do. It is too paper thin. We could cut our finger on that edge there. So, we need to add some thickness to this cup. And while we could do this in edit mode, like you could select everything and extrude it in and whatnot, um, we don't need to because there is actually a function we can do to add thickness to anything without needing to go into edit mode. And that is underneath your modifier stack here. So, if you click this little wrench, this little activate modifiers. Let's just drag this out. And if you click add modifier at the top there, you can see you've got a number of different options. Um, and the one that we're looking for is solidify. So, this is underneath the generate and just in case this changes for a future version of Blender, you can also go to search at the top there and you could just type in um solidify from the list. Okay, so now now that we've got that, you can see we've got a bunch of options and you'll notice that our mesh now has some thickness to it. And I can change this thickness here. Now watch what happens as I enter into edit mode. You will notice as I select these faces here, I can't select this thick this inside part of the uh of the cup there. And that's an important point because modifiers are not actually adjusting the real mesh. So the real mesh still exists here. Um if I disable this from the viewport by clicking this little um monitor button there, you'll see that my mesh has not changed. This is just applying this effect after the fact. So, it's basically in object mode. It's taking whatever mesh that you give it, which is this, and then it's adding thickness to every face essentially. Um, so the reason this is um so useful is that this is a non-destructive workflow. So, I could at any point I could be doing a bunch of changes to my my mug here. I could, you know, we'll get to all that later on. We could change the size and things and then later on I can go, you know what, I don't I think that's a little bit too thick. I'm going to change that and I can come back to that and very quickly um adjust it. So non-destructive and it's obviously very helpful um for a lot of things. [snorts] Okay. So I've given it some thickness, but I also want to round um this corner here. That's way too jagged. Just like before I said I we want to um we're going to add in an extra layer on top which adds more geometry. And that is called your uh add modify generate subdivision surface. So yeah, all the way down there. You use it all the time, but it's like buried in there. Okay, so subdivision surface. So this appears to have like screwed up the mesh. It's like, whoa, what actually happened there? Let's just increase the uh levels viewport. So this is just increasing the number of times that it um doubles the geometry. So you can see this is what we start with, right? This is the the start. This is one level. Then this is two levels. And then this is three levels. And every time you do it, it's doubling the geometry. Um, and but you can see it's giving us the effect we want. It's smoothing out that edge there. But because of the way that it works, like basically if you look at uh let's go back to this. Um, we've got this this hard corner here, right? That's just like a 90° corner. So let me get in a little bit closer here so you can kind of see it. Um, yeah, it's like a 90° perfectly like that. So, when you add in a subdivision surface, it's basically saying, okay, so there's a point here, there is a point all the way over here, and there is a point that's going to go all like it's it's so far it's off the screen, but it's all the way down there. So, what I need to do is I need to average out those points. So, take the middle point of those three. So, essentially from here to somewhere around here. And I'm going to add in a point like here, right? And then if you do another level, like level two, it then places a point here. And then another point here. And then if you do another level, it places another point here, another point here, another point here. And because there's two sides to this um uh mug, there's like another one happening on that side, right? So we've now just got this like really super like ovalshaped edge like this. Okay? Which is why when I turn it on, we get this effect there. So what we first of all need to do in edit mode with our uh mug here. Um so I am in I guess it doesn't matter what mode I'm actually in here. Um but what I need to do is essentially tighten an edge where that that uh that smoothing is happening. So it's no longer happening from all the way here to smooth it all the way down to there. I want to happen it like just to about there. So I need to add in more geometry onto this mesh here. So to do that uh we need to add a loop cut. That is how you add in another level of uh another edge. So ct controllr will add in this loop cut. I believe you can also find it from the mesh like somewhere in here. [clears throat] Yeah, there you go. Uh edge loop cut and slide if you wanted to look it in there. But it's yeahr. That's another one you use all the time. >> [snorts] >> So when I'm in when I hit CtrlR, it's it's saying where do you want to place the cut in this mesh. Um, and I could place it, you know, anywhere anywhere between uh a face essentially. So I'm going to place it along this middle. So you do a single click and then it's saying where do you want to place that vertically on this uh th this this row of of faces essentially. Um, so you can see as I bring it towards the top there, it's tightening that edge there. Okay. And that's exactly what I want. I want that edge to be much tighter than it was um before. Um so that edge is now looking good. But now what about this one at the bottom there? This one's looking even worse. We got a lot to fix here. Um but first I need to do another loop cut. So CtrlR and then again single click to confirm I want it on that that uh row of faces. And then I'm just sliding it along until it's you know roughly about there at the bottom of my mug. Okay. And then you can see it's like this whole area here, this this face here, it's become like a like it's turned it into a star. And not to get too complicated, but basically a subsurf modifier, it has to has to know what to do. And generally, if there's like faces that are made up of four vertices, this is getting complicated. I can tell it knows what to do. It makes it like nice and smooth. But the moment you have a face that is made up of more than four vertices, it's called an engon. and it doesn't really know what to do with it. I mean, it does, but you don't know what it's going to do. Um, and it just can make things look a little ugly. Endone is kind of like a dirty word in in 3D space. It's like, h, you never want to have an engon. They are actually useful and they, you know, do have a purpose, but generally generally speaking, they're good to uh avoid if you don't know what you're doing. So, anyway, I should tell you what I'm doing. The the way to fix this is I need to add another loop that kind of just goes around here, right? that. So that way I've only got from there to there and then I can have my ugly star or whatever happening underneath my coffee mug. So I need to uh add a loop cut, but I can't add a loop cut on just a single face. Instead, what I need to do is um it's called inset to take a single face and then just like add in a loop around that face. And you do that by hitting I. So I and then just like it's already active. Again, this is the the way why I spent a while to explain it. The moment you activate a tool, you're already in that selection state. So, I hit I and wherever my cursor is, it's now going like, where do you want to put this inset? Okay. So, I'm just moving it back and forth until I get it. You know, how tight do I want this edge to look? Something like that, maybe. I mean, it's it's underneath the coffee mug. doesn't really matter that much, but um yeah, something something like that. And there we go. So, you can see this looks a lot nicer. [snorts] And again, because we are in a non-destructive workflow, I've still got my solidify modifier at the top here, right? I could change the thickness of this. I can make this a really chunky looking coffee mug or a really thin one. Um and that is the benefit of a non-destructive workflow. And then I can also change how how high- res do I want my coffee mug to look. Um, and this is the way to work in 3D. This is the best way to do it because, you know, if a client wants you to change something or whatnot, keeping in a flexible um, workflow is uh, definitely a good place to be. Okay, so we have created the start of a coffee mug and we have also created um, a donut. Good time to save. Good time to save. So, file, save as, or shift controls and then save as. So, the way I like to save things, and you might want to copy this, is to um you come up with a name, you know, underscore, whatever. Um, and then you put a number after it, and then you can actually see I've already saved my file. Um, I don't want to override my existing save in case I need to go back to it for whatever reason. So, I just want to add a number to it. And in other softwares, you know, you have to come here and you have to type in the number, right? Not Blender. Blender has a hotkey for everything. If you hit plus or minus on your numpad or on the little uh field here, oh, you can't even see it. I'm right over the top of it right there. This little field, these little plus and minus, it'll automatically add a number to the end of your um file. Um so that's yeah, really useful. So, I'm just going to add a two there, and I'm going to hit save. It is time to make our coffee mug look like a coffee mug and not like a sad little cup. So, we could try to model this from our imagination cuz like, hey, we all pick up coffee mugs. We know what they look like or we think we know what they look like. Something that you learn very quickly in 3D is that uh when you model something from imagination, it almost always comes out looking a little bit funny. And the reason for that is that your brain is very good at like abstracting away the information that isn't important to it. Like if you just close your eyes right now and just think of a door knob, like what does a door do look like, right? If you had to make one in Blender, what would it be? It's like, okay, well, it's like a sphere bit. You like grip it, you turn it, and there's like a cylinder thing at the back, and there's a cylinder that connects it. And that's kind of that's kind of it. But then if you were to make that, you end up with something that looks really basic and boring and bad. And then you go actually look at a real doorork knob and you forget there's all this other detail that's just not important to your brain. Like the little lip inside, the little hole that's on there that's so you can put a key in to kind of like pry it open or a uh like a a rim that kind of like cuts into it. So there's like a separate seam around it. There's the privacy lock on the front. All these things that just don't matter to you when you're turning a handle and so you forgot that they even existed because you never even saw it really. So the same thing applies to even something as common as a coffee mug. So it helps when possible to use reference images. Now you can get reference images from anywhere because we have the power of the internet and you can type in handmade coffee mug and you can pick any mug you want to create. Um and uh there's a lot and you know if you want to pick one of these if you want to just go on Google images uh you can pick one of these and and go for it. I'm going to give you an image that I've used. Um, but you can there's there's some really pretty ones here and I was uh actually shocked just whilst like clicking on some of these sites before. I was like, oh yeah, like that's a cute cute little handmade mug and then you go like, oh my gosh, $12325 and that's a discount from 145. And then you think like, oh, it must be like a one of one, like, you know, a unique thing. Like, no, there's like nine reviews. Like, people are buying it. I I'm like, I don't know. [clears throat] I got to make more money or something. Like, I don't know how people are buying $123 coffee mugs. I think it's also like we forget what labor costs, you know? Like, you think like a coffee mug is like $2, right? Or a dollar or it's free. Like it's just there's so many of them it doesn't even matter. But like no, like to hand make something like obviously any of these mugs, they're they take more than a few hours to make if you're making it by hand. So like yeah, $33 is probably like break even for them. I don't probably not even making any money, but it's just like Yeah. Anyways, whole side topic of like the economy of handmade ceramic mugs. Um but people are buying them for $123. All right. So, all that is to say is I want you to get an image and the one I'm going to use uh the link for this is below. Um and uh it's on my website. I've got all the links to everything we're going to be using in this tutorial. Um but there there's two ways to add images. Uh so one way is to go to the ad menu and then just go image and then say reference. Um and then you just pick wherever the reference is. Um and you can drop it in. the alternative way um and it's something that we didn't used to be able to do and that's to just uh drag over from wherever it is on your computer and then just drop it into Blender and it will recognize it as an image and it will bring it in as an image object. So either of those ways will work. So this is the image. This is the one we're going to use. Now if you quickly orbit around, you'll notice that it's come in at a funny angle. Um now I don't know why Blender does this. I think I think it's because they they think they people want it locked to the perspective that they were at when they brought it in there, but that I've never needed that. So, we just need to clear this rotation and then rotate it to the the way we want. So, to clear the rotation, I'm going to hit alt R. The alternative way, object, clear rotation. Alt R. It's the same thing. Um, now it's flat. So, now we need to rotate it, prop it upright so that it is flat on to, you know, how it should be relative to the scene. So, I need to rotate it. So, I'm going to hit R. So, but we're now in freehand rotate mode. And it's again it's it's relative to where we were looking at it. Um, which is uh yeah, this this funny angle. So, uh if you remember from before, when we're in a move state like rotate, scale, or grab, uh we can lock something to a specific axis whilst we're in this mode by just tapping the letter of that axis. And if you don't know the letter, you can see we we really want it on this red line here. And that red top right hand corner that is the X axis. So I'm going to hit X. There we go. So now it is locked to that axis which is good. And now we want it to be 90°. So you could either hold down control and you can see in the top uh what that does is that's now um moving it in 5° increments. Or you could just type in the number 90 on your keyboard and then hit enter. And there we go. So that's how we uh bring it in and uh clear the rotation and set it up. So, all right. Now, it's way too big. So, hotkey to scale something. S. Okay. S to scale. And now I'm just going to scale this down. And I can't see my mug. So, my mug is behind it. So, let me just move my mug. I'll move my mug forward. So, let's move it forward to there. Okay. All right. And then now, um, I'm going to look at it like front on. Okay. So, I can do that by clicking this little uh minus Y at the top there. That'll do front on. or the hotkeys. Um, because I use my numpad, for those of you blessed with a numpad, you'll you'll like it. You can hit numpad one, that's front view, numpad three, that's side view, or numpad 7, that is top view. Um, but I use those uh a lot, but again, you can use these if you don't have it. Okay, so front view, and then I'm going to scroll in to zoom. Shift middle mouse to pan to the side. And now I'm going to move this over here. And I'm going to scale this down again to get it roughly to be the size of my my mug here because I know that this mug is right relative to the donut. So, it should be good. And then what I'm looking at um for the size of this image here is I want the top of this rim here to roughly match the bottom down there. So, this like I want that to match that. So, it's still a little bit too big. Um and you'll notice I can't really easily do it from this angle. I mean I I can but the the problem is is that this photograph is taken with a camera from the real world where there is perspective but we are looking in 3D and actually when we're in an axis like this the reason it all becomes flattened is because it is in perspective mode. If you click that little button there that'll actually put you back into perspective mode and you can see how things get distorted and like angles and things. So the best reference is actually reference which is in orthographic like blueprints for something but you usually don't have that. So you just go from something like this and just kind of best guess it. Anyways, okay, cool. So that's roughly roughly the right size of uh of image. Now we can model by going into uh edit mode by hitting tab toggle in and out of edit mode. And we can start to shape this to look like this mug here. So the first thing you will notice is like the general broad shape of the mug is that it actually kind of tapers towards the top. both lines are kind of tapered upwards. Um, and then there's like a kind of a midpoint around about here where it starts to invert and it goes in the other direction. Okay. So, it's very smooth object and perfect for using subsurf modifier, which is what we've already got. So, to get that taper going up to the side, I want to shrink the top of the mug here just a little bit. So, I'm going to hold down alt and uh I'm going to go into edge select mode at the top there and then alt and then just leftclick on that line there. Not on like like a middle point like here or it'll select a different edge, but just on the middle there. And then now I want to scale this in to just shrink the size just a little bit. So, I'm going to scale that to there. And then I'm going to select the line underneath it and I'm going to do the same thing. So, alt click on that line, that edge, uh and then just scale it. you know, about halfway there. Now, I want to create um this like widened point right here. And you can see like from here, like there's there's a lip at the bottom, but like from here to here, and then it goes up, I'd say probably 20% up the mug. That's where that middle point is. So, this line is close, but I'd probably pull it up a little bit. So, I'm going to double tap G, and that'll let me slide that edge there. And I'll put it to Yeah, it's about there. And now I want to pull it out to make it a little bit uh a little bit thicker. So I'm going to hit S and just pull that out to about there. And now I can see this line here is not quite right. So I'm going to scale this one out as well. Just a little bit. Okay, that's roughly the right shape. Okay, now this bit at the bottom here. Okay. So, I can see already that I need a little bit more detail. So, I'm actually going to have to slide this line up here. So, I'm going to hit uh double G to just kind of slide it up. And I'm going to pull it to about there. You can see now we've got kind of a more curved taper on that edge there. And I'm going to hit S to scale. And I'm going to double tap G again. And I'm just by eye just guessing to try to get this form here. Um but you can see you can very quickly start to shape any sort of object you want um by just moving sliding lines around and um scaling things. Okay. So now obviously this face at the bottom here. So if I go into face select mode or by just hitting three um this has to be this little uh lip at the bottom there. What do you call that? I guess like a lip. It's probably a word for it. All the all the pottery people watching this tutorial going to tell me what it is and they'll also tell me about the price of manual labor and why that coffee mug was quite well priced I'm sure. [laughter] Um anyways uh I'm going to yeah I'll scale it in a little bit. I'm just trying to guess like where would it start? But you know you just do it by eye. I think about there. Okay. And now with this face here selected, I need more geometry because I want to actually pull it out from that face there. Um, but I can't just like pull it down, right? Cuz that now it's stretching it. I need more geometry. Um, and so that is called an extrusion. And thankfully the hotkey for extrusion is just the first letter of its name, which is E. E for extrusion. And just like inset and everything else in Blender, the moment you tap it, you're now in that mode. Um, I can pull it upwards, I could pull it downwards. Um, obviously downwards is what we want. So, I'm going to do a single click right there. Okay. And then now if I go back and just look at it in object mode. Um, and by the way, if you want to see it like the donut, you want to make it look uh smooth, you can as well by going to shade smooth. Um, and that's okay. But you can see that this line here, this is a much tighter line. Okay. Uh, and the reason that this is happening is of course because of subsurf modifier um, and the way that it works. Um, it's essentially going from here to here and then kind of like I guess like a a midpoint in the middle there. And it's trying to taper from there all the way in. But then also from this point here, it now has to taper from there to kind of smooth out that line. So we end up with just kind of like this like very smoothed out little nub. Um, but to fix it, we just have to add in more geometry so that it doesn't start the smooth so so much further up. So to do that, we need another loop cut, which you might remember the hotkey or you can find it in the menu, edge, loop cut, and slide, but it is ctrlr. So ctrlr. When you're in this mode, where do you want to put it first? So do a single click on this face here. So click and then it's now saying where do you want to slide it to? So I'm going to slide one to the bottom like so. And then I need another one right above it. So I did a click there to confirm it. So I'm going to hit CtrlR. And now placing it on the exact same place. And I'm just going to pull it up. And there we go. And now you can see it's much tighter at the bottom there. Um, and it looks good. Uh, and if you really wanted to clean up this bottom base there, you can see we kind of got that like starfishy pattern happening. You could do the same thing we did before, which is select that face there and then do an inset. It's not really that essential. Well, no one's really going to notice it, but you might. And maybe you want to clean it up. So, yeah. But that's pretty good. That's That's great. That's a good start to the mug. Um, it looks good. Awesome. Well done. Now, it's time for the challenge of making this handle. So, you can see it starts about here and then obviously extrudes around and goes back into itself and is joined here. So, how do we do this? So basically whenever whenever there is a join and you can see there's like you know like a nice like uh bevel edge there kind of thing it has to physically be part of the geometry of this. You can't just have it like existing out in in space cuz then it won't appear to be joined together. So essentially we have to find somewhere on this mesh to start the handle from. Um and that point is actually here. Right here which is why I've modeled it this way. Right here is where I'm going to extrude out. Um, now before I show you how to uh extrude, I first of all want to show you I'm gonna do something and it's going to mess it up. And I'm gonna then show you why we need to do something else first before we start extruding. So if I was to extrude this out, um, we could do the whole handle here, get it back there, make it look perfect, and then later on look at our mug and go, "Oh no, [laughter] what is going on?" The reason this happens is because of you might remember the solidifier modifier which these modifiers they're not part of the mesh, right? It's it's happening after um after the fact. So it's adding a thickness to any mesh that we have here and it's now adding a thickness to the actual handle itself. So how do we fix that? We fix that by making making this go from a modifier to real like actually bake it into the mesh so that it's actually real geometry. Um, and the way you do that is uh first of all, let me just undo all of those. Ctrl Z of course. The way you do it is by going to the modifier and then in the little drop down in the top there, right next to that little camera icon, there is an apply. So when you click that, it's disappeared. And now when you go into edit mode though, you can see all that geometry that wasn't there before is now actually part of it. And you can see it if you turn off the subsurf modifier. So I can now make changes to the inner part of my uh model there without it having affecting um the rest of it. So it's actual real uh mesh that we can we can manipulate. Um obviously the downside is it's no longer uh non-destructive. So that slider that we had for changing the thickness of the mug, we no longer have the slider. It would just mean if we wanted to change the thickness of the of the mug, we would have to like do it ourselves, like selecting all that stuff and doing it. But that's fine. You have to uh break uh break the workflow eventually to add in customization. But there you go. So anyways, now that I've got this, now when I select this face here, I can start to do the extrusion. So importantly, make sure you're selecting the right face. If you were to select this one by mistake and then start trying to do your handle and then like twist it around, you it would start to get screwed up very very quickly. So, make sure that you've got this red line that's like intersecting your mug there that it is. Yeah. Like it's that one. It's like bang on to the middle. And you can actually check if you go into top view mode. It should be directly in the middle of uh of the mug there. Okay. So, with that selected, I'm going to go into front view mode with uh numpad one or hitting that little uh green thing. And then I'm going to hit again the hotkey that we use for extrusion is E to extrude out. Now, when you do that, it's using the normals, the hidden um it's like the hidden direction of each of the faces that are on your mesh. Okay? So, it's kind of extruding it out like that. For most of you watching this, the extrusion there worked perfectly. But every now and then you go to extrude something and it doesn't work. And it's because there's something wrong with the normals of the face that you tried to extrude from. Basically, it would just mean um you would have to clear the normals first. So basically, you would select the the face, then hit shift N, and it would clear normals. I've got, by the way, throughout this tutorial that you're going to run into a lot of problems that I I might not be able to explain to you. So, I've actually created um a troubleshooting guide called the unstuckyour yourself guide. So, the link for that is below as well, but this is just like a database of all the problems you might run into whilst you're doing this tutorial because we noticed um on the uh Blender Guru Discord, link for that is below as well where you can ask questions and share your renders and stuff. Um a lot of people are asking the same questions. So, we put together this like FAQ troubleshooting guide and um please make use of that. So, there'll probably be when you're modeling things, people will run into issues. So, just uh have a look at that if you run into an issue first. Anyways, sorry to really painfully slowly do this, but we've extruded out a little bit. Um, now I'm going to move this up. So, just grabbing. So, G to grab. I'm going to move up. And I might actually now I'm going to tab out to so that I can select my image. So, I'm in object mode and I'm actually just going to move this over. So, G and then X. Move it over to be about there. Okay. And that'll just enable me to kind of see relative to to the mug where it should go. Like what is the shape? I could do it by eye, but yeah, I figure might as well just it's right there. Might as well just grab it and pull it over. So, um I need to position this about here, but you can see it's kind of getting like skewed, right? Um, and that is because it's uh it's obviously coming in at like a like this slanted angle. So, with that face selected, um, I need to rotate it. So, I'm going to hit R to rotate like so. Okay. So, like that. All right. And I might just trying to think. All right. I definitely need a loop cut because obviously that bit that's coming out looking like a nub on on our mug there. So, I'm going to hit CtrlR to create a loop cut. And I'm going to pull it down just so that I can see it's like where where it should join basically at the base there. All right, great. And now face select mode. Select that face again. And now we just have to keep extruding around. But what I want to do is I want to scale just make the handle look a little bit thinner. So, I'm going to select this top edge here, and I'm going to double tap G just so that I can slide it downwards a little bit to just make it a little bit thinner, cuz that handle obviously doesn't look as as fat as uh as what we had there. So, all right. So, face select mode now. And now I'm going to start to extrude. So, another extrusion. G to reposition. R to rotate it. And I just want to rotate it so that it kind of follows the contours of uh of this. So, I'm going to be rotating it like this kind of angle as we go around. So, now E to do another extrusion. Click. G. Click. R. And now, by the way, there is another way to extrude, which is actually kind of perfect for this. Um, but if you hold down control and then rightclick, it will not only extrude, but it will also rotate the faces so that they align. And it can be a little helpful. um a bit more easier than doing this like E G R S G R like so just holding down control and then right click will just place these little points um and will rotate them so that you don't have to do all that rotation yourself. It really only works for these kind of appendages like this, but might as well use it cuz it's a very um handy way to do it. Okay, cool. So now now the tricky bit. It's not really that tricky. It's it's relatively easy to solve, but it's it's a conundrum, right? like how do we make this mesh with the rest of the mesh? Um, and you do that by like the wrong way to do this would be to just like kind of like smush them together, right? And this is kind of like early 3D stuff. Like a lot of stuff was like this. This kind of mashed stuff and intersected it together, but then you don't get that edge there where it like catches the light. And the only way to really get that is to actually physically like join this mesh together. So this face here has to be connected to this face somehow. Um and the easiest way in this case to do is to first of all we can see that this line here is like cutting into the middle of this uh this this cup. Right? So we really need to just add a line that goes around there to make this this area here like one face to match um this sorry this this this handle. So, I'm going to add that line by hitting CtrlR loop cut click. And then I'm going to slide it up to be, you know, roughly about there. That's fine. And then now, um, because I've intersected it, that that went too far. Um, so I'm holding down Z. Um, now this is a way of quickly changing the mode that you're you're viewing something in. Um, and we'll we'll get to these other two once we get to materials rendering and stuff, but for now, if you just swap to wireframe mode, this will show you through the mesh. Um, there is another way to see through a mesh, and that is to at the top there, that little X-ray or alt Z is a hotkey for it. Um, but that's that's another way to do it. Um, but yeah, that you can see that's that's wireframe, and then hang on a second. Nope, that's that's X-ray. This is wireframe. But yeah, they're they're pretty similar. Anyways, so I'm going to select my my face here and I'm just going to pull it out just so that I can just just grab it basically. And now I can go back to my solid view as before. Okay, so I touched on this briefly before, but like a mesh is made up of these individual points, right? This is what you're seeing when you're in uh verticy mode, these individual points. Um, and each of those points when you have four together, three or more actually, um, you can create a face. Um, and so that's what that is. So essentially I need to create a new face for this section right here. So let's do that now. So I'm going to select those two and I've just selected them by holding down uh shift like this. And then I'm just going to hit F. F for face. Okay. And then I can do the same on this side like that. And then I'm going to do the same on the top. And then I'm going to do the same underneath. Okay. All right. So I've done it. But, and I did it deliberately this way cuz I need to show you um the the reason for this this issue here. So, we've got yeah, we we've we've got the faces. So, they should be going smoothly across here. But because of the way meshes work and the way they try to sorry, the way shoot uh smooth shading works is it does it based on like a continuous flow of faces. And you will have noticed that when we created this, there was actually a face that is inside here before we joined it. Okay, which and I'll I'll show you. If we go into here, this area here, you should see there is a face that is right here. So, because that exists, the smooth shader doesn't actually know that it's supposed to continue on because there's a face that goes down. So, it's now kind of mixed. It doesn't know like it has to create a smooth shading here, but then also one on the top there. And so, it's done this weird um hybrid thing where it's like it's tried to do it, but there's clearly something going on underneath. So, what we need to do is just delete that face. So, again, in face select mode, you select that inner face there. And by the way, when you're working in 3D, this is a really common thing beginners do. They select the wrong face. So, you can see how quickly that like they're right next to each other, that point there, right? But selecting one or the other, it it just happens all the time. So, a thing that a lot of 3D artists do is when they've selected something before they delete it, you just do a quick orbit around and that'll just like break the perspective and just to verify that that is the actual one I mean to select. Okay. Then I'm going to hit X and I'm going to say faces. Okay. But it's not just that one, right? Like that. Actually, that that should be fixed soon. But anyway, I'll show you how. Um, and then there's one on the inside here as well. Okay. Cuz when we joined it, there was there was a face here and there was a face over there. So I'm now going to delete that face by hitting X and then say faces. Okay, now that's done. This should be correct. But the reason it's not is one I think if I need to right click and say shade smooth and that has fixed it. What on what can happen sometimes is when you've fixed up some geometry um you might need to uh recalculate the normals like which and again to bring up the normals there's a secret hidden line uh that every face on your your object has and they're always pointing outward like that. But when you've created new mesh and you've kind of fix things or whatnot, you can end up with one of these lines that goes the wrong direction. Um and I'll show you that actually if I just do this. um that's what it might look like. You get this weird like black shading artifacts. Um that's very ugly. So to fix that, you select your entire mesh and then you hit shift N and that will recalculate it. Um and now you can see the smooth shading is correct. And just to show you quickly as well, um the way I did it just then where we like created it and then we deleted the faces. Don't do this. I'm just going to show you like actually what you would do cuz it's not this tedious. Normally, if you had this problem, you would actually select this face and this face first. You delete them ahead of time and then actually, and there's a faster way to have uh created this this join here. Um you can select that entire edge loop with alt then shift alt select that. And now I could rightclick and say bridge edge loops, which you only can do if you've got the exact same number of uh vertices on one side as the other. But I want to just show you physically creating those points with uh vertices because that is a really common way to to model to join things together. You select the four vertices, you create a new face. Anyways, look at that. We've got what looks like a handle coming out of the mug. Now, if we look at our reference here, um we've got it pretty close, but you can see that there's like it's sharp, right? There's there's clearly like a crease here and a crease here. Um, and we can do that just by adding in more loop cuts. So, I'm going to add in uh well, I guess there's two ways to do it. One, I can actually just select this edge here. So, holding down alt, just select that and then double tap G and I can bring that in. Um, but when I do that, this area becomes a little bit straight. Um, maybe not what I wanted. Let's have a look at front mode. Um, yeah, I might want a little bit more detail there, which case I would add a loop cut. Um, but, you know, it's really up to you. You might be able to just, you know, move this around and just kind of shape it. Like, look, we're really, we're learning Blender. That's really the goal of this. It's not necessarily to make a physically accurate uh mug. I don't want to over complicate things and make things feel like you have to do everything perfectly, but I also don't want to end up with like a trash result and then everyone be like, "Oh, we did all that effort and now it looks garbage." Um, but you know, you could spend a lot of effort. You know, you could even try and get like if you look at, you know, uh there would be probably like a little line here like like the kind of you know what I mean like on the inner inner part of the the thing. You could try and create that. You could really add a lot of detail. The only thing I'm really going to fix is right here where it's pinching. I'm just going to select that edge there and I'm going to double tap G. I'm just going to slide it up so there's just a little less pinching. And then this part here like you can see the shape of this face is being very distorted. Right? You generally want to keep things as close to a squareish shape as possible generally. Um and so I'm just going to select this edge at the bottom there. Double tap G. And I'm just going to pull it out just to relieve a little bit of the the tension there. And I mean that's I mean you can Yeah, there's obviously there's like a tighter line there, but this will do. this this is enough to be uh perceived as a coffee mug. Now, if you want to just move ahead with the tutorial and get on to the next part, which is going to be on uh materials and lighting, um you can you can do that. However, if you want a little bit of a challenge, like a little bit of a homework, um where you can try to use some skills but by yourself, you will see looking at the photo here that we also have a saucer, a little tiny plate for our mug. Um, now I didn't include that in my final image. Um, I just had the coffee mug just sitting on the table. Um, but this is a great very small thing that you could try to model by yourself using the skills that you've just learned um to to create something new. So, how would you go about adding that saucer? You could have have a try at it. It it's a completely separate object obviously to your mug here. So, even if you screw it up, worst case scenario is you just delete it. And then, you know, you'll still end up with something that I actually had for my final result, which was a mug without a saucer. But, if you want to add that in, it'll be a way to kind of take some of the lessons that you've uh you've you've picked up already and then try to remember them and the different steps and the things um required to create it. Because whilst you've just created something now, it's the best time to try to recall that memory so that in the future, maybe in a few days or a few weeks from now, when you try to do something yourself, it'll be a lot more readily available to recall that information. So, if you want to have a go at doing that, uh, feel free to. Otherwise, join me in the next part. Welcome back. In this part, we are going to be making the icing. Yes, the exciting icing for our donut. Um, but first we do have quite a lot of objects going on in our scene. We got a camera, lamp, we got an object, uh, an image and stuff. We should try to organize some things. And some of you might have noticed in the top right hand corner, you've got a list of all of your objects, right? This is called your outliner. Um, and it is a like a spreadsheet version of all the objects that are in your scene. And uh, we're going to use it later on to like organize like create collections so it's like easier to see and organize things. But the first thing we need to do is just add names to things that make sense. Um, so for example, our mug here is currently called cylinder. So if we had a big scene with lots of objects going on, we can't find it. So it's a good habit to name your objects. So there's a number of different ways you can name something. Um, one is you can just double click it in the outliner, right? You can see now I can type in a name like mug. Uh, you can also in your 3D viewport, you can hit F2, which is the same hotkey in uh, like Windows. I don't know, maybe Mac, but for renaming. Um, and then I can just type in a name like donut. Um, and you can also do that in uh the outliner as well. You can just hit F2 and that'll also um also do the renaming. So, there we go. So, now we got names that actually make sense. Um, I don't actually need the image anymore, even though I just renamed it. So, I'm just going to delete that. All right. So, we've now just got a camera, we got a donut, a light, and a mug. Great. So, let's make that icing. I'm going to move my mug out of the way. So, G and then X. And I'm just going to throw it to the side so we don't see it anymore. And let's focus on our doughut. So, we want to make some icing. And when it comes to something as challenging as icing and and really anything that there's so many different ways to make things in 3D, and every single method has a pro and a con. So, for example, there is a fluid simulator in Blender. It's not very good. Um, but it exists and it is a way you could create icing. You could actually like create an object and then simulate it falling and splatting over it. The reason we're not going to do that though is that one, it's incredibly complicated. There's so many things that can go wrong with this simulation. Blender simulator is not very good. Um, and then also you don't have any control over the final result. You have to keep re-aking things. It's it's horrible. But there is another way and that is to just do it by hand. And at first that seems slower, but you have much more control over it and it's actually pretty easy to do. So I'm going to show you how to do that. And it's also a great way to introduce some more tools and things and get you familiar with different areas of Blender. So icing follows the shape of the thing that it's on. So really icing is basically the shape that we've got. It's basically half of this doughut. So if we got half the doughnut, we're halfway there. Then we just need to add some variation to it to make it look like icing. So what I'm going to do is duplicate my donut. So shift D. That is how you duplicate. Uh you can also just go object and then say duplicate objects there. Shift D. Um and when you do this, you are in the duplicated state and it's saying now where do you want to place that thing? Um and we don't want to place it anywhere. We want to leave it exactly where it was. And so I'm going to hit escape. Now when you do that, it hasn't um cancelled the duplication cuz you can see at the top there we've now got donut and then donut. 001. So there is two objects still there. They're just exactly in the exact same spot fighting for space. Something you actually never want to have is two objects sharing the exact same space cuz then when a camera moves or something happens uh in an animation you see like flickering. Um really really bad. Anyways, um I'm going to double click that and I'm going to call it icing just so that I can uh quickly tell the two apart. And I want to delete the bottom half of my doughut. So I'm going to go into front view mode like that. And I need to uh go into edit mode next. And I want to select the bottom half of my donut. Um this is face select. Current. Let's go verticy select. Okay. And if I was to click and then just drag over the bottom half of my doughut, it would appear as though as we have got half the doughut. However, and this is an area of blender that is not clear uh until you run into problems. But if I was to change my orbit, you can see it hasn't actually selected half the donut. It's only selected what it could see from that view. So you have to turn on toggle X-ray first or go into wireframe mode. Um but uh yeah, you have to turn that on first, then do your selection. And now it will actually select all the way through an object to the other side as well. By the way, if you find that you can't do this this drag selection that I've got, if you've got instead a circle over your cursor like like what I have here, um what that means is you have tapped the W key by mistake, which will cycle through in the top little uh side of your screen there. Um different selection modes. I wish it was not W. That's one of my complaints I've made to the Blender team. W is so close to the other keys you need on your keyboard. So many people hit this, they hit the wrong key and then they're in this thing and then like nothing nothing works. So like yeah, you want to be in this mode most of the time. Um but yeah, you can change to these other modes if you wanted to, you know, do a special selection or something as well. But anyways, that is how to to fix that. And also just to to call it out as well, we're going to be doing some like stuff with this icing that's going to maybe mess some things up and you might run into some issues. I got to call it out again. I've got an unstuck yourself guide, troubleshooting guide for just this tutorial. It is free. Just click the link below um and it'll take you there. Um because I want you guys to be able to get through this tutorial, but there's so many little things that you could experience in this. So um we're going to add it to that guide um to try and help you. And if you can't find um the answer to your your problem in there, um hit up the Discord. Uh the link for that is also um in it. So I'll link to my website and all the links will be there. So check that out um if you run into issues. All right. So, I've got the bottom half of my donut. We have to delete it. So, I'm going to hit X. When you do this, it's saying which part of it you want to delete. Now, this is one of those cases where it actually matters like which one of these you select cuz if you were to select vertices, cuz it would appear as though that's what you need to delete. But if you did that, you'll notice you've got now less than half because along with the vertices selected is that final line that is cut through the middle there. So, I don't want to delete that final line. I want to delete the other stuff. So in my options here, I've got an option for faces, which if we try that, you can see is the solution because when you uh deleting the faces, you're only deleting what are like what is a whole face, but these individual points here don't make up a whole face. This part does, so that's left behind, but all the other stuff was deleted. So anyways, we should now have half of a donut. So I'm going to turn off toggle X-ray now so I can see it. And if we clicked off, you'll see that it actually just looks exactly like a donut because again, they're sharing the exact same space. I do know it's there if I select it in the uh little outliner there, but it's uh completely invisible. So, the first thing I want to do is I want to add some thickness to this icing. And this is something you should know how to do. You should know it. If you don't know it, you've not been paying attention. Um but if you go to your modifiers, there is a modifier. Another clue. uh it is of course the solidify modifier which adds thickness to any face. So now that we've added that you think something's broken, it's not working. It is working. It's just that by default the solidify will uh add thickness inside. So if you change this offset here to be the inverted, which is one, it will now add the thickness the other way, which is what we need. Okay, so that's great. But of course, it doesn't look very good. There's a a quote which uh I always repeat. Uh imperfection is the digital perfection because the reason this looks fake, it's just perfectly straight. There's no way to get a laser cut icing across a donut like this unless you're using 3D software. So, we need to add randomness to this edge here in order for it to look realistic to our eye. So, I need to go into edit mode. And when we do that, we can't see the mesh because we've got our solidifier blocking our view. So, I'm going to click this disable in viewport just to hide it so that I can see it. So, when I turn it back on, I I know it's there, but just while I'm editing it, in order to see it, I need to be able to um have it turned off. So, to add randomness, what I could do is I could come in here and I could select one point like this. I could hit G and I could move it down. Okay? Then I could get the point next to it and I could move this one down. and then this one. And I could do this and do this and we could put ourselves to sleep trying to make this donut look good and it would it would take forever. Um, but thankfully in 3D there are tools for everything to make your life easier. And so one such tool is at the top here, your proportional editing tool. What this does is now when I hit G, it'll move everything at once. Um, no. It what it will do is it will it will uh move everything with a fall-off area around it. The reason it's moving the entire mesh with it is that the fall-off is so big that it's actually outside of our view at the moment. This was actually something I I called out in my uh usability talk at the Blender conference last year. Um, we could do better than this, but basically if you zoom way out, you will see there is a circle around it. Um, and that's how big it is. So, what we need to do is whilst we're in this move state is we need to reduce that. And you do that by scrolling down. Scroll down, down, down, down, down. Oh, no, that was the wrong direction. Scroll up. Sorry. Scroll up, not down. And that will make it scroll smaller. So, scroll up to make it smaller. Scroll down to make it bigger. I just completely brain farted. If you don't have a scroll wheel, by the way, and this is another thing to call out. When you're in a move state like we are right now, you can see along the bottom of our screen, you've got a list and that only appeared there when you're in that state. When I when I turn it off, all those options are gone. But whilst I'm in this state, there's a bunch of options there. And the keyboard shortcut is actually right there. Page up and page down. Okay, so that is how we can increase or decrease. So again, if you if you don't see the the circle, you just have to keep holding page down or scrolling up um until it goes uh down to something that you can see basically. Anyways, now that we are in that state, I'm going to hit Z, okay, to grab uh sorry. Yeah. So, whilst I'm doing I I don't want to just like freehand do it because if I if I pull it down like this, if it like if I watch what happens. If I do it on the edge here like this, it appears as though it's it's pulling it straight down, right? And I do this and this. But actually, if you looked at it, these would be slightly skewed a little bit. Um, just because of like we're working in 3D. We're looking at things from a different perspective. Sometimes things appear to be going down, but they're actually at like a slight angle. So, it helps to um when you're moving something to think of which axis it's going on. So, I want it to go straight down. So, G and then zed. And now I'm going to pull it down. Okay. That was a lot of work just to do this one little bit. I'm sorry. [gasps] All right. Okay. So, we've pulled it down. Excellent. Um I'll do a little bit more as well. I'll just do a little bit here. I'll do a little bit here. You can like play with the um the amount the the fall-off like so. You know, you can play with it. All right, cool. Now, if we turn on our solidify modifier, we've got the thickness back, and you can see we've got some variation to uh to the donut there. So, let's let's continue on here. So, let's pull this like so. I don't want to go too far cuz we're going to add some some dribbles soon. Dribbles sounds gross, but you know, the little runoff droplets that uh that's going to go down down the donut. like so. Okay, that is pretty good. Now, you can see it's like partly like intersecting it. Um, and that's obviously because we've got proportional editing, so it's actually kind of moving some of these ones that are up top and pulling it down as well. It's fine with the solidify modifier, but we're actually going to end up fixing it when we uh when we do the dribble anyway, cuz I'm going to introduce another modifier that's going to fix this. Um, but anyways, let's do this. Let's do the dribble part. So, I'm going to look for an area. Yeah. Like let's go. Yeah. And here where this bit's like running down. Um and I'm going to um I want to make this like a dribble that goes down the donut here. And currently I can't really continue to pull this like I could I could like get like a sharp point like that. But that does not look very good, right? We need more geometry essentially. So you might remember the hotkey. If we want to extrude something, it is E. But I can't just extrude one point like that. Okay? Because there's no face there. There's nothing that's actually going to be rendered if I just pull one point down. So, I need to select two points. Okay, so two points like this. If I hit E and then zed and then pull down and then release. And then if I bring back my solidify modifier, you can see we've got more geometry. Doesn't look very good though. [laughter] Um, so let's add in another modifier, the same one that we used on the mug as well. It's the subdivision surface modifier. Um, as I said, you use these all the time, use it for most objects probably have a subdivision modifier because it's so useful. Um, but one of the things it's good for is it like besides adding detail, it like smooths things out for us. So that little hard little block that we had there has now turned into a smoothed droplet looking shape, which is exactly what we want. But look, it has separated from the donut. Now, in previous tutorials, um I actually did like a thing that showed you how to like use this but make it like snap onto the donut, and it got all complicated. Everyone screwed up their mesh at this point. Um you can do this by hand as well. You can like come in here and like try to pull this in piece by piece, but it's actually not necessary because there is a modifier that will just do it for you. Um so, if you go to your add modifier stack and then go to deform and then you're looking for the one called shrink wrap. And by the way, again, if you can't find it, just go up to here, type in shrink wrap, and you'll also find it there. So, shrink wrap, what this is going to do, it's going to shrink it onto a mesh. But you have to define the mesh first in order to see it because if you don't, it just has no effect. Absolutely. That's what the red is h showing you. It's not doing anything. So, your target um yeah, you can actually like select it from the drop down or what most people do, you click the little eyropper and then you select the object. Bam. All right. Now, it's working. And now we've got some serious Z fighting where the uh faces are overlapping and this is horrible. You never want this. All right. So, you will remember uh when I was talking about the modifier that it works top to bottom. So, essentially what we've done is we've gone uh add thickness then add detail and then shrink wrap all of that thickness onto the donut itself. So, what we need to do is change the order of this um and not go halfway cuz that also won't do anything. Um, we need to go all the way to the top. So, the shrink wrap is happening first. So, it's snapping it onto the mesh. Then, it's adding the solidify modifier. Then, underneath that, it's adding the subsurf modifier. And we can actually increase this, make it a level two for the viewport. And you can see it just adds a little bit um extra detail there. Okay. Um, and you can go even higher, of course, but you know, you will get uh eventually it'll just get so slow for your computer and there's not really going to be any point. But you can just go to level two for now. Okay. So, uh to quickly show you as well what the shrink wrap is actually doing. Um because it's really it's not that clear. Um but yeah, this is this is where it's that little piece is overhanging and then it's essentially looking for the nearest point um to find this mesh underneath it and then it is just snapping it uh to that point. So, it's it's pretty good. Like I can drag this like pretty far down like but there is an extent I can So I'm just doing another extrusion on this point. So as I pull it down you can see it like it kind of loses it. There's a point where it just won't find the mesh anymore. So there's a point like at which you should start to pull things into the mesh. It's not magic. It's not going to just magically find it. So if I just pull it all the way out there, there's no way it's going to be able to find it. So there is uh a limit. But you can see this is it does make our job a lot easier because I can um I can pull it down and I can start to make um you know some some big dribbles along my mesh here. And I don't have to really worry that much about the uh the placement because it's just going to automatically snap itself to the donut. I just have to make sure the dribbles are straight. Um, and if you look at reference, which you should be doing, um, I'll put some reference on, um, my, uh, the link below on my website, so you can have a look and just kind of go through it. Um, but yeah, usually when when like droplets form, they kind of like the gravity kind of like builds at a point and it kind of like gets sucked from the top and so you end up with like this thin bit in the middle and then this like globule, which is a crazy word um [laughter] at the bottom there. But essentially, it just means the piece at the bottom I'm just going to make a little bit thicker than the pieces above it. Okay, so that's one, but we should do more. So I'm going to go around and I'm going to add more. Um, and just repeat the same thing. Just do an extrusion on these little points there and just kind of drag it down. So, let's do that because yeah, I remember the first doughut that I ever made. Oh, way way back in the day, making the first doughut. Um, and I really like I I did one little dribble going down it. And then I always wanted to frame the the camera so that it was looking at that cuz that was the most interesting part of the donut. And then I learned like ah just exaggerate. Just add little dribbles everywhere. That is a big part of being an artist is you look at reality and then you find the bits that are actually pleasing and then you exaggerate it. And that's what I'm doing. So, you know, donuts typically don't have this many dribbles, but it's very pleasing. It just makes it look very like gooey and like, oh, there's so much icing. Um, and you can see, by the way, I'm not doing the same shape also everywhere. So, this is like a half one, right? And I'm kind of looking for like where I can add um some different shapes. Why is that? There's a gap there. Oh, okay. Oh, no. [laughter] Yeah, I was uh recording uh for this this tutorial and I recorded something and then I like reverted it. But I've now got a giant face here where there should be not a giant face there. So, what do you do? You you've accidentally got this thing. There is uh and this is you obviously don't have to do this because this is not your problem. Um but I'm just going to use the knife tool which is a way to do an incision on a mesh and just add more geometry like freehand. So I've just uh fixed that little problem that I had there. But uh you hopefully should not have that problem. Um yeah, let's I'm going to just pull this down. I'm going to turn on proportional editing. I'm going to add a little bit that's going down. And let's select these two. Turn off proportional. Let's add another little bit that's going right here. Add a little bit of variance. And let's add let's add another big one right here. Pull this one down. But this is the fun part, you know? I mean, aside from the finicky like going like sideways looking at where it appears and then straightening it. But you get to kind of like shape things and just like with your eye just just play with it. It's actually one of the cool things of of 3D. Um, it's also why a lot of people get into 3D is they want to do art, but whenever they pick up a pencil, they just can't get the lines where they want it. And the great thing about 3D is is that you've got points and you can move those points after the fact. You're not drawing freehand. So, if you there's no case where you like screw up a line and you have to like rub it out and try again. Like, you just grab a point and just kind of like move it around um like I'm doing right now. So, that's one of the uh one of the joys of of 3D. I'm just trying to just doing filler talk if you can't tell. Just grab a few pieces, move them all down together. Why not? There we go. That's kind of interesting. I might add I might just take this one at the bottom there off. And I'll just maybe pull these out just so we've got more variance that goes all the way around it. But play with it as much you want. Um, you know, you can pause this and, you know, play with it. Um, but I'm just trying to make it look generally appealing. Now, one way to improve this, you'll notice that the icing is separating from it, right? It's going uh it's going up right there. And again, that's because of how subsurf modifiers work. There's a point here and there's a point here. So, it has to uh it has to make this really rounded shape. But real liquid when it is uh in this state when it's clinging to an object uh this part here as as it hits it that part will be like solid right and then the rest of it like this part is round but then this part is like hugging the actual surface. So thankfully we can do that. There is a setting in the solidifier setting options which I might have to move. There we go. So we can see it. Um, underneath edge data, there is an option here for a crease. Okay, so what a crease is doing, we didn't really talk about it with the mug, but it's essentially on an edge, it's creasing it and saying like instead of like doing that huge rounded thing, just kind of tighten it on that edge. Very similar to adding the geometry like what we did on the mug, but this is a way to do it without adding extra geometry. It does kind of add a little bit of stretching, um, but it's not really that noticeable on something like this. But that is very very nice, very solid. Um, it's hugging it and it looks very pleasing. Excellent. Now, we could as well I didn't actually do this for my final one. Um, because I forgot. [laughter] Um, but I realized after I was like, "Oh, yeah. I guess like the part that's on the inside of the donut." Yeah, I I forgot to do that. Um, but yeah, you can also like do the exact same thing just playing with it. If you find like it's kind of hard to like look at it inside the donut, if you just select the middle row. So if you just hold down alt and then select on that middle row, you can use the same focus um button. So numpad period or tilda and then view. And then that will just lock it on to those selected vertices. So that focus key that I mentioned, it works on uh in edit mode as well, which is good. So yeah, I could just pull these down like this and just, you know, the camera's not really going to notice it. You just want to make sure that it's, you know, not perfectly straight like mine was in the uh final render. Um it doesn't really like who's going to notice, you know, who's going to tell really. Um annoying people are going to point it out if the inside part's too straight. All right. So, that's pretty good. Um actually, something I might do cuz I noticed like looking from the top cuz this is where the camera's going to be like we're not really able to see much donut. like the icing is a little bit too far down. So, I'm just going to grab some of these points here using proportional editing. I'm just going to pull them up to just expose a little bit more of the underlying doughut, which is definitely going to make the doughnut look a little bit more handmade, you know? Um cuz like obviously a probably a professional donut from Crispy Cream or something doesn't have this much variance in it, but it's okay. Does kind of help it give it a uh yeah, realistic kind of look. Now, there's one thing that would really improve the look of this icing, and that is thickness variation. Because if you go around it, you'll see that the exact, you know, the distance from here to here is the exact same thing as like, you know, what it would be over here to here. And that's just not the case. We've got like icing that is dribbling down. These little droplets are kind of like breaking away. And what happens when those droplets break and then they kind of stop? They build up, right? So, we should actually see these kind of like swell a little bit. They should be a little bit rounder at the heads of each of these points. Also, along the edges here, every little edge here should be a little bit more inflated than the rest of it. And although that sounds like nothing, when you when you do it, when you actually add this little detail, it really does improve the realism. So, we can't do that because all we've got is these little points here. Okay. So, just like what we did with the mug, there comes a time where you need to break the um break the uh non-destructive workflow and apply your modifiers. So, this shrink wrap here, by the way, when you apply something, you have to apply it in like top to bottom. So, even really, although we really just we only want to apply the solidify. That's the main one we want to do. Um, we have to first of all apply this the shrink wrap because that's the one that is first and that's the one like if we if we applied this one first, we would lose uh the the the shrink wrap would have to go after and it would just yeah it would screw it up. So we have to apply the shrink wrap first. So go here and click apply. Okay. Now in edit mode you can see we've still got those single points but they're now snapped to the mesh. All right. But it means we no longer have that automatic snapping. So, if I was to pull these out, you can see they're now separated from the mesh. So, just keep that in mind. Um, we still can't edit the mesh there because we haven't applied the solidify. So, I'm going to apply the solidify now. And now we've got these points here. Okay. So, now if I wanted to with just these points, I could pull some of these points out. Turning off proportional editing. And I could just pull them out a little bit. And that's better. But we don't have enough detail here. We need more geometry to play with in order to add this extra detail. So, we need to apply our subsurf modifier. So, I'm going to on here I'm going to hit apply. And actually, there's a hotkey if you want to don't want to have to go to the drop down each time. Ctrl A will apply the selected uh modifier. And now in edit mode, look at this. Now, we've got all this extra geometry to play with. So, now if I wanted to, I could turn on proportional editing. I could select one point. I could try and get a kind of a shape like this. That would be probably the best way to do it if I was restricted to edit mode. And that'll get me some of the way there. I could, you know, pull individual points out. I could try and do that. But you can see it's it's very finicky. And it's really it's not the tool to use because, like I said, there are tools for everything in 3D to try to help you to um yeah, to to to do things better. So, go to the top of your screen. We're currently in layout. That's all we've done so far. We're going to swap to sculpting. All right. Now, when you swap to a new one of these views here, it'll uh it's assuming the default view of Blender, which is like when everything was like 10 m long or whatever. So, our donut is tiny. So, we have to focus on the selected object. So, I'm just going to hit numpad period. Um, that hasn't worked. Okay, don't worry about that. Um, all right. So, instead of in sculpt mode, change to object mode. Then hit numpad period or view selected. And then now jump back to sculpt mode. And now we're back to it. For some reason, I thought focus worked in uh in sculpt mode. Yeah. All right. Sometimes you just teach something and then you go, "Oh, that never worked. What was I talking about?" Anyway, um Okay. In sculpt mode now, and make sure you're looking at the correct one, okay? Not the donut, but the icing itself. If I was to now draw over this, you can see we're drawing into the mesh of the icing. Isn't that cool? All right. So, what I want to do is I want to change my brush and I want to find the one brush which is really going to help us here and it is this one, the inflate deflate brush. Now, your brush size here can be controlled by the size at the top or there is a hotkey F. And when you hit F, you just choose with your mouse like how big the size needs to be. Okay. So, I can pull out. And then now, if I just draw over that little gobuille there, the end piece, it just adds a little bit of inflation. And I'm So, I'm just pulling it around just slightly. I don't want to go too far, but just adding these little inflated points will really help this to look realistic. The other thing is you can actually shape some of the the mesh as well. So, there's another brush that I use all the time, which is the grab brush. You just uh essentially just pull mesh like that. So that's another easy way to just kind of move pieces around like so. You can just shape things like this. Add a little bit of extra detail if you want. Yeah. And all is well. So you can see I I'm doing a little bit on the edge here again because all the edges there should have a little bit of buildup of the fluid because that's where gravity kind of makes it stall and like stop cuz it just kind of like runs out of um like the the tension will be more than the gravity that's pulling it down. Um you get the idea. Anyways, play with that as much as you like. But of course we have some homework to finish off this video. So, what I want you to make is this hidden object, which is a plate for your doughnut. So, have a look at the shape here that I've got and have a think about how you would go about creating this and try to do it yourself. Just give it a stab. Even if you don't feel confident, you don't feel like you could uh achieve it, just give it a go. Um, there's a hint, we've got some modifiers on the right here. And I will also show you what the wireframe looks like. um because that will probably help some people out as well. Okay, so that's a pretty big hint. Um but yeah, give a go without any instruction from me. Have a stab at that. In the next part, I'll very quickly show you how to uh how to create this. Um if you get completely lost, you can join me in that part, but please have a go at trying to do it yourself. Anyway, go ahead, join me in the next part after you have tried to create this by yourself. Welcome back. How did you go making your plate? Hope you all attempted it. If you didn't or you got stuck, don't worry because I'm going to show you how to make it right now. So, if you had no problems with it, you might want to skip forward. This might be a little boring, but otherwise, I'm going to show everyone how I would go about creating the plate. So, uh, we need to add a new object to the scene. We can go to the add menu up there, or we can hit shift A. Um and then from this list we want to choose the object which most resembles what we want to create. If you ask me that would be a circle. Okay. So just like before the bottom leftand corner we can change some options here. The biggest one being radius. It's too big. So drop that into about there. Um and you will notice that you can see through it. Okay. And that is because there is no face there. This is just a string of vertices. And as I touched on briefly earlier, vertices don't show up in your render. Faces do. So we need to add a type of face underneath fill. So there's two options. Either of them will do. Engon is just one single face shared amongst the 32. Or the triangle fan will mean uh there's one point in the middle. Um you can actually see it in this mode. One point in the middle and then it just creates um triangles to that point. I'm going to go with engon because you know it's never failed me. for this option. So, I'll just use that. Okay. Now, we need to uh add more geometry to this cuz we need to create some sort of a lip for the plate. You can't just have a plate. It's always got to have a rim on or else that stuff slides off it. Right. So, into edit mode by hitting tab. Um I'm to add some geometry. I'm going to extrude. So, I'm going to hit E. Okay. And in this state, it's now saying, yeah, where do you want to place it? and it's extruding it along the normal, which is that invisible line that faces out from the face in there. Um, and I'm just going to do a single click right here. Um, now before we start scaling and pulling this out, you'll notice that obviously that's intersecting our mesh. We need to delete that face because we don't need it. So, I'm going to hit X to delete. And then what type of deletion? Not edges, not vertices, obviously, because that would be, you know, the entire line. Um, I want to delete just the single face on top. And there we go. So now I can reselect that line by holding down alt and then left clicking on it. And now if I want to create like a lip, which is not just straight up, but a little bit out, I would just scale. So S to scale and then just pulling my mouse out until it looks something like that. Do a click to confirm. Okay. And then I'm going to do another extrusion because I'm going to create like another bit like a little bit of a flat area. Okay. So E. And then I don't actually want to pull it upwards. Obviously, I want to pull it outwards. So, what I do is I cancel the movement. And now that I'm in that state, I'm going to hit S to pull outwards like so. Um, by the way, I should show you as well. If after you have like extruded something like let's say you do this, right? Oops. you if you did this, if you extruded and then you uh like cleared its position, but then accidentally clicked off it, you've now got double vertices all along this this line here. And that's horrible because it will it will create jagged artifacts in it. So, this is a really super common problem that you will experience all the time. And the way to fix it is to select your entire mesh, then hit M to merge, [clears throat] and then you're going to go by distance. And you'll see in the bottom there, that little thing that says removed 32 vertices. And that has cleared up that problem. So, I have to show you that cuz people will do it. It'll happen. And um that's how you fix that issue. But again, if you run into issues like this, use my Unstuck yourself guide. Link is in the description because I did set it up so you guys can um hopefully get through this tutorial. All right. So, as I said, extrude, clear its like movement. So, its placement is exactly where it started from. But then I'm going to hit S to scale outwards. So, now I've got a little flat rim to my plate. And then, now that it's here, I'm going to do one further extrusion upwards. And this is just obviously the design of the plate that I'm choosing. So, upwards. Now, you can see it's like freehand like that. I don't like it. So, I'm just going to lock it on the Z axis. So, just hit Z. So, it's going straight up like so. Okay, great. We've got a very jaggedy looking plate that you sometimes see in video games. You're playing Call of Duty or something. You get up close and you go like, "Look at that jagged old plate there." Um, which by the way is cuz in games the plate is like one of a million objects and they can only put so many polies into the scene. So, little things, little details on um tables and things often end up a little low res. Anyways, go to your modifier stack. Um, and the first one we want to add to kind of smooth this out is our very favorite subdivision surface right where my head is. Um, or you can access it from the search subdivision. There we go. Okay, cool. And I'm going to go level two. And we've got that crimping effect happening to the middle of our plate there. So, just like before. And actually, let's hide my donut and my icing just so that I can focus on the plate. And I'm also going to turn off the subdiv just so that I can select this single face here because just like before, the reason that's happening is it's like right on the edge there. It has to like convert all that into like a single point in the middle and it's just too ugly when it starts there. So, we just may have to make it start way further in the middle like that. And then when we do that, it's clear. It's practically invisible. You can only see it if you get really close, but you won't see it because it'll be under the donut and it'll be smooth. Anyway, um, cool. Now, um, I can tighten up the edges here cuz this is looking very, very, um, smooth. So, I showed you before how you can add a loop cut. You can do CtrlR. Okay. And that'll add a loop cut in the middle. And then I just pull it out towards the edge like that to make a smoothed uh, sorry, a um, sharpened uh, point. Yeah. Anyway, um [laughter] the other way to do it, which I didn't talk about, but you can do a crease. So, if we just hold down alt and then we select that line there, um you can do a crease. If you uh right click, you'll see you've got their edge crease or the hotkey shift E. So, in this when you do shift E, you'll see at the top there, you've you're pulling out basically a value from one to zero. Um and essentially what it's doing is it's like doing a fake kind of tighten on that edge there. So, it's kind of like pulling it out and just making it a sharper point. It doesn't look as nice. You don't get as much of a bevel because there's no geometry being added there like you would if you were to actually do a loop cut. You get all this extra geometry. So, it's not it's not as good, but for like small things, it's you know, it's generally fine to do something like that. All right, I'm gonna do a shade smooth now because I want to see how that looks. And that's pretty good. Now, the only other thing, the exact same thing. It's weird that like three things in this small little scene have the exact same two modifiers. Subserve and uh solidify. Um anyways, generate solidify. And just like before, we want this solidify to go first because otherwise it's doing it after the fact and then we get this like really annoying like hard line there. So just pull that up to the top and now it's rounded. And look at that. Um, but yeah, I might actually want to make this line a little bit harder. So, I'll pull that in. It's still, yeah, there's just not enough geometry there. I This is one of the cases where you just need more geometry. So, I'm going to add a loop cut here. And I'll add another loop cut underneath it like that. And now I'm going to just select this. And I'm just going to revert that edge crease. So, shift E. And then I just go like minus one, like so. And now it's just Yeah. the way it was before. But there you go. So now I've got a sharper edge on it. The only other thing I might just pull up this lip here. So alt select on that lip. G zed. And I'll just pull it up a little bit. Um and there you go. And we would model from reference, but I actually had like a photo scan plate from uh Polygon, which we'll get to later. Um but yeah, this is just modeling from that reference that I already had, but this is the design of it. So there you go. Great. Now, let's bring back our donut and our icing. Now, I saw a comment on the last video that said, "Uh, you didn't make the donut lumpy like last time. It's so over. Why? Oh, ye have little faith. You think I would forget something like that?" Maybe I did forget. [laughter] But I'm actually glad I did because this is a great opportunity to talk about a new tool. So, for those that haven't watched a previous version, before we did the icing, um, we made the donut lumpy, which I did by going into edit mode and then I just selected vertices using proportional editing and like, you know, like pul pulled it out, right? And just kind of like maybe I shrink some parts in this kind of thing. And the reason this is important is that this adds natural variation because you know you could have scientists working for a thousand years in a lab and they would never be able to create a donor as perfectly mathematically accurate as our 3D software has done. This is too perfect. there is natural variation and we need to see that for the eye to go this is you know a real you know uh something realistic right and it's hard to do this kind of thing after you've already added the donut sorry the icing because you can see it just has no bearing on the icing over the top right so some things in 3D are easier to do earlier than they are to do later and this is something you just learn as you do 3D like you'll you'll do so many projects where you just like you get to the end and you go like oh man why didn't I do that before I did this now this is I've like 3xed the amount of work and you just learn these things over time. However, there are certain tools um and there is one I'm going to introduce you to in a second that enable you to make these sort of changes after. Um by the way, there is a way like you can select both objects like this um which you you that is something that you can do in Blender now. You didn't used to always be able to, but you can now edit both objects together. So, I could do this. It does have like a clipping issue when you try to do like shrink fatten, but you can get some like natural lumpy variations going this way. Um, and you can do that. That's actually fine. But I do want to introduce you to a new tool that is in 5.0. Um, and it is if you select both of your icing and your doughut together, then you hit shift A and then you go lattice. There is a new option for lattice deform selected. We always had lattice, but it was very finicky to set up. But now you've got lattice deform selected. And that adds this what looks like a cube, like a bounding box over your object. Um, but it's not actually going to appear in your render. All it is is a defamation guide. So if you just select these points, you can see we are twisting the donut. But importantly, the actual donut is underneath. Like this is a modifier, right? So we're not actually changing the mesh at all. It's just doing this after the fact. And then if I just deleted my lattice, like it's it's gone. It's back to where it was. So this is a non-destructive workflow. These these little points here, they enable me to at any point in the future change and deform a mesh, which is actually really useful. And it's because you're not often in this the uh the exact circumstance where you know exactly what you're going to do and then at the end of it like you know the order in which to do things. Sometimes you're working with a client and they've got an idea for something and then far later on they're like, you know what, let's change the proportions of the car or whatever it is and you have to be able to like fix it without redoing all your mesh. So that's what a lattis can do. Now it comes by default with just this low res cube over it. But if down here you click this little uh data property uh for the lattice, you've got resolution here. So I can increase this. I can add in some more resolution here. And importantly, I want to add one in the middle here. Um, because the first thing you notice when you look at reference of donuts, um, is that besides the the lumpy shape, the bit around the middle of the doughut is often whiter and it's not as puffy. And when you look at how donuts are cooked, it's actually easy to see why. It's it's half submerged in the oil and then it is flipped over onto the other side and then the other side cooks. So, it cooks one side and then it cooks the other. and the bits uh sorry near the surface of the oil. That's the the uh the oil is less hot, right? Because it's near the surface, so it's escaping. So that oil is less hot. The oil that's underneath it is much hotter and then it flips it over. And so again, you always have this bit around the middle that just isn't quite cooked as well as the other stuff. So it ends up being a little bit lighter. It's also less puffy. So no doughut actually comes out at that perfectly round shape. It's usually always kind of almost concave actually around the middle. So with this, I can select all of these points here like so. I have to shift select them. I can't do the alt click around it cuz it's not technically a mesh. Um, and then I can just scale it in like uh turn off proportional editing if you've got it on. And then just shrink it in like that. And that by itself will add just a little bit of realism to this cuz that is a detail that your eye won't notice. Everyone thinks donuts are just, you know, they're perfectly round, but they're actually not, right? They're always got this like concave kind of shape around it. So, that will add uh some realism, but then I can add in some little areas here where one part it got a little bit more puffy on that side, so that part's a little bit raised up. Um, and obviously this isn't as detailed as if you had, you know, if you were manipulating the the Taurus underneath, right? I can't do like, you know, small details. I can't, you know, sculpt in an area or do or do some crazy changes, but it's enough in in a pinch to do something like this. I'm just going to hide my plate. Um, which by the way, you can do it by hitting the eyropper, which is what I've been doing up there. So, not the eyropper, the eye icon. Um, you can also, um, do it by hitting H. So, you select an object in the viewport, you hit H, and then you hit Alt H to bring it back. So H or alt H um is a good hotkey to remember. Um and then here, so at the bottom here, cuz yeah, the same thing will happen at the bottom. There'll be parts where like the donut looks a little bit like raised on the plate a little bit like this. Just around the middle here. Um like that. There you go. Something like that. But this is just just a small amount of defamation, right? It might seem unnecessary, but it does help. It really does help things to feel more realistic when you go to the trouble of doing some of this. Um, and it's super super important. Um, but we can also now apply it once I know that I like everything. I don't want to have this like lattice sitting over it forever. So, I can just apply that by going to uh apply and then selecting the donut. And I can also say apply there. Um, and now I can just delete this lattice. And now it's like I modeled that, right? All those shapes are now like baked into it. Um, and it looks good. As I said before, if you did want to do any more detail, you could, you know, shift select multiple objects, go into edit mode. Um, and then using proportional editing, you could also do some like more targeted tweaks. If you really wanted to, uh, you know, manipulate the donut, you could do that. So, there are things that you can do. Um, it does make a difference. it is important. Um, but you know, it is also optional, but it's it's an excuse to kind of introduce you to some more tools and things in Blender. So, I'm kind of glad that I uh didn't do it at the start because um we can introduce you to that that kind of thing. So, all right, we got a lumpy looking donut. Good for us. Now is the exciting bit. We can talk about rendering. Making this actually look good because this is gray. This is boring. This is called the 3D viewport view. Okay. The the reason this looks looks boring and flat is that this is cheaper for your computer to actually process just the shapes in like a gray. There's no shadows. There's no lighting. There's no surface interaction or anything like that. This is fast for your computer to see to create that pretty image that looks realistic with light calculations and everything. That is called a render. And you can do a render by either hitting F12 on your keyboard or by going to render and then saying render image. Huh. And now that has taken a snapshot. The problem is is it looks like not the view that we were looking at. So we're looking at this view. Why did we get a view up here? The reason is is that Blender will always take the render from the camera view. So remember that thing that's like way out in the middle of nowhere we haven't touched. It's taking the view from that that camera. And you can look through the camera by hitting the camera view icon over there. So now that I'm here in this view, um, how do we move it in close? How do we get it close to our thing? So there's there's a number of like traditional ways to bring a camera into like in Blender. I'll actually show you the way I first learned to do this cuz it's actually just like natural to me. Um, but then I'll show you the method that actually most people prefer. So you can just with the camera selected, you can hit G. You can move things around like that. If you want to bring it in like just zoom to the like straightforward if you hit G and then middle mouse button that will like kind of what's it called? Dolly dolly in and out which can be uh very useful. Um and then if I want to like tilt it um I can like just hit rotate like that or I can rotate along the Z axis, right? Because I know how to like turn the camera. So that was how I learned to use uh the camera and how a lot of people still like to do it. But a lot of new people prefer this because now in 5.0 it's actually just a button right here. If you click this button now I can use the same controls that I used before um to to move the camera because if you don't have that checked the moment you just like hit your middle mouse to like orbit somewhere else it leaves the camera behind. Okay. But when you have when you're looking through the camera and you have this checked now, when I orbit around and I zoom and I do all the same controls as before, shift middle mouse, I can position the camera exactly where I want it. Get it right there um without having to worry. You just have to remember, don't then immediately orbit like you're going to go do something cuz the camera is still locked to your view. So, you have to make sure you uncheck it when you're done and then the camera is locked to that position there. Um, and by the way, this is like a small thing, but when you're working with like small objects, you often have to like change because Blender is like designed for like environment like like big types of scenes. This this camera is just too big. So, if you go to the camera settings, click the camera thing, then go to viewport display. I just changed the display of this. This has no bearing on the actual like final render. This is just how it displays in your viewport so that it's not so gigantic it's taking over everything. All right, the other way you can quickly look through the camera is numpad zero. So numpad zero will take you in and out. All right, but now that I'm there, I can hit F12 and look at that. That is a different look. It It's still gray because the default materials are gray. Um, but you can see there is shadow there. But check this out. We can do even more. So besides just shadow, like you might notice looking at the By the way, you can bring back a render by hitting F11. Uh, I should also mention, by the way, the first time you do a render, um, I think the first time, like if you've just opened Blender for the first time and you hit render, it'll have to do a bunch of like shader compilations and stuff like that, it should only need to do that once. It shouldn't have to do it every time you open Blender. We're using EV, which is a rendering engine we'll talk about soon. Um, but this there is some of that every time you you render like to when you create a new shader, it has to like develop those things. But anyways, it should it the first time it should be slow, but it should be quicker for every render after that. Okay, so there's shadow here, but you'll notice like in here there's no there's no detail, whereas in the real world you would see like bounce lighting from the the end of the plate there. You would see like some crevice information. Um there would be it' be darker and things and that is because by default there's an option that is turned off. So if you go to your render properties at the top there, this has all the information just pertaining to how something is going to be rendered. And by default, ray tracing is turned off, which I think is a mistake. I think they should change it to default on because so many people don't like EV, this rendering engine, because they they think it just produces fake looking images. But when you turn on ray tracing, look at how much better that looks. Um, by the way, if you want to compare renders, you can change to a new slot and then uh you can do a render, another render, and then you've got the previous render and then uh the new render in slot two. And then you can flip back by hitting J on your keyboard. And that's a way you can like quickly compare settings, which is very useful. Um, but you can see with ray tracing turned on, this is off, turned on, we get bounce lighting. So there's some light that's hitting the plate there and it's bouncing up. We've got like more information in the crevices. Um, and it just looks a lot more realistic than it did before. Um, you'll also have reflections when I show you some uh, material properties. So, that is something you should have on all the time when you're using um, EV. By the way, there is another rendering engine called Cycles, and it is much more realistic. However, it is a lot more slower. Um, it's honestly I I'm going to show you at the end a comparison between Cycles and EV, but it's actually negligible if you know the right settings for EV. So, I'm going to keep it on Eevee for the rest, which is actually good because Eevee is actually pretty powerful at doing most things. It's just it's it's a game engine style, so it's it's a rasterized rendering engine, whereas uh Cycles is a path trace rendering engine. Much more computationally heavy. Um whereas uh EV is much more faster. So, we're going to keep it on Eevee and I'm going to show you how to get really great results with it. And then at the end, we're going to flip it to cycles. So, if you want to see that final result, you can get it. But we're not going to start there because it's just not necessary and I don't think most people will actually need it. Okay. So, I'm going to talk about some materials. But first, um you'll notice like it's kind of annoying to have to like render something like go to render it every time you want to see um an image like that. And thankfully, you don't have to because in the top view here, these little icons, there is a mode here called render view mode. And this puts the render in real time. Look at that. I don't have to hit the render to wait to see my result. I can see it in my viewport. So, it used to be that like rendering engines were so slow that really to do a render was like a big task. You hit render and it would take hours to process something and it didn't look anything as good as this, right? But now rendering is like and computers are so fast that we can just have rendering running constantly whilst we are working and it's usually not computationally heavy. Um, so this is yeah, this is Eevee which is the the much faster one. um cycles would be a little slower, but still. Anyways, now that we're in render view mode, let's talk about materials. So, let's start with the like most different material. Let's go with the icing. So, looking at our icing here, if I want to make this look pink and change its overall appearance, if I go down to my material panel down here or material properties, um and then I can just click on new material. And now I've got a bunch of different options here. Okay. And these all do different things for um for for the the surface appearance. Like metallic will make it look like metal, right? Uh roughness will change like how sharp the reflection looks. Uh the base color, this is like the main one you want to change for almost every object. This is just the base color of the object. So obviously I can make that look pink like that. Let's pull in here a little bit closer. Focus on that. Um so I can make it look nice and pink. Uh, the other thing is is it's looking like way too diffused. It's almost like a chalk looking icing. But if I bring this back, I can make this look more shiny. I don't want to go like too far cuz then it's like mirror reflection. I want to go like, you know, somewhere around 2. The great thing is is we can really change these values at any point in the future. So when we add in other objects and there's different lighting setups, some of the settings can look a little off off at that point. Um, so it's very very common to like once you've set up all your lighting and everything to like re-evaluate your materials, but this completely non-destructive. I can change these at any time. And now I could create some very simple materials. Like I could say, let's make this look black. Make it like a black shiny glossy ceramic mug. So, um, by the way, you'll notice I'm not going all the way to black. There's a kind of a unspoken, well, it's not unspoken. People speak it. um you shouldn't um uh go fully black or fully white or like same with like uh colors. You shouldn't go like 100% saturation on a color because things start to clip. It's maybe a little outdated as like now color management is getting so good it's it knows actually how to handle saturated stuff and like dark things, but it's still like a general rule. Um, you never want to go like fully black because things are never truly like the real black is vant black, right? Which is like just this material which is like scientifically created to like emit no uh reflection simplifying it. But yeah, so like things will even a black mug that looks really black to you is probably not entirely black. So it's still there's going to be a little bit of lightness to it. So I'm just adding that in there. uh the roughness. This is where I can make this if I wanted this to look like a, you know, shiny ceramic mug, I could do something like that. These are just placeholders, by the way. I'm just using this as an example of how to create very simple um materials. Uh the plate here, uh let's go, yeah, make it just look a little bit shinier than by itself. And then the donut, let's go give it a, you know, brownish lightish color like that. Make it a little bit darker like so. Um, another value which is super important for something like icing and and uh the donut and it's it's really important for just two things which is food and characters and it is that um when light hits objects like this they are mushy right they're made of like organic matter and so light actually enters the object and it kind of scatters around inside it and then it re-exits it. Um, it's the reason why when you like look at your hand in front of a light or the sun or something, you can see the light shining through. You can even see your bones through your hand if it's a bright enough light. Um, so it's called subsurface scattering. And that value is underneath here where it says subsurface. If you go down here, um, you want to turn the weight all the way up to one cuz this is not the intensity of it. This is just like apparently this value is supposed to be zero or one. It shouldn't be somewhere in between. to control how much of it is the scale which is how much how far into the surface will the light penetrate. Um and then you can see here you can increase this or decrease this and you can see the light kind of get into it. Now by default it looks red which I also think is a mistake. Um it's very suitable for characters because characters need red because inside a character is blood right but for every other thing like food it shouldn't be red. Um, and confusingly and and I know there's a mathematical reason for this because of like how light and the physics of things, but like different wavelengths travel at different speeds right inside the ser that's how I understand it. So they've they've made the color of the subsurface um RG and B separated here. So you can see we've got red as one, then we've got green as 2, and then blue as 0.1. So essentially, I need to clear all those out and make them one, which here's a tip. You can drag over multiple values in Blender. So if you just click and drag down across something, and then you can just type in one and then hit enter and it makes all of those one. Um, and then now I can, you know, tweak this. I can make this look a little bit more milky like that. But we can, you know, we can adjust those. I'll do the same thing for my donut here. Um, give it some subsurface. Turn that up. And then I'll set this to one. And then yeah, let's just leave it at the default value. But you can see that that's with subsurface on. Actually, let me bring the camera in. All right, I'm going to go lock it. Bring this in. And I'm going to do a before and after render. So this is how you can use these these slots. So this is with subsurface on. Then I'll go to slot two. And now I'm going to select this. And then I'll turn it off. And then I'll do another render. And now hit J back and forth. So that's the difference that subsurface can make to something. You can see here where it's like fully dark. It's actually now the light is passing through it and that's what gives something a milky kind of look. Um, and it's, as I said, it's it's mostly true for things like food. You can see it. I take photos of it myself all the time when I'm out and about cuz I'm like, "Look at that subsurface." And my family think I'm weird. Um, but I I think it's cool. So, anyways, there you go. So, that's that subsurface. All right. Um, I'm going to pull the camera out to here and then um let's add a table because this has to be a table. Uh we're going to do the texturing in the next part. Um but let's add a table. Now normally if it was a table that you were um make sure I turn that off while I while I orbit around. You know if this was a large scene, right? Uh whatever you would have to do like model an actual table. If you know the camera is only going to be here doesn't matter about anything except the top surface. So all we need to model is shift a plane. That's it. That's our table. like I just have to scale it up a little bit. But this is our table. It's actually really common in 3D if you look at like breakdowns of 3D scenes in movies and stuff. Everything is fakery. They're just like buildings are cards. They're just like a a plane with a texture slapped on it. Nothing is real. Um you know, when the camera moves, they might have to like model things properly and people go like, "Oh, I have to model it now." Um but like if the camera's here, it doesn't matter. Just make it a plane. Um there you go. So, that's that's a a a donut on a plate with a mug. And that for somebody who has never used 3D before, that's an achievement. Um, this is the kind of thing that like back in the '9s, you probably would have won like scholarships for and stuff if you could pull this off. This used to be insanely difficult. It is still pretty difficult cuz 3D is hard. Um, but yeah, if you have uh uh if you're new at it, this should make you proud. You you've pulled this off. If you want to save this, by the way, you can go image and then go save. Um, and then you can just save an image, PNG. You got all the options, JPEG, etc. Um, however, if you want to make this look good, in the next parts, we're going to be making this look much, much better by doing some texturing and making our table look good and adding some ceramic textures and things to different objects. But this is kind of the end of the modeling section of the doughnut tutorial. Um so we we touched on you know basic primitives. We add slight defamations. Um we extruded some things to uh create like an organic looking shape. Did a little bit of sculpting. Um and then we created a mug right and then did some uh modifiers and subsurf to kind of uh create the general shape there. So those are kind of some of the techniques that you will need to learn to create lots of different objects in the future. Just some though. But there are so many other techniques and tools. Uh precision modeling, modeling mostly with hard objects, how to keep straight lines and then modeling something that is really custom and deformed. Getting those like largeish shapes there and just kind of like almost using the mesh like a guide mesh to kind of uh create shapes. And then actual characters like sculpting a character from nothing and then actually converting that character into something that looks and has like like subdivision so that the arm can move and then rigging that character so that you can actually move the arms like a puppet. So these are the kinds of techniques that we don't have time to go into in the donut but I do have time to go into in my course called the beginners academy. So all of these things you can see on the screen here are taught in that academy. If you only want to learn Blender for free and you just want to do this donut, that is fine. But if you want to go further and you want to learn how to actually think like a 3D artist and take an idea from your head and actually convert that into something that you can use, whether that be for 3D printing or for rendering or for whatever visualization purpose you have. Um, that's what this course is about. It's teaching you those foundational skills um to actually um create something that you want to create. So, if you're interested in that, uh the link for that is uh beneath this video and um it is designed for complete beginners who have finished the donut. But you've learned enough now that if you want to jump straight to that, you could. But if you want to continue on, we will jump into texturing next. I will see you in the next video. It's time to texture these bad boys finally after hinting at it for so long. Um, so we added some simple materials and uh that is actually fine for some types of objects like you might actually have a plate and go like it's just white plate doesn't need any texture but most things need texture. So I'm going to select my uh table floor here. I'm going to go to the material panel right here and I'm going to add a new material since it doesn't have one. And um let's look at how to add a texture. So, right here where we've got base color, if we want to add a color texture, we just click on this little uh yellow dot next. I know that's not clear. It will become clear when I show you nodes. Um, but when I click this, you get this uh slide out menu with a bunch of different options here. Um, and the one that I'm looking for says image texture. Okay. So, now I can hit uh open. And just to demonstrate this, I'm going to select a wood texture that I downloaded off the internet just to show you how this works. Now, on this note, if you happen to see this, if you use an image texture that you find online, it's because there is a new feature feature uh there's a purpose. There's a there's a new feature in Blender 5.0 where if it identifies in the name anything from the number 1,00 to 2000, I think um it'll think that is a UDI, which is a completely whole, you know, production professional workflow kind of thing. um it'll think it's a UIM and it anyways what you need to do is then change this to single image but most of the time most images if it doesn't have those numbers uh a string at the end it should just load in fine anyways let's say you had an image like this um and you wanted the table to look uh wood right we're not going to do that but you know just just to show you um you would see it it's okay right but there is no bump information okay um and that is because Of course, the 3D software doesn't know that there's supposed to be crevices here, right? Little dips in between the table, the the fine tooth uh grain of it. It has no idea because it's just taken with a single camera. It would have no idea how to guess guess what that true information should be. I mean, there is technically a way to guess it, but it never really turns out well. Um, so I'm not even going to bother showing you. Um, so most of the time when you're talking about texturing in 3D, um, and using image textures, like textures from the real world, um, you don't just grab a random image texture that you find online, you need to use PBR textures, which stands for physically based rendering textures. And there are many different places that you can get PBR textures from. The best website that I think is polygon, p o l i g n.com. The link is below. Um, and I think it's the best website because it's my website. [laughter] It's my company. Um, which I created 10 years ago and it is now the fastest growing texture library um, online. Um, so we've got photographers all over the world and they use specialized equipment to go out into the world and they capture surfaces um, usually like photograph the surface like hundreds of times which is what enables you to actually capture all of that height information, the bump, uh, the shininess, reflectiveness of materials um, and actually capture all of the maps that you can see here. for example, these weird looking maps um is exactly what Blender um needs to uh to to make the material look realistic. So, we got a bunch of different categories obviously like almost anything you want to create um you can find the textures um on here. But for just this tutorial, if you go to polygon.com/donut, the link for that is also below. Um but this has the uh six textures that you'll actually need to follow along for this video. Um, they're all free. We've made them free. All you need to do is get a free account. Um, and you can download all of those by just clicking them and then hitting, uh, download. And also, if you scroll down, uh, we've got some premium textures here if you have, uh, a subscription with us. Um, that you could use for the cafe scene that we're making to kind of spruce it up, make it your own, add some variation there. Um, so we've included some ones here that uh, go well uh, with the scene. Um, and if you use this link, you'll get 10% off uh, any any uh, plan you choose. So, the first texture I want you to start with is uh is going to be our cafe table. Um and obviously you could, you know, you could use any texture for that. You could use, you know, some of the ones down there if you wanted to. Um but I want you to start with this one, this concrete texture. Um because we're going to make this look like a concrete table, something that, you know, a lot of cafes can sometimes have. Now, we actually have a Blender add-on which makes downloading and importing these things even simpler. But I want to give you the traditional way to import PBR textures first so that you know how to use PBR textures just flat. Um, and then I want to show you the easy way after. So once you've got your free account, you can come back here and you can click on download this big download button. So that'll give you an 8K uh texture. You probably don't need it. You could probably get by with four, but I'm going to get the 8K just to show you how it looks. Now this will download a zip file like here. Okay, so it should be fairly quick. It's about 289 megs. Once you've downloaded this texture, I need you to unzip it. So, with Windows, you just right click and go uh extract all. Uh if you're on a Mac, you just double click it and it should just unzip itself. Now that I've got that, you can see you've got like a preview image there. We don't worry about that. It's the stuff that's in here. This is the good stuff. This is the one we actually need to use. So, I'm going to uh just copy this folder uh location. And then uh back in Blender for my selected plane here underneath base color. I'm just going to uh just like before, you know, select image texture if you haven't already. Then I'm going to click open. And then a lot of these images look pretty similar. There's very little detail across them. There is some uh but the one we're looking for is underscore base color. So that is the one we're going to start with. Okay. So this has given us a nice clean delit concrete floor texture. But the same problem, we don't have that height information there. And that's because just like before, we've only loaded in information into the base color. So, it's almost like this has been printed on cardboard. That's kind of the appearance there. So, we need to load in the other PBR texture uh maps. They're called uh all of those uh different uh images that we downloaded. And we could, you know, import and do them the same way by like clicking this little dot and then go image texture. But it's very fiddly. And this view here, you can probably tell, is like it's not designed for like complex texturing work. If you want to do complex texturing work, you should click on the shading tab at the top of your screen. Now, this view looks completely different. You've got a 3D view at the top. You've got these nodes here, which are very useful. And then you got two over here that I think are kind of pointless. I don't really think they should be here. Um, I've never really wanted them. So, I'm going to right click on the uh like the divider between these little windows here. I'm going to say join left. And then I'm going to do the same for the bottom. Join left. And then I also I want to flip it because I haven't I don't really like having like the top view and this. It's like it's too widescreen to like look at things like this. So, instead, I'm going to rightclick this, say join uh down, and then at the top of my screen here, the top of the little uh divider there until I get that little uh little arrows, I'm going to right click, and then I'm going to say vertical split. And then to make this one on the right hand side, those same shader nodes that we had from before. Click from this little drop down at the top. Uh by the way, if you don't see it, um you just have to like middle mouse like grab and pull across and you will get uh all the way to the end there. Uh but yeah, if I click that and then go shader editor, then close this by hitting the N key. It's a lot of steps. Uh but now I have my shader nodes. So the shader nodes over here, this is actually the same information as what we have in our material over here. For example, if I was to uh adjust this roughness, you can see that it's adjusting both of those values there. And when we added in this and we we clicked image texture, it was basically in the background adding in this node here which loaded in the image texture. So this is a it's a simplified view. If you want to do like small changes to a material, you use this panel here. If you want to do anything more complex than that, you use the shader nodes here. And it's pretty self-explanatory to understand how shader nodes work. It's like over here. This is your material output. It's the final material. And generally you have a shader which is something like this principal BSDF. That is the shader that you use for like 99% of materials now. And then you just have a bunch of values and then you can connect things into this um to do different things. And I'm going to show you how we can like tweak this texture and do a bunch of stuff. Um but first let's load in some of those PBR texture maps. By the way, if you're wondering uh the one the view on the left hand side of the screen here, why does this look different? This is because and again a middle mouse drag along the top there. Um, we we talked about the 3D viewport. We talked about the rendered view mode. We didn't talk about this one. This is the material preview mode. And it's literally designed for previewing materials because it loads in a like fake world view around it called an HDR, which you can actually swap out here. So you can see, you know, different types of uh environments, but it's a way to like quickly visualize a material um without having to like change a bunch of lighting to understand how the material is going to look cuz materials look very different in different uh lighting setups. So it's actually a very useful mode um and it makes sense. It's called material preview. So let's load in another image. So I'm going to hit uh uh I could hit shift A or I could just go add at the top of the screen there. It's cool that Blender's uh hotkeys are the exact same ones everywhere. So, shift A is the same as shift A over there, right? Add. Um, and I'm going to go uh texture and I'm going to say image texture. Okay. And now it's just asking where do you want to drop it. So, I can just drop it anywhere. And I'm going to click open. Then I'm going to navigate to that folder where all of the images are. And the first one I'm going to load in is this one called underscore normal, the purple one. Um, and it's you can remember it as the normal map because it's normal to ask why is that purple? That's how I remember it. >> [laughter] >> Um then uh yeah just hit open on that. And the place that you would put that you could guess is the normal input that little purple input there on our uh shader there. So the way you connect something to something else is you just uh where there's a point you just click that point and you just drag out and connect it to another point and then you release and then it is connected. Now you can see that there is some bump information now but you wouldn't know it but this is actually the wrong what's it's partly the way to connect something but we need to do something else. First of all you can see that between here and here. Whoops. Um we've gone from a yellow input to a purple input. Now it's okay to go from like yellow to gray because gray just means grayscale. So you can go from color information to gray information. That's fine. But normal is like vector information. Yeah, without getting technical like the normal is the way the faces like that invisible line of the faces and this is like faking which direction each of those pixels has. Um, but basically we need to add something between here and here to convert this from color information into vector information. And we can do that by hitting shift A to add again and then going to displacement in this dropown and clicking normal map. You can also if you can't find it, uh you can go to the search bar and you can type in normal map as well. All right. Once you've got this normal map, you then just need to drag it over that line until it lights up and then you just want to do a single click and it will connect it. Okay. So now it is correctly connected but but still it's just not quite right. There are there is a lot of steps to like manually connecting PBR texture maps which is why I want to show you the fast way to do this um after this. But I need to show you this because you might be using PBR texture maps from elsewhere or from like production files and stuff and you need to know how to actually manually uh connect them. So when you're working with PBR texture maps, the only uh texture that should have the color space sRGB is your base color. Okay? Every other map should have the color space set to non color. And again, without getting technical, I keep saying that because the shaders are very technical. Um it it basically it's it's it's converting it to linear space. So it's using that um or it's actually not doing any conversion. It's just saying like let's use the raw values from that and um just use it linear. I don't Yeah. Anyway, [laughter] um other other software sometimes call those utility maps, but uh Blenders is non-color data. Okay. So now that we've got that, look, we've got bump across our concrete there. And if we went into the rendered view at the top there, um you could see if I took my lamp at the top there and then I brought this like way down to the uh the plane there, you can see we get this like nice gritty shadows cast across the surface there. Um and this is how you make materials that look realistic. You can't get this information any other way than by very expensively capturing these surfaces. And I know that because I've seen the bills. I know how much it costs to capture surfaces like this. Um, and it can be uh thousands. That's where we started and over the years we've got that price way way down. Um, but it's it's a very expensive uh capturing process. Um, it's not easy to do. It's not fun. It's very boring to do. Um, so unless you really want to go into that space, it's not something you want to try to do. Um, anyways, so that's the normal map, but there is uh another map which is useful. So, I'm going to hit uh shift A to add another map. And I'm going to say texture, and I'm looking for image texture. Okay. And then I'm going to click open on this. And this time, I'm looking for the one with underscore uh roughness at the end of the name. Okay. And then just like before, I need to make sure my color space is set to non-color data. And then finally, I want to drag this out um to plug into my roughness input. Now, when you do that, you'll see that the material goes very very dull. So, it was like, you know, before when we set this to like shiny like this. Um, when we connect this in here, it goes dull because concrete is dull. So, this is actually like the correct value for concrete. We like calibrated it to make sure. So, this is is that now it's very often that you actually want to customize something. Like for example, cafe tables often have concrete that has been like buffed or like uh coated in some sort of gloss or or something like that or an epoxy. So it can it it's totally fine to just want to have like the free control of the slider there and not use it. Like the maps are there if you need them, right? If you really want to go for something realistic, you would use them all, but sometimes you don't and it's totally fine to just disconnect them. Now, the other maps here, by the way, if you're curious, this yellow one, O RM, we don't use that in Blender. That's used by game engines. Polygon provides them because we, you know, serve all the different uh uh renderers and softwares out there. Displacement is a different method uh than normal map. Um we're actually going to use that on the donut. Uh metallic is if the material contains metal. That's the only time you would use that. And then the other one is occlusion uh map, an ambient occlusion map. That's if it there's like deep crevices, like if it's like a pebble pathway or something like that. This is the actual like shadows that like collects inside of crevices. Um, but we don't need that honestly. Most of the time these three maps, the base color, the normal map, and the roughness, that is like 90% of materials. Um, and that's really all that you need for those. But it is still very finicky to do this, right? Am I wrong? Like having to remember the color space and connect this and convert that and like even just these three things was like 30 clicks. So, that is why most people um that are dealing with PBI textures don't want to have to do this. They want to use an add-on like the Polygon add-on. So, at the top of the page on polygon.com/donut, you can click this link that says download polygon add-on or you can just go to uh/blender. This will show you how to install it. If you don't want to read that, I'll show you how to do it right now. Unlike before, when you have your zip file, do not unzip it. uh Blender actually needs this zip um in order to properly install it. So what you do is you drag out and you release the zip file from anywhere on the computer and then it will say install this because it'll recognize as an add-on and then you say yep install it and you say okay. Now if you go to edit preferences then go to add-ons you should see one there called polygon at the top there which means it has been successfully installed. If it didn't successfully install, maybe you're on a Mac and maybe it actually automatically unzipped itself, in which case you need to rezip it and then drag it over. Um, but yeah, it should install if it is properly zipped. Now, once you have done that, in your 3D viewport over here, if you hit N, which brings up your properties, you should see a tab there that says polygon. Then, if you just like oneclick login, um, this will take you here and then it will just say login confirmed. go back into Blender and you should see now we've got materials in a scroll bar, right? Which is pretty cool. And I can type in anything I want. Let's say uh sprinkles cuz I know there's some sprinkles materials here for example. Um but you could also browse by um category, right? You can look at all the different ones. And importantly, this will actually download it. So oneclick download like this and then oneclick apply. And look at this. All of this has been set up automatically. All of these are automatically set to non-color. We've got the exact precise um correct use of every single map that is ready to go. But anyway, go back to my previous material here and let's go to the uh free category and then let's use another one. So, this speckled glazed uh ceramic plate. Um, and by the way, you can, uh, like click the little drop down there if you want to see something online to get like a better picture for it. Um, you can, uh, quickly view it that way. But, uh, this is the one we want to apply to our plate here. So, with my plate selected, um, I need to first of all hit download. I've already done it, which is why I don't see it, but you hit download, and it'll just save it to your uh, folder, which is in your preferences. And then with an object selected, you should be able to uh, hit apply. If you don't see the apply box, it means that you haven't got an object selected. So, make sure one is selected in order to click uh that box. Okay. So, we have correctly um applied it. You can see all the nodes are there. It's the correct material. Why isn't it showing up on our object? Now, this isn't a fault of the texture or anything like that. This is to do with texture mapping, which is the next thing to understand when it comes to textures is textures are 2D, right? 2D. And our objects are obviously 3D. So how do you apply a texture to an object? There are so many different ways. And the most common way is to use UV unwrapping, which is the default method, which is what it's actually looking for right now. You can see that's the texture coordinate that it's called in is UVs. And for something like a plate, this is the most simplest thing ever cuz it's just creating UVs. So in edit mode, so just tab and then select your entire mesh like that. Then hit U for unwrap and then select unwrap anglebased. And look, now the texture has been applied. So what did that actually do? If you go to your UV editing tab at the top of your screen there, just click that. You will see, and let's uh focus on our object. So number pad right there. And I'll just uh turn this off so we can see the mesh underneath it. and this one as well. And let's look at uh the wireframe. Okay, so when we UV unwrapped it, it basically took I mean it in in the case of something as flat as this, it just took a snapshot of it and then it put it into the 2D space over here. And from your drop down, you could actually change it to the color map and you could see where it's actually applied to on it. So if I select a point right here on the mesh, you can see which point is actually selected there. So it's right next to this little spot and you can see there is this spot in the ceramic there. Okay. And as I uh if I was to select everything with A and then if I was to hit R to rotate, you can see that the texture is being updated over there. In fact, if I turn off the overlay there just to uh see it more clearly and then I turn on the thickness, right, watch this. As I select everything in edit mode, I can move this around and the texture coordinates are updating in real time. Okay. I can also scale this by hitting S. And this is a really common thing you do because like often a mesh is a completely different size to the captured size of the object. Um, in Polygon's case for like detailed textures like this, this is a 30x 30 cm texture, which is actually probably pretty perfect for a plate. Maybe maybe a plate should be a little bit uh scaled in like that. So the dots are a little bit bigger. But you could see this is very very easy to do. Let's go back to layout over here. I'm going to select the icing now and let's do uh one that's a little bit more complicated. So, I'm going to hit N to bring up the properties again. I'm going to scroll down. So, this is in the textures free category. Scrolling down and I'm looking for the strawberry pink uh glaze. Okay, so we got this strawberry pink um texture, right? And this was actually captured um by literally pouring a bunch of icing into a pan um and then using a stereoscopic scanner to capture it from all dimensions so that you get this like really interesting like that height information there the little bumps of like the sugar crystals and stuff popping through. Pretty cool. Anyways, let's hit apply on that. Okay, you can see there is some texture on here unlike the plate which came in like nothing. And the reason for that is that when you add in um a Taurus, like certain primitives, we added in a Taurus, it actually comes in with UV unwrapping already created. Okay, so with this this one here, so it's already got some UVs, but all that extra work that we did at the bottom there, like extruding some things down, that's all been missed. All of the way that things have been shifted because now it's lumpy, all of that is missing as well. So it would help to actually UV unwrap this again and project these points in a way that actually match matches the mesh. So the way to think about this is what if this mesh was made of paper and we had to lay the paper flat over onto this texture on the left hand side over here. Where would you place the cuts on the mesh in order to lay it flat? And in the case of something like this, where I would place the cuts would be essentially along the edge, right along here. Okay. So, if I altclick along that edge there, that should select all the way around it. So, do check that it goes all the way around it. Um, if it doesn't, then it just this next step will come out a little bit funny. Um, anyways, now that I've selected that, to add a cut, we're going to hit Ctrl E, and then I'm going to select mark seam. Okay. And now, if I was to go back into uh wireframe mode here, and then just turn off this selection. You should see that we've got a line here that is red. By the way, the one next to it that is purple, that is the one that has the crease, which we added when we used the solidify thing to make it cling to the uh to the donut a little bit better. So, we've got this line that goes all the way around it. Okay. And that has done a cut. Now, nothing has changed yet because we still haven't UV unwrapped it. And that's okay because we need to do one more right in the middle of our donut. If you just select like a random point on the inside of the donut there, then hit your focus key um tilda three or numpad period, then you should be able to get in nice and close to it. Now that I'm here, I'm going to do the same thing. So hold down alt and then select this line here. And now I'm going to hit Ctrl E and do another seam. Okay, now that I've done that, select the entire mesh and just like before to unwrap it. It's U to unwrap and unwrap angle based. Now watch what happens. Ready? Wow, that's taking a long time. I don't know why it took that long. I've never seen it stall like that before. Okay, anyways, but look, that is perfect. That's pretty well perfect. I mean, there's probably a little bit of stretching there. There's always going to be stretching, guys. You'll never get it perfect, but as long as the stretching is minimal, like that is pretty well good. It's laid flat. Like, it looks almost like a cowhide rug, you know, like the dead animal that's been stretched out. It looks like that, but like that's that's how it works, right? So, now if I go into material view, look at this. Now we no longer have I mean you couldn't really see it clearly before but we no longer have the stretching um that was happening there. It's now been properly um stretched across it. It's been properly mapped and so we've got the texture going all the way in there. Now the scale of this is probably wrong. So um I like to like change the scale here and I want to see it over there. So I like to turn off my over uh overlays at the top there. So you can just click that little box. That'll turn off everything so you can't even see what's selected. And now I can just change the scale here. Um, and I could make it bigger or smaller. Um, but yeah, you can play with the size and and try and get it good. But why does it look so pale and pink and like not as fun as it was before? Well, it's because when we added in that texture, right, when we clicked this, it over rid overrid um the material that we had before. So, if you go back to your shading tab, you'll see we got all these textures. And for example, before we had a pink color that was in the base color. Now it's been overridden with the actual strawberry color which was captured with the camera. However, that strawberry is a little paler than what I want. So, I'm actually going to disconnect it because there's not actually that much information in color when it's something like this. All the information is in the bump. So, we can really just get by with Actually, we don't need metallic because there's definitely no metal in it. Um, I'm going to keep the roughness. That's okay to keep because I just actually want to see that. I'm going to disconnect this which is the subsurface amount um because I want to control that myself as well. And I'm just going to leave the roughness and the normal. And that's it. Oh, I should explain how I was disconnecting those. So, if you hold down control and then rightclick drag, that is how you can disconnect. You can also just click these points and then just disconnect like that. But I prefer to controll rightclick drag and that'll cut it. Um sever the tie. And now that I'm here, I'm just going to set these values to what I had before. You know, just playing it by eye. What pink color looks good. Set my subsurface amount radius to one. And then I'll change this uh scale value till it looks nice. But there you go. I've now got my fleshy pink donut. Um but I I now have this lovely bubbly um sugar crystals, real glaze going on the doughut. All right. Now, let's do another fun one. Let's do the donut itself. Now, this is an interesting one that I had my team do um before we did uh before I started recording. Um I had them go out and scan a real donut, scan it all the way around, then map it to a Taurus, and then just get the extracted data. And because this has been already UV unwrapped to map the exact square just like what we um uh sorry, yeah, ju just like what is captured for this this type of map here. Now I can just apply this and it'll automatically do it. So let's do that. Hit apply. And that's pretty good. Like that's nice color. We got nice bump there. If we bring back our icing, you can see that's already pretty good, right? But there is something else that we can do because when I was talking about shading, you might remember I mentioned that there is two different ways of um uh creating normal sorry creating bumps, right? and the the the normal one, the purple one, that's the one we've been using uh thus far, but there's another one here which comes in disconnected, and it's the displacement map. Now, in the newer versions of um the Polygon add-on, like the next version that's coming out after this, you'll be able to in this last used box here, you'll have an option that says um displacement and sorry, displacement type. You can currently see it in cycles. So, if you use that, you can change it here to displacement and bump. But because EV only just came with this feature to enable displacement, it's not yet there. Um, so we would have to connect it um ourselves. But essentially all it's doing is when you change that little drop down there. If I grab all these things here, hit G to move them down. And then I se this tie with the normal and then I take my displacement. Don't put it in the normal input though. Put it in the displacement output of the material here. And what this is doing now is well it's it's still a fake bump but the other setting that it would enable is here in your material properties right down here at the bottom where it says displacement it would change that to displacement and bump. And now if I select my icing hit H to hide it. Um you can see that the mesh has changed. Right? This is the underlying mesh. It's now kind of expanded and this is actually the captured data of the height and it's being projected out of the donut. but it can only use the actual data which is on the mesh. Okay. So, it currently looks kind of like chunky um because there's not enough information. So, if you go to your modify uh panel here and then what would we add to more add more geometry? We would add in another subdivision surface. And now when we do that, if I increase this, you can see if I increase it two, three, four times in the viewport, you can see I get a lot more data come through. Okay. I I think three is about it. Um I'm just going to I'll I'll set render to three or four. Yeah, I'll set it to three. That should be fine. Um it comes in a little bit projected. If you want to change the scale of it, you can also do that. Um here I could change the scale from 0 2 to about a 0.15. Also, you should see how it looks with your icing. So I'm going to hit alt h. Um you can see it's actually yeah clipping through it. So I'll select my donut again and I'll change this scale here to about a 0.12 like that. And then of course the other value that this is missing is the subsurface scattering because again we overrid the uh the placeholder stuff that we had there before. So in here I'm going to sever this connection and then I'm going to set this to one. And then I'll just make this you know whatever. And look you can make this look like so buttery nice like look at how soft and fluffy this doughut looks. How cool is that? Like that. Bring it back. Look at that. We've got real icing with the real crystals. We've got real doughut that has been captured and projected onto our Taurus. Um, and that's just two materials, which is really cool. The final object to texture is our mug. And I'm going to do that in the next part because we need to go much deeper into UV unwrapping and show how to unwrap a custom object. So, join me in the next video. The time has come to UV unwrap and texture our mug. So, we did a little bit with our icing, our donut, and our plate. We got most of that for free. Um, it those were very simple objects. This is a little more complex, so we're going to have some fun with it. So, first things first, we need to apply a texture to it so that we can see the UV unwrapping and see that it's working well. So, I'm going to hit N to bring up my properties. And uh I'm using the polygon add-on and I'm going to apply the ceramic texture that we're going to use. So the free one that we're using for this tutorial you can find by typing in donut 5. That'll bring up all the ones we're going to use in this tutorial. And uh the one we're using is this one. This rustic gold uh ceramic texture. So I've already downloaded it. So you'll see uh download. It'll look like download like that. Um and then with the mug selected, you want to hit apply. If the mug isn't selected like that, you'll see import, which would just like load it in as a like fake user material that you could reference. But anyways, so select the mug and then say apply. And now we can close that and let's take a look. Now, you might be surprised at how well that came in. Like the handle's no good, but the rest of it is semi okay, right? There's some stretching on the rim and the base, but like why did that come in? Okay. So, if you go to the UV editor here, you can see we got some islands and this matches exactly what you would expect if you created a cylinder. So, when we modeled this mug, you remember we started with a cylinder and that's a primitive object. And Blender automatically UV unwraps the primitive objects for us. So, everything that is still a cylinder form is okay. But everything else that we created from scratch, like this handle here, it has no idea what to do with it. So, it's all stretched and all screwed up. So basically we have to start from scratch and um and do this again. But that's okay. That's the point of this tutorial to learn how to do UV unwrapping. So as I explained with the icing, the best way to think about uh UV unwrapping is to imagine that this object was made of paper and we have to lay it flat onto a 2D surface which is what this is over here. This is the 3D uh object. This is the flat surface it's being laid on. So, it's like we are turning this into paper and we have to lay it flat. Where would you put the cuts on this object in order to make it flat there? And so, the most obvious place you could think of if you're looking at doing this is like, I know for sure this handle has to be separated from the rest of it in order to start to lay it flat. By the way, uh before we start, it would probably help with your um uh mug selected in the modifiers. You've got this little box there that says uh on cage. So if it's turned off, it'll show you like the unsubdivided result around it, but then like parts of it get hidden by the mesh. So I usually turn it on just so that I can see it and like all the mesh is visible. It just makes UV unwrapping it uh a little bit easier. Okay, so the handle needs to be separated. So right here is an incision point, right? So I'm going to select these vertices here by holding down shift and just shift selecting. Then I'm going to hit Ctrl E and then select mark seam. Now Blender won't have updated yet. So this hasn't changed over here. So if in order to see that we would first have to select the whole mesh, then go U and then select unwrap. Or the method that I prefer to do and I would suggest you do this too in your 3D view over here, there's a little options drop down at the top there. If you click that and then select live unwrap, now whenever you do um a seam, so let's just do another seam here. Mark seam on the same spot. Um it will automatically do that UV unwrap for you. So that's really helpful. Um now it looks worse. you have to go backwards before you can go forwards. Um, but that's okay. So, we've only got one uh incision. So, let's do another one, the other half of the handle. So, down here, I'm going to select these points like so, and then hit Ctrl + E and then mark seam. Okay. So, now it has changed. So, we've got the handle here. Now, if you want to select just the handle, by the way, in the 3D viewport, if you just mouse over that part of the motion of the the motion, the mesh, and then hit L, then in this little um uh last use box here, if you select seam, it'll now just select the parts of the mesh that match that seam. Um, by the way, I should also be in edge select mode. That would definitely be helpful um because we're placing seams on edges. But yeah, if I do that now, uh that selection, you can clearly see that this is the part of the mesh, which is this handle over here. So, it's been separated. Okay, so we've got like two parts of the mesh. We've got all of the this part of the mug, which is this mess over here. And then we've got this handle here, which is this part over here. So, this is like somewhat uh unwrapped. But again, if this was made of paper, to lay it flat, we would have to do another incision. So, when I'm placing a scision like this, like I have to place an incision somewhere here, right? like here, here, here, or here. And because a a seam generally makes a seam, [laughter] like a visible line in a texture that will often not be um like lined up, that that can look ugly, right? It's like it's not a good look for a model. So, often when you're placing a seam, you put it in a place that is hidden. So, I mean, it it would be a really good spot if we had like a line right down the middle of the mug there, but next best thing, I'll place it just to the side there. So, holding down alt, select that edge. Now, I'm going to hit control E and then say seam. And now, look at that. This now has been pretty well UV unwrapped. Okay, that section there. That's pretty good. So, now we just have to do the same for the rest of the mug here. And this is pretty easy to do. So, it's I mean, you can tell like one place we would have to put a cut um would be like the base of it, like right here um inside of our mug. So, I'm going to hold down alt just on this face at the bottom there. And I'm going to hit Ctrl + E, and I'm going to say scene just to separate that that single circle there out by itself. Now, I I need to put one cut that goes right down the um right down like here, like this part of a mesh. Like, I need to do a cut right there. But again, that can create like a visible like line. So, I want to try to hide it by putting it on like close to this handle here because also there are other seams here and it will just kind of help to just have it on one part of the mesh. Um, because like you you could like move it and hide it by the camera and stuff like that. So, it just helps to put it all in one place. So, holding down alt here. So, alt click on that so it goes all the way down to there. And then it kind of stops here on the handle there. So, I'm going to select this line. Just holding down shift. And then I also want to do it right there. So, um, holding down alt on that. And now I'm going to hit Ctrl E and then say mark seam. Okay. So, now that's looking a lot more, uh, released, right? There's less, uh, tension in there, but there is still this like pinching effect happening at the bottom there. So, just like in the middle there when we selected that and separated it, I want to select this part of the mesh, which is underneath the mug, and I want to unwrap that or sorry, uh, uh, place a seam there. By the way, if you want to like like cuz we can't really get to that very easily. If you want to just see an object by itself, you can hit forward slash. So, in object mode with the mug selected, forward slash. And now everything has vanished. Now, Blender doesn't do a very good job of showing you that you have you're just looking at an isolated view except for at the top there where it says local. So, there's many times when I'm using Blender and I for I'm like, where's the rest of my scene? And then I remember, oh, that's right, I'm in isolated mode. And you only know because it says local there. So, you just have to remember if like you ever get to that point of like where is everything? What? Just forward slash and it'll bring it back. Okay. So, forward slash uh there we go. And by the way, if you don't have a uh forward slash key, you can go to view um and then go local view toggle local view like that. All right. So, now that I've done that, I can get underneath my mug edit mode and I'll select this, say E, and then I'm going to say mark seam. Okay. So now when we look at this, you can see we've we've now we have pretty well successfully UV unwrapped this. Okay, cuz these points are now they're they've been flattened out. Now there's there's some stretching. There's always going to be some stretching, but as long as it's not like obvious, it's generally okay. But now what I want to do um is I want to load in the actual texture that's that's being viewed here. So I can see where this like line is being uh viewed on the um on the mug there. So, from the drop down here, I'm going to select that base color, this little ceramic mug here, which by the way was actually scanned from a real mug um that we uh we we bought and then scanned around it. So, this actually matches like what you'd find in a store. Um so, it's loaded in there. And now with this island uh which I can select by hitting L like that, I can now hitting R, I can start to rotate and move it around like this. Okay. So, I'm going to place this. Let's go. I'm just kind of guessing. But that is Yeah, that's the bottom of my mesh. If you don't know, like you can go into like face select mode and just like select a few faces and you can see them like update over there like that, which is cool. Um, but yeah, so that's the bottom of the mug, which is good. And let's get that like, you know, try and get try and get a straight line there. Okay. And you can see we can't, [laughter] right? We've got the line like going up here and then we've got another line coming down here. And obviously we want these to meet. But how can we do that, right? Because the lines are doing that because this part of the mesh is all the way uh over here and then the other part of the mesh is like yeah much higher up, right? So we essentially in order to get this to to line up, we need to make this island here look straight basically like almost like what it was before when it was uh the default cylinder view. Now, there are some tools in Blender that let you like quickly align like one line, right? So, if I selected this line here, I could rightclick and then I could say align auto. And you can see it would give me a pretty straight line for for that one there. The problem is is that it just does that one line. If I wanted to do all of it, I would have to do these like one by one like this. So, Blender really needs a tool um that would like let this happen like easily across an entire island. And although Blender doesn't have this tool, there is a free extension and it's a great excuse to talk about extensions in Blender and how to install them. Um but yeah, there's a free one and it's amazing and so I'm going to show you how to get it. So, go to edit, then preferences, then go get extensions. And uh with a fresh install, um it'll first ask you do you uh want to let Blender read the internet? cuz it's not going to do that without your permission. So, say allow online access. Uh, and by the way, you can change that in the future if you want inside of system allow online access. Anyways, now that you're here in the top right hand corner of the get extensions, there's a little uh unassuming dropdown. Then click on visit extensions platform. You can also find it by just going to extensions.blender.org. Anyways, so these are all extensions that are um they're not made by Blender, so they're not like official, but they are all free. So, they all have to meet the criteria of free. I believe there's some other things in there like it has to I don't know, probably like safety checks and things like that, but these just like expand the capabilities of Blender by the community. So, the one they were looking for is actually this one here, Moy 3 UV, which you could find by just, I think, typing in UV. Weirdly, when I was typing in Moy 3, uh Oh, no, that's right. Oh, it's Mio. Oh, that's why I wasn't finding it. It's Mio3. Okay, there you go. I I thought Blender search was so bad, but it was just Mio3, not Moy. All right, Mio3 UV. Okay, so this is the extension. Now, you might think like I have to download something, unzip it, and do that. No, it's actually really simple. So, all you do is you grab your browser like this. Just like separate it to make it like a half window like this. >> [snorts] >> Then all you're going to do is uh you're going to in the bottom corner of this little window here where it says get add-on, you're going to click that and then you get this like little outline box there and see how your cursor changes to this little um like crosshair thing. You just click and drag out from that and then drop it into Blender and it'll now say, "Do you want to install it?" And you say, "Yes, I do." And then that's it. You can see at the bottom there it says installed mio3 u UV. And now in our UV editor over here in this window, if I hit N to bring up properties, you can see I've got a little option here that says Mio3. And look, we've got a bunch of options that I honestly have not played with. Most of them, [laughter] most of the ones I'm looking for are right at the top here. So the one that I use all the time is gridify. Okay. And look what happens as I click this.un. It does what we're looking for. It converted that from this like stretched like kind of uh view to making it look actually squarish and uh and like a grid. And that is perfect. And now you can see that line there across the ceramic is lining up across it. So that is absolutely perfect. I have no complaints. It is uh it's worked perfectly well. I do though just want to apply it to this part of the handle as well because the same thing would apply to that. Uh make sure I do it in face select mode. So I'll hit L. So I'm just selecting the handle by itself. And then here with this or you can also just do it on the island itself there like that. And then go to Mio again and I'm looking for gridify. Okay. And there we go. Great. Now um you you can position these however you want. So, you can select an island by hitting L and then you can like find a different portion of it. Um, by the way, if you don't want to see the like cuz you can't really see the texture under it very well. Sometimes I just disable the overlay at the top of the screen there. That will just like disable all the overlay so you can't see anything on the mesh there at all. Um, so you just have to remember that it's doing that. But when I've got that now, I can like move things around. Um, and I can see them visualized on the actual mesh there, which is helpful. So, if I wanted it to be like a larger looking texture, I could make it smaller, right? That's a kind of a look. Or I could make it bigger. And I'll probably make it like somewhere in between about about there, I think, actually looks kind of good actually. Yeah, basically filling the space like that from like left to right, which is nice. And then for the handle, I need to also resize that. So, I'm going to select this part of the handle. And by the way, you'll notice as you slide it off the screen there, it doesn't matter where it is because it's just going to be tiled. Okay? So that texture is just tiling all the way to the left and to the right and above it. Um, so yeah, so I can position this wherever I want. Um, like so. Now you can see here this little empty patch here, right? This is one part of the handle cut, right? It's that section. And then this section here would be this right here. So, if you actually wanted to line it up to be perfect and also get the texture, it's it's called like matching the the tixel density across the islands. Um, but yeah, you could like scale this down to be like roughly the same portion, like the same part of the mesh if you want to. There's still like there's extra stretching and stuff in there. Um, the other thing I sometimes do is like I look at the size of a square like this and then I go like, what is the size of the square over here? And it's like, all right, that's pretty close, but I can see it needs to be stretched like further this way, right? Cuz this is more rectangular than this. This is more kind of squarish. So, I'm going to select this whole island and I can hit S and then uh Y, like so. So, till they're kind of kind of the same size like that. And then just to make them fit, I would scale that down again. And there you go. And now I'm just going to move that up a little bit just so that this part here of my my texture I want it to kind of line up there. I don't even know actually if this is physically possible. Maybe somebody who works in pottery will tell me. But like see how it looks like it's kind of like dipped in something. I don't even know if that's like something that is like painted or like branded or something like can it go halfway up the handle as well? I'm assuming it is. Maybe I thought it was like dipped in something, but that could be like this could be a completely implausible mug is all I'm saying. [laughter] But that that's how it is in 3D. Like you have artists that have like never done engineering before and they design a robot and they're like and everyone's like, "Yeah, that looks cool." And then like all the people in engineering are like, you know, that's never going to fly, you know? [laughter] Um, but that's that's fine. It's part of the part of the fun of it. Okay. And now there's there's a lot of stretching going on right here. And that's because this gridify thing, as good as it as good as it is. You can see that this part, right, it's really like shrunk it in there and it's made it a really thin line. So all I'm going to do is uh I'm going to go into edge select mode by hitting two and I'm going to select that edge. Oop. Okay, I can't select that edge very well. I'll just shift select them one by one like that. And then I'm just going to pull it up just to add more detail there. Like so. And I think it is also like stretched a little bit because it's kind of like wrapped around it and it's kind of like peeling outwards a little bit. I think it works a little bit better if you also scale that part out a little more. So I'm just scaling out that line. And you can see that has now blended in pretty seamlessly. Like that's about I mean it's a little messy there, but it's about as good as it would get on that. That's that's pretty good. And then I'll just do the same for the bottom part here. So, I'll select these edges. Uh, actually, no, I'll do it over here. And you can see you get both parts of it, right? Because that line there exists across two islands, right? This island and then this island here. So, anyways, I'll select this in the editor here. And then I'm going to pull it down to give me more data. And then I'm going to scale it out a little bit as well. And look at that. That's pretty good. We've got a pretty seamless looking result. I mean, and honestly, that's that's about as good as it gets. And by the way, I I should have said like it doesn't actually matter that the UV islands are overlapping here, but it does matter if you were to be painting onto this. Um, and the reason that that that makes a difference is like you can imagine if you were doing a paintbrush and you had painted parts of the mesh here and like one part was for the handle and this part was for that. If you had islands that were overlapping each other, then you would have like different parts of the painting like appearing twice across it. So, there's kind of like two styles to UV unwrapping. This is the simplest one, which is just like if you've got an image that you've got off the internet or a texture or whatever that's just being tiled across it, or even not tiled. Like, it doesn't matter if things are overlapping because you know that the texture is different enough your eyes not going to spot it. But if it's painted, yes, they do have to be separate parts. And another thing as well, if you're UV unwrapping for a game asset, it's even more complex because all the islands have to be separated, but there's also like margin because like in games, you develop like multiple versions of a mesh at different resolutions. Then there's different texture resolutions. So, you have to create like big margins and it gets all like complicated. It It's like a completely separate thing. So, if you wanted to texture for games, you should probably look at like game texturing type tutorials if you really wanted to go into that. Um, but anyways, the rest of it is fine. Like that part of it, all this like stretching in here. If you wanted to fix that, you could. It doesn't matter cuz we're going to put some like coffee foam along the top there. The base of it doesn't matter cuz we're not going to see it. So, yeah. But that's that's also the the thing to consider is like, you know, when people are like on Twitter and they're like, "Look at this model. Look how terrible it is." It's like, yeah, it might be for a purpose like this. It's designed to be viewed from above and that's all it needs to do. Like if you've like pulled it apart and it's like how terrible does it look? It's like yeah, the camera was never going to go in there or under there. So that's why it doesn't matter. [laughter] Anyways, all right. So the mug is pretty good. The only thing I'll do is I'm going to go to my material over here. U actually sorry I'll go to my shading tab at the top there so that I can access the nodes here and I'll just make a few tweaks to it. Just like before when I mentioned these maps here like this is going to give you the physically accurate um data from the actual ceramic that we scanned, right? And it's like color calibrated and everything like that. Um but sometimes you want artistic control and I want this to look shinier. This is a little dull for me. So I'm going to disconnect my roughness here and then I'm just going to play with this slider like so. So I've still got the bump. So like most of the detail that I want is still there, but like I don't need I don't need um I don't need to look as dull as it was. So that is pretty good. I also don't need the metallic shader. Like that's just superfluous. Um there's another one here, O RM. Oh, sorry, not OM. Uh ambient occlusion or AO. This is another one which is completely unnecessary. Um it's just for like crevices of information, but this is like flat ceramic, so there's no crevices. um we have to provide it like standardized for all of our materials so they're all uniform. But a lot of materials just don't need it. So in a case like this um I just don't want the AO like this map here. So I could just like disconnect that or actually if you want to delete something like this and you want it to retain its connection rather than just deleting it cuz then you have to manually connect it. Um if instead if you hit Ctrl X it will delete it and retain its connection. So that's just a little tip there for you. Okay, great. So, now let's go back to my layout mode over here. Let's have a look at it with our lighting. And that is pretty good. Now, the only thing I will change though, looking at this, is this concrete is mighty pale. It doesn't look very good. Doesn't look very luxurious, like a like a cafe, like a high high fallutin. Ooh, look at me. I'm paying $9 for a coffee. Aren't I fancy? Doesn't look like that, right? It looks like dusty, like a workman floor. So, we can adjust this by going to the shade tab. This is a great excuse to uh to go a little uh a little into the nodes, right? So, this is the one that we actually manually set up. So, it's, you know, it's pretty clean. We just got a base color and we've got a normal map, right? But between here and here where it connects, we can adjust the color of this. And I'm going to show you how simple you can you can completely transform the look of a texture. So, if I hit uh shift A or just go to add at the top there, then go to color and there's a bunch of different color options like brightness and contrast. I wouldn't use that. That's like a like what is brightness? What is contrast? There's a whole like color debate and things. Color ramp can be useful if you just want to like convert something to like your own set of colors. Uh hue, saturation value, we use that. But what I'm looking for though is RGB curves. So, if I drop this in here, this will give me, if you're familiar with RGB curves from like Photoshop or Da Vinci or anything like that, this will let you do like an S- log uh kind of curve. So, essentially, this data at the bottom here, this is your uh your dark dark tones. Uh this would be your mid tones, this would be your highlights, and this is like your clipped like highlights at the top there. But you can see if I make this look like a like a ramp like this, it starts to look more contrasted, right? and I pull it all the way down. I can like really transform this and make it look really contrasted. Look at how different that looks already, right? From just this one little thing, you wouldn't imagine you could convert it like this. But that's a simple thing and it's already looking good. And then I want to bring out some of the whites as well. So I can just add at the top here just a little curve that goes the other way. So it kind of exaggerates some of those whites. Okay, great. That's pretty good. But now the other thing is is like because I've like crunched it and made it a little more contrasty, it's also brought out some of the colors which are looking a little like yellowy green which is a little unappealing. Kind of like this table would be like a little moldy not great. So instead um to improve it I can add another node. As I mentioned I use this one a lot. Hue saturation value. So, if I drop this in and I drop it in here, you could also put it before the the curves or after, doesn't really matter. Um, and then I I just want to drop the saturation here. And watch this. Watch how completely transformed this becomes. Woohoo. Look at that. Doesn't that look nice? I think it looks nice. It's like, and you can turn off these nodes, by the way, like temporarily. If you want to mute something, it's M. M for mute. And you can select that and mute it. So, this is what we started with. And then just with two nodes, we converted this pale looking concrete into this, which is crazy. Pretty cool. Anyways, so that's uh that's nice. And then, you know, you can obviously play with the the roughness and stuff, and we'll get to that when we go to the um the lighting a little bit more. Um but that is looking good. Oh, the other thing of course we need to add is our coffee foam. And this one is super easy and it's another chance to talk about um another type of texture which you can find on sites like Polygon. Um but we need to add coffee foam to this. And um to do that we need to start with an object that is going to obviously fill the top of this. And obvious you know we could go in here and we could like add in a circle and do that kind of thing. But it's also smart to think about like how can I save time by reusing part of my mesh that I already have. So, I already know the exact size that the the foam to fit my mug because I already have a mug here with a circle in it, right? Look at this line. That is a circle. If I could just take that and make it a new object. I can use it. So, to do that, I can select that line and then hit shift D. Right, I've got my circle now. Then I want to hit escape. Okay, so it's now just brought it back to where it was. And now I'm going to hit P. P is how you separate something to uh a new object. So you're separating part of the the mesh. So now I'm going to hit selection like that. And now if I go over to my uh outliner here, we should see two mugs. So this is my original mug and then this is my mug.00001. Okay. So I'm going to call this my foam. Like that. And now I'm going to go into edit mode. Uh let's put it in edit mode. All right. And I'll turn off the uh that little view there so that I can just see where is it. Hold on a second. All right. Okay. So, you have to go into uh wireframe mode in order to see it there. But yeah, that is my uh my circle. Um and yeah, I should just be in my layout mode, shouldn't I? Not in shading. I should be in layout. So, I'm going to go here. Let's do the same thing. Wireframe mode. Okay. So, this circle obviously isn't being rendered because there's no face on it. So, if I go into here into wireframe, um I need to create a face on that. And I can do that by hitting F. Okay. So, I've now got a face and it's completely flat across it. And this is okay. And this would, you know, it'll work for most things. But there is a small detail that you notice when you look at like like if you've got uh um if you got coffee on your desk right now, if you have a look at it where the coffee line like where the water meets the actual uh edge there, there's like surface tension and it actually rises up against the edge there. And you might think that is like a negligible detail, but that line there always catches light and when it's missing, the eye goes like that looks fake. So, it's a very small thing, but we can add that line in here very simply. So, in edit mode, going back in wireframe mode. So, with our solid face here, I can create an inset. Okay. Have we talked about insets? I'm trying to think. Yeah, we did a little in. Yeah, we've done some insets. Okay. But yeah, you hit I. Okay. To do an inset. Um, and that's just like creating a line like uh that goes all the way around that one single face there. And now I can put it like Yeah, let's go right there. And then right underneath it, I'm just going to Sorry. Yeah, right here. I'm going to hit G and then Z to bring it down like so. And then now let's have a look at it in solid view mode. And look at that. So, I've now got it and it's pretty good. I might just do another inset cuz it's got this like crimped kind of effect there. So, I'm going to hit I just so that it's not so noticeable on that uh portion. Okay. Nice. And now all the all I need to do is rightclick it and say shade smooth. So now I've got a little raised edge to it. Excellent. By the way, quick little opportunity to talk about um uh something like it's kind of hard to see that raised edge there. It is there, but it's just like the lighting doesn't really make it um visible. So sometimes when you're modeling, it can be helpful to change the way things are displayed here. So there's a really powerful tool in the top right hand corner. Um, the default lighting is studio. If you go to matcap and then click this ball here, you've got all these options which can show you different views. Um, it's actually how I uh create some of my 3D uh my YouTube thumbnails cuz some of these look really beautiful. But like you can see that's so much more useful um for seeing what that edge actually looks like there on that. Um, and there's some like this which are designed to like show you where there is like artifacting on your mesh because it'll reveal um problems with the mesh that you otherwise might not have seen. Um, and these are new in uh Blender 5.0. Um, they redid the Mac caps, I should say. Um, but anyways, it's cool. It's nice to have, but we don't really need it. Okay, so to give it a coffee foam texture, I'm going to hit N to bring up my properties over here. And then I'm going to download my coffee foam atlas texture. So, let's hit download. And then with it selected, I'm going to hit apply. And if I go into rendered view mode, it should look like that. [laughter] Let's go to the uh UV editor. Okay, cuz I don't think it's been UV unwrapped. Nope, it has not been UV unwrapped. And then I'm going to go into top view mode by hitting seven. And then I'm just going to say U and then go unwrap angle based like that. Now, I want to see this on my coffee atlas cuz this is a special texture and it's called an atlas texture. I'll show you what it looks like. Okay, so it looks like this. And this is a bunch of different coffee foams that you get to choose from. And so with in edit mode with this UV uh selection here, I need to scale this down over the coffee foams. And then I just move them around to the one that I want. Like what sort of coffee foam do you want on your mug? Right? Like some bubbles. Uh funny story with the coffee foam. like every uh the annoying thing about having like an asset company is every subject there is it's like trying to reinvent the wheel cuz like how do you create a texture for coffee foam? Um because you could photograph it but then how do you get the detail of like the bubbles right cuz like bubbles you can't get the shape of those bubbles like so we use like substance first like we hired somebody to make some very expensive um substance materials. I can't remember what we paid $2,000 or something like that. Um, but then there are some things which are just like really hard to do procedurally with Substance. Substance, if you don't know, it's like a completely uh separate texturing software. Um, it's very complicated, all nodebased. Um, but we got somebody like super skilled and it's just really hard to get the detail of bubbles here. Um, and then we had a guy on her team who was like on Saturday. He's like, "Look, I don't know if this is going to work, but I just I took some photographs of some coffee and then I took it into Substance Painter and I manually placed the bubbles so that they all have the exact like shape of the detail and it worked." And it was like sometimes the cheap and easy. I mean, it was, you know, it still took him a day to do it, but like it actually it actually works. Um, but yeah, it's kind of like we just have to guess what's actually going to work for it. Um, and just kind of wing it. But anyways, you can pick whichever one you want. I can't even remember which one I used for the ch. Oh, yeah. It was that one at the top. That was what I used in the animation. Um, but I'll let you choose cuz you've got nine choices to choose from. Some of them frothy espresso looking, but that was the one that I went with. Now, if you go to render it, you might find I'm not actually seeing it on this one. First time I brought it in, there was um uh in the shading tab because it treats this as like alpha. Yeah. So, it I I thought it treated that as like alpha. We don't really need that alpha. Like alpha will make something like transparent. But there's nothing transparent on this. So, if you see any like see-through stuff or stuff or whatever, you might just have to disconnect that. I don't need metallic. I do need the roughness, the base, and the normal. So, I'm going to keep those. And I also don't need my AO. So, I'm going to uh controll X on that. And there we go. So, that was the very basics of UV unwrapping. Uh, if you want to go further and learn how to UV unwrap something a lot more detailed with hard flat surfaces, placing the cuts in the right spots to avoid stretching, um, as well as how to UV unwrap something smooth and organic. Um, and then texture it using procedural textures, painted textures, that's all covered in my course called the beginners academy, which I designed for people who have finished this tutorial uh, and want to go further. So, if you're interested in that, the link for that is beneath this video. Otherwise, let's continue on with finalizing our donut scene. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the new scatter on surfaces modifier that was introduced in Blender 5.0 to add some lovely sprinkles to our doughnut. But first, we need to model those sprinkles because you can't scatter nothing. Um, and I want to add my sprinkle on top of my doughnut or close to it just so that I can see relatively the size of it is correct for the donut. Um, and so how can you do that? How can you add an object and place it somewhere in the same motion? Um, and you can do that by moving the 3D cursor, which is this little guy down here. And sometimes it's in a weird place and you're like, why did it end up there and how can I move it? So you can move it by holding down shift and then right mouse dragging. And then that'll place it on the surface underneath uh your mouse. Um so yeah, it's placed it right there. Um I might actually move it up a little bit. Just kind of Yeah, just about there. Yeah. So I want to see it just above my donut. All right. So now we need to add a new object and that is going to be a cylinder, of course. So add mesh and then cylinder. You could also use a sphere if you wanted to if you want to get like round sprinkles. I'm not a fan of those. They're too crunchy and just like I don't know. I always like the long ones. So, we're going with the long sprinkle with the cylinder. And just like before, we're going to go in the last use settings here. I'm going to change my radius to the smallest cuz I mean, hey, we're making a sprinkle. And yeah, let's start. Let's start there. Um, so probably should be a little bit bigger than that. So, um, obviously if you just like click and drag on this, it's just way too sudden movement. But holding shift, might remember I mentioned that. that that'll use like smaller increments. So, I think that's Yeah, that's pretty good. And then I'll just increase the depth of this to make it a little bit longer, you know, something like that. It's just a a starting block before we actually start editing it. The main one though is the vertices. So, I want to add like a really um Oh, oh, oh gosh, I hit the wrong button on my zoom it tool and I flew in there. But, all right, we can work with this. I want to add a rounded corner to my uh sprinkle there. So, we're going to be using a subserve modifier. Um, and if we were to add it on a mesh with 32 vertices, every level of subdiv. So, it' go 64 and then, yeah, 128, right? So, um, way too much. So, I'm going to drop this to six vertices. So, super low poly, but, uh, it's what we're going to use. All right. Now, add my subsurf. Uh, I'm going to move me just to the side here. So, I'm not blocking everything. That's kind of the the optimal place I've found for me is like just right on that line. I only have to move my head sometimes when I do that, but otherwise I shouldn't be blocking too much. Anyways, um now add modifier generate. And we're going subdivision surface. And there we go. So, um the reason we've got this uh diamond shape is as I've mentioned before, it's using the like middle points of each face essentially. So, it has to go from here to the middle point of this giant long face. So to here. So it's now averaging out those points. But if I want to make a tighter, rounder bit around here, I just have to basically move add a point here to to add that that roundness to it. So it only goes to there. And then I would also do another one here so that it's the the same thing on the bottom. So in edit mode, tab. I'm going to hit CtrlR uh to add my loop cut. And then it's obviously saying where do you want to place that loop cut? So click there. And then just slide it up to the somewhere near the top. Like that. Click. And then do the same for the bottom. Control-r. Click. Slide to the bottom. Okay. And now let's have a look at that. Just have a look in relation to the size of the donut. Do we want any bigger? Do we want to change the size? All right. Now, um, yeah, I'm going to rightclick it and I'm going to say shade smooth just so that I can see how that looks. Okay. Now, we could begin scattering at this point. Um, but if we did, we would end up with the same this exact same sprinkle all over it. And that much repetition to your eye just looks fake. Like every single sprinkle. Actually, the way they make sprinkles is just like from a piping bag, right? So, you just literally just pipe out a bunch of uh this, you know, uh, piping, right? Glaze. Um, and then it dries and then you just like break it up so they all end up in different sized um, shapes and stuff. So, we need to add more sprinkles uh just of different shapes and sizes. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to first of all uh rename this by hitting F2. I'm going to call it oh boy late in the day sprinkle. Okay. And now we haven't really mentioned [clears throat] collections before, but they're basically buckets and you can move things in and out of buckets. So, there's a default one that comes in here. Um but you can move it out of this whole collection by just taking the sprinkle, clicking, and dragging it up. So, I'm going to drop it into my scene collection there. And the reason I'm doing that is now I'm going to select this whole thing and I'm just going to exclude. Okay. So, now when you hit exclude, it's not going to show up in your viewport or your render. It's effectively like it has vanished from the scene, but you can easily bring it back there. So, it's just a way to like quickly edit, you know, a bunch of different things and then bring back the rest of your scene. [snorts] Okay. So, here is my sprinkle. I want to create variants of it. So, first I'm going to go into front view mode and then focus. So, one and then numpad period. Now, what I want you to do is to create some variance by duplicating your sprinkle and creating different twists and turns and shapes and things. And I'm not going to walk you through uh doing this. You should be able to do it if you've been following the series. But also, I want to tell you something more important that every Blender user needs to hear. Blender needs your help. When you download a Blender, you might remember that it didn't ask for your credit card, which is good. Means that everybody in the world can have free access to 3D and try it out. But what's bad is that Blender doesn't have as much money as it needs to develop the software. There are so many areas of Blender that they want to improve. They want to develop, but they lack the funds. Texture painting, the whole physics engine, sculpting tools, the compositor. So, the headquarters of Blender, which is in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, if you didn't know, uh they hire some full-time developers to work there in their offices and also some full-time contractors from around the world to contribute and work on these features. Um, and they get the funding from that from the dev fund, which is the engine that enables Blender. So, if you have been enjoying this donut series and you've been enjoying Blender, please donate. If you can go here and join a monthly donation of 5, 10, or if you're a high roller, 25 or higher is amazing. This will enable more people who can't afford this to uh to try out Blender to to download it and so the software can remain competitive cuz I don't know if you know this, but Autodesk made $315 million from 3ds Max and Maya last year. Blender doesn't have that money. So, if you want Blender and Open Source to win, we do need people to donate. So, please consider the link is underneath this video. You can click that and um please uh make a donation. All right, with that spiel out of the way, we can get back to it. So, I'm going to bring back my scene now. All right, pull it out. And um yeah, let's let's let's move this into a new collection. So, we briefly talked about collections, but they're essentially buckets. They're just ways to organize objects into different buckets. And you can reference those buckets in different parts of Blender. But that's basically it. So, I want to create a bucket, a collection for my sprinkles. Now, you can create a new collection by hitting that little button at the top there, and you can just create a bunch of different collections and rename them. But if you want to move something and create a collection at the same time, you can do that as well. So, if you select all your objects here or you select them here in the outliner, then you just hit M. M to move. You can move it to an existing collection or you can create a new collection and move it there. So that's what we're going to do. So I'm going to call this sprinkles. Okay. And now that I've got that, I'm actually going to uncheck it because we don't actually need to see the sprinkles um visibly in order to reference them in our scatter system. So otherwise they just kind of get in the way there. So all right. So here it is. Exciting moment. With your icing selected, we are going to add in a modifier and it is the brand new scatter on surface modifier which is only there as of Blender 5.0. If you don't see it, you're not using 5.0 or at least you're not using a version later than 5.0 if you watch this at a later time. So, scatter on surface. All right. So, so many little settings and things, but it's very well made. It's uh I actually love it. It's a fantastic modifier. I'm so happy that it exists. Um, but anyways, the first thing we need to reference is here. What object are we scattering? That's the instancing here. Okay. So, we're not ob uh uh instancing one object. We're going to do the entire collection. So, go collection and then here, click on sprinkles. And look, we've got not what we expected. What's going on? Um, so the first thing we need to do is uh first of all, why is there only one of them? That's because density is really low. If we increase density, we get more of them. But still, it's it's just getting worse. Andrew, what's going on? Um, so first of all, uh, underneath instancing, you need to check pick instance. That's the first thing. And that is so that it doesn't reference the entire group as one thing to be uh, scattered. you're instead referencing the individual parts of that collection, which is the individual sprinkles. And then as well as that, it has reset the transform because like it bases it off of how far away is it from the center of the thing. But if you go reset, then it actually bases it on the point of those sprinkles. Okay, cool. So, ooh, look, we've got a alien looking landscape or something, right? Um, but yeah, you can see you can increase this. The higher you go, the more sprinkles you will get. Um, how do we change the rotation? So underneath transform. Oh, right here. Right where my head and everything is. Transform. Okay. You get extra settings here. So, we want to change the alignment axis. Um, and you can just cycle through it until you get the correct one. But yeah, it looks like Y is the one. And then also, man, I should just Hang on a sec. Let me just move me. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Randomize. So, this is cool. Um so if we add randomize here, check that box, then go here. Now we can randomize and add slight variances to um how it is being rotated. So to rotate on the Y-axis, we just increase that to 360. And look at that, we've got sprinkles on the doughut. But we can go further. We can do so much more. Um there's a setting at the top here which is called surface offset because you can see how it's like they're submerged in the icing. Now, sprinkles do submerge a little bit in wet icing, but probably not as much as this. So, I just want to increase this very, very slightly. So, if I just hold down shift and kind of drag out, I can get it to they're just resting on top like that. You wouldn't believe, by the way, how much effort it was to create this in Blender. Previously, like bit of brief history on scattering in Blender. The old old way uh was to use the particle system in Blender which was like old and legacy and it was badly coded and it kind of worked but it was you know it was annoying. Um and then they came out with geometry nodes which was all mathbased and mathematical but to do stuff like this required so much work to set it up and then now they've come out with scatter on surface which is still geometry nodes. So, if you don't know geometry nodes, there's a tab at the top there. You can click it and this is what it looks like. It's nodes, right? Um, but the cool thing is is that this just comes packaged with Blender now. And this is already done. So, the guys at the Blender Institute that uh, you know, need your money, right, so that they can keep working, they came up with this uh, crazy math-based thing. So, it's got all the options that we need that everyone will ever need. and then only one person needed to do it and then we can all access it for free. So it means that creatives don't have to dive into math just to scatter some sprinkles on a donut, which is what the last three versions of this doughnut tutorial had to do. And then everyone complained that it was too technical. And it's like, yeah, I know, but how else you going to get the sprinkles on the donut? Anyway, all right. So the next thing you're probably wondering looking at this is um how do we scatter it in just a specific area? Okay? Because you'll see, and in fact, if you select your icing and then uh forward slash, we've got sprinkles everywhere, the underside, etc. So, we only want them around the top of the donut. So, how do we do that? Well, there is a way to reference an attribute inside of this. I'll show you soon. Um, but the attribute we're going to use is called weight painting. And you can activate that by going uh at the top of your screen there and changing from object mode to weight paint mode. Um, and I'm going to deactivate my sprinkles so that I can just see the icing. Now, if you were to click and drag across it when it is active in this state, you'll see that you get like a a heat map. And as you can probably guess, where it is red is going to be where your sprinkles are. And where it is black, it's where your sprinkles are not going to be. And if you want to get technical, weight paint mode is actually adding an attribute to the mesh, which is where it is red, that is a value of one. Where it is black is a value of zero. and then varying values between there. Essentially a heat map of values which are stored in the mesh and then other parts of Blender can reference this. So it's a very quick way to just do some painting on a mesh um to to reference in different things. Now uh what is not clear though is that when you're painting in this mode, if you go into the uh isolated view by hitting forward slash, you might notice that you have accidentally painted through your mesh. I wish it wasn't like this, although I understand why it is because people that are rigging often want this turned on. But your brush, you want to check front faces only because if you don't do that, then you'll still get your sprinkles underneath your doughnut. So, now that I've got that, um, I'm going to Yeah, I mean, you can like paint over the mesh like this. A quicker way to do it would be to, um, go into here where my head is, data, then go into edit mode, right? Like this, right? So edit mode, everything is selected. If I drop my weight to zero and then say assign, then go back into uh weight paint mode. Everything is black because this vertex group thing here, this is the weight paint, right? So you can select everything if you want and just make it entirely one or you can um make it entirely zero. Anyways, now that I've got that, as you can tell, I've got front faces on. Now I can do my painting. All right. So where do you want your sprinkles to go? You just do that painting, right? Um, and you can have, you know, you can change the weight of the brush as well. If you want there to be like a lot that's kind of just like on the edge, right? You could do something like that. But generally, you know, it doesn't have to be that, you know, that perfect. You know, I'm just doing this as an example of how you could, you know, really do. You could also go like weight one and then turn the strength down. And then now as you paint, you get like, you know, different amounts of buildup. But, you know, how detailed do you want? Like, do you want I don't think anybody's ever going to look at your doughnut render and go like, "Wow, the distribution of those sprinkles is amazing. You did a great job distributing the sprinkles." But they might notice it if it if it looks fake, you know? So, it's it's one of those things that seems like pointless in 3D. Like, you watch, you know, like Planet of the Apes, like the making of that that latest one. I don't know the name of the the latest one, but I was at Sigraph and I was watching a a talk where they had the most amazing the guys at Wetter know how to do a presentation, but it was just like full of detail and like tiny like cuz they had like monkeys in the the the rapids and like just the sheeting and the the the plants had to have just the right amount of of wind or else you and so like artists are just slaving over every single detail. And I'm sure a lot of them were like, "Come on, who's going to notice?" You know, and it's like, people will notice if it looks fake. That's what they'll notice. Um, but they won't know specifically what you did, but they'll know if it looks fake. Anyways, so we've done our weight painting. I did a lot of detailed weight painting there. But now, how do we make our sprinkles just appear in that place? Oh, yeah. Bring it back by clicking that. Um, we do it here where it says distribution mask. Okay. So instead of this uh single value from 0 to one, we can change it to click this little spreadsheet looking icon. I don't know why they went with that icon, but anyways. Then from the dropown, we want to select group. Okay, which is the name by the way inside of data. It's right here. So if you wanted to change that to be sprinkle distribution, you could um and then just, you know, click it there. But yeah, that's that's what it's referencing. By the way, make sure you're not using it cuz you can see there's distribution mask and density. They both have this icon. If you instead used it here, you would see like almost nothing. And that's because it's now overridden what was there, a density value of 900 with a value of 0 to one across those areas. Whereas a distribution mark will keep the density of 900, but it'll multiply it by the values of 0 to one here. So it's uh it's important you get the right one. Distribution mask, not density. But there you go. Great. Cool. So they're in the right places generally. You know, you can play around with it obviously. Um but now let's talk about some other settings you might want. Like for example, the density. How much how many sprinkles do you want? Now, the big question people have when they're looking at this, they go, "How do you stop the sprinkles from intersecting each other?" And unfortunately, there's not an easy answer because this is not easy to do. There there's a such a thing as like circle packing. That's the closest thing, which is like you could run an algorithm to try to combine circles of different radiuses to kind of fit together as best they could, but just it's it's complex. That's kind of like a simulation and we just we can't do it easily here. The closest thing we have is called distribution method plus disk which when you click that and by the way you can only see that option if you're using density method not amount. So amount will let you uh actually use a specific amount of uh sprinkles but then you don't get this extra option here. Whereas density bases it on the scale of the object in relation to the scene and yada yada. But anyways, on disk gives you this little setting, minimum distance. And what it does is essentially every single one of these points here, it goes there's a point, there's a point, there's a point, there's a point. And then when you increase this value by whatever amount, it will add a circle around it, right? And if you increase that circle and you increase that circle, right? Eventually, if this one, for example, had a value of this size, this little dot here would be removed because it is now colliding with the value of this one. So, this one would override that one. So, this one gets xed. So, if we increase this, you can see that is exactly what happens. All right. So, I'm holding down shift as I just play with that value there. But you can see that's removed some of the intersections, but there are still some more. So you might be tempted like, "All right, let's increase that even more. Let's increase it like cuz I want to get I want to get rid of this one, right? Let's increase it again, right?" And you go, "Aha, I fixed it. No more intersection." But now the problem is the the radiuses are so big that they're deleting each other and you now have what looks like meticulously tweezed places uh sprinkles placed along the doughut um rather than randomness. Right? So, we've gone from the chaos to something that just doesn't look right to the to the eye. So, really what I do is I just drop this to be as low as I can get it before it's starts to feel like too manicured. Right. That still to me feels a little too manicured. I might go like that. I might even go a little bit lower. Yeah. See, that feels chaotic to me. I like that. And then what I do generally is um I just change this seed amount here. The seed amount not very well named but I understand why they did it. But it's it's just a randomness amount like a distribution amount. Okay, you find it in a lot of like procedural workflows but it's like you can cycle through here. There's an infinite number of uh numbers here. And by the way, it's not like you know one is any better than a thousand or 10,000. Like these are each individual. It's just a random number generator to uh give you different variations. So, you could do that as many times as you want to try to find the best distribution that has the least amount of intersections. That's probably the best that you can do um with what we've got. The other the other thing as well is that sprinkles sometimes are not laying flat right on a on a donut. Sometimes they might be a little bit skewed like that and that can kind of help with the intersections. So here where I've got randomize, I'm going to increase which one? The X, right? Not too much or else it'll just look weird, but a little bit makes sense for what we've got. The other thing that we should do as well is with our sprinkles, if we just bring them back by clicking on that little check box at the top there, um the point at which they are spawned onto the icing is where the origin point is of the uh of the mesh there. And we haven't talked about that either, but that's kind of you could think of it as like the center of mass for the object. It's we're not using physics, but like that's kind of how you think of it. It's like generally speaking, it should be in the center of an object, but you can see here with it being there, if it was spawned like here, for example, the whole sprinkle is going to be over here, right? So, if you've got those circles of radiuses, it might be intersecting something when it shouldn't. Um whereas if you select all of them like this, then you rightclick and then you say set origin origin to geometry, they will now be at the exact center of that sprinkle and it'll just be a little bit better and there'll be slightly less um intersections. Um but that's that's the best we can do. The alternative way to like have sprinkles on a donut where they're not intersecting like this would be to use a physics engine. Um there's a rigid body physics engine in Blender. Unfortunately, it's not very good. It's very slow. It's one area that they're looking to overhaul with more funding. Yes, I found another way to throw it in there. Um, if more people donate, we can have good physics in Blender. That's what I want to tell you. Um, but for now, this is uh this is the best we got. Or the other way is you could actually apply this. You could say apply all my sprinkles. Um, you would have to realize first, realize the instances, so they're actual objects, then apply them. Um, but you could then actually physically move each of these little ones like that. But I wouldn't recommend doing that. I think it is overkill. It's not and um it's not needed and it's not going to help you for the next step because we got to have random colors. So yes, colors. Let's make our sprinkles look not like tic tacs. So yeah, if we go uh enable our sprinkles, right? You know, we can come in here. We can give it a material and you know we could we could pick a random color you know get a purple one and then go yeah now I want to make a yellow one or whatever right the problem with this method is although this works and it is fast is um that you'll always have the green one will always be that bent one that little squiggly one right and your eye can kind of pick up on things like that um it's also like hard to control the colors right? Because I can't control how many blue ones or purple ones or whatnot I get across my doughnut. So, it's also not ideal. So, there is a much better way which involves, as I briefly mentioned before, random colors. So, you start with your material like this. And we're actually going to give the exact same material to all of our sprinkles. So, um let me just disable those and I'll select all of my sprinkles here. Um, and if I want to give them all this same material, all I would do is the last sprinkle, as long as that's got a material, I can hit Ctrl L. Ctrl L. And that will transfer data from one object to many objects. And then you're just looking for materials like that. And now you can see the uh where it says material, there's a little number next to it, and that actually tells you the number of users that are sharing that data. So there's six sprinkles now, all sharing it. And you know to be good good little artist um we should call it uh sprinkle or sprinkles I don't know. Anyway um cool. So now if we go to the uh shader tab I'm going to show you how we can we can make this look cool. So let's go back to the shader view. Okay great. So there is no limit really to what you can do with nodes. Um you can plug things in and do this and that and it's it's really cool. There's a bunch of nodes. If you hit shift A and just go in here. There's like all sorts of attributes you can call in and do complex things and you can get really technical. So, it's it's a lot of fun. Um, but the one that we're going to use is underneath object info. If you bring in this node, um, you'll see that there's there's a bunch. There's like location, you know, you could drag that into the, uh, color, you know, there's there's all sorts of things that you can do with this. The one we're looking for is random. Okay. Okay. So, what this is doing is it's saying every time there's an object that is using this material, we're going to pick a random value for that object between zero and one. Okay? And you would actually see if you were to duplicate this sprinkle again and again and again and again and again, which by the way, um, you can do by just holding down shift R after you do a duplicate, and you just get more and more and more sprinkles. Um you can see that they all now have a value between 0 and one and that's been converted into color form because zero is black and then one is uh white. Right? So that's what um that's what this is doing. So 0 to one giving it that scale. Um have I run out of undos? I've run out of undos. Well I have to assume that was yeah that was the last one. Okay, there we go. Um so that's not very useful in this format like zero to like like black to white. It's it's not that fun. But we can convert those single float numbers 0 to one into color format by between here and here dropping in a color ramp node. So if you go add or shift A and then go color and then go color ramp, then if you just drag this in and drop it until that line lights up, drop it in there. Now I can say instead of it being black at this end, let's make this a blue color. And instead of it being white, let's make it a orangey color. Right? And now I've got a range of those. Right? And you can see as if I was to duplicate, right? You get kind of like variance across this, right? Every single one of those is getting like a new little position somewhere in this um little uh gradient over there. Okay. And that's cool. And that would, you know, if you looked at our donut now, you would see that we're now getting a nice range of different colors across it. However, it's not quite accurate. If you look at photographs of donuts, there's there's not really like the yellow sprinkles are all the exact same shade of yellow. The blue sprinkles are all the exact same shade of blue. And it makes sense because they mix up the the the sprinkle uh icing uh I was gonna say batter just the icing sauce icing. Icing they just mix that up with one like lot of food color. They get just the color right and then it's piped out and then that becomes the sprinkle. So they all have one constant color, not a range of colors like this. So, um, by the way, here's a little a little tip cuz you you'll notice this that like when you click on something else like your icing or you're hiding your sprinkles, like I can't get back that material with all my sprinkles on it, right? So, I have to go here. I have to enable it just so that I can click on it just so that I can tweak the color. It's annoying. You don't need to do that. We've got a material here that says sprinkles. So, we can hide it. And then what I do is I just select my icing and then I add a new material underneath it. And then I which you do by clicking the little plus button there. So click the plus and then in the dropdown you're looking for sprinkles. Okay. And this won't affect your icing. Like you can stack multiple materials on one object. And then although we're not going to do it in this tutorial, you can assign certain parts of that material to different parts of your mesh. For example, you could assign it like that. Um but you can also just leave it unassigned and then that way you can like quickly reference it. So that's what I like to do. So I've still got my glaze at the top there. And then whenever I want to change my sprinkles, they're there and it's being shared across all the sprinkles that are hidden. Anyways, so as I mentioned, I want it to be a constant color. How can I make this look like a constant color? You can do it by changing these handles from instead of it being linear interpolation to a constant interpolation. And look at that. Now it is a hard line. It's not a a gradient across it. You only get all of this blue or all of this uh orange. So, you know, if you wanted to make a uh Halloween donut, right, you can go for something I I moved to United States a couple of years ago, coming up on two years ago. And uh I I'm just learning that that's the colors of Halloween cuz we don't really do Halloween in Australia where I'm from. Like some people do, but it's really a kind of a rare thing that people are into. But it's always Yeah, it's the black, orange, the green, and the purple seems to be the uh the colors that people like decorate their houses with and stuff. And Reese's Pieces really lean into that. They love that they're one of those colors. [laughter] You know, you can do you could do like fun stuff, right? You can make up a Halloween looking uh donut if you wanted to. Um what I'm going to do for mine is um I'm going to make mine look like pastel. Um, so I like to go with like a shade of aqua, kind of like that. And then I'm going to go with purple like that. And this is a a tip, by the way. You never want to go like 100% um like saturated like that. Um, that's weird. Why is no donut got that exact Well, they are. They're just being washed out. Okay, they don't look very very extremely saturated, but anyways. Um, you never want to go like fully saturated like that because it can like using different uh the way you render it. If you put it like through a like a a contrast, you kind of like boost highlights or like make things more contrasted, it can kind of like blow out the colors. So, it's it's generally a good idea to leave things mostly unsaturated like this. It's also just like more pleasing on the eye if you don't have too many things that are like, you know, extremely intense. Um, and now this is the other thing as I mentioned, right? I can now choose the exact ratio of my sprinkles. More blue, more purple, more pink, more yellow. And I just have an exact easy slider to choose this. Um, and this is really fun. This is like where you get to be creative and go like, what kind of what kind of donut am I going to be making here? You know, um, like this. you know, you can make some white ones. But yeah, generally as a a rule of advice um when you're when you're making something um like this and you've got lots of colors, lots of potential color choices, it's best to try to go with like one primary color, like one that is making up the predominant color choice, right? So you go like mostly purple and then like a few splashes of other colors and it just helps it. It's it's almost like it helps your brain digest what it's looking at. Whereas if you just went like evenly distributed across all of them or get an equal share, it just starts to look a little bit like noise. Um, by the way, the other thing that you might want to do at this point, oh, I'm already using it. I'm using medium high contrast. Um, but we're going to be So, by default, your color management, it kind of looks like this. So, your colors look a little bit washed out. And we're not going to get into color management, but essentially like everything is kind of a little bit desaturated. Um, and it's designed so that it makes it easier to grade, but it's not really designed for a final render when you're using the none look. Instead, you're better off using uh medium high or high contrast or for a YouTube thumbnail. Very high contrast. That's what I use. Um, and these aren't like bad. It's not like they're doing like a rough like contrast grab or something. This is like a proper S- Log um uh sorry S scurve uh conversion. Um nothing is peaking. It's all it's all this. I I use these all the time. Medium high. Medium uh yeah or or high. Um anyways, so that's pretty good. And then I might grab my Oh, yeah. I got to fix this again. Let's make that back what it was. Let's move that back. Get a few more blues in there. Bit of pinks, bit of whites, bit of yellows. I'm going to make my icing as well a little bit hotter. And I'm going to tweak it a little more towards the purple range. Just a little bit. Back at the sprinkles. The other thing I forgot to mention as well, um, sprinkles are actually a little bit shiny if you look at references. So, a little bit shiny. And then the other thing it really needs, and this does make a big difference, is subsurface scattering. So, just like before, dragging down on that radius to make them all one. And then I'm increasing the weight to be one and then I just dropped this scale to be something really low. But that will make a big difference. I was before I was like practicing for this this uh video um and I was like why are my sprinkles just not looking good? They weren't looking as good as um you know a previous render I'd done and I forgot subsurface scattering. And it does make uh a huge difference. So there we go. We've got a nice looking donut. Before you go ahead, what I'd like you to do is to try to create your own style of doughnut. Um, you could try substituting the long sprinkles for like rounded sprinkles or like star- shaped sprinkles. Um, you could change the doughnut color to be something else. You could make more donuts by just stacking donuts on top of each other. Um, here are some ideas that uh my team and over the years we different doughnut versions and stuff we've we've created. Um, but you can do a lot. So have fun just experimenting and trying to create something of your own with your own creativity uh injected into it. And it'll also just kind of teach you to kind of think independently and like where is this thing and locate that and it's you know just a way of like bringing back that information. And also as your homework uh add some sprinkles to your plate if you want. Um I won't show you how to do it because it's basically the same steps as before scattering on surface. The only thing uh I'll mention is that you do need to apply your solidifier modifier so that you can actually paint on the correct side of your plates and they will appear um as long as that's done. But it's super simple. So I trust you all be able to do that. Anyways, that's it for this video. Join me in the next part, the final part, as we do the lighting and rendering. Welcome to your final serving of doughut. In this part, we are going to be lighting, rendering, and making our donut actually look good. The final piece of the puzzle. Um, which is the most fun, honestly. Um, because currently it just kind of looks like a early '90s test render or something. Very, very bland. So, let's make this actually look good. Uh, we're going to be moving around some stuff. And you can see that if you like move an object, you always leave behind something, right? And this is just annoying to deal with. So to fix this, you parent things to other things. So for example, if you want the icing to be connected to the donut, then you first select the icing, you shift select the donut, then you hit CtrlP to parent. Um, and there's you can parent to the object or object keep transform. I always choose keep transform otherwise it can like clear the original location and you kind of lose its location. So always uh keep transform. And so there you go. So now when we move the donut um the icing is going with it. Importantly, you'll notice that in the outliner you can't see the icing anymore. The icing has gone. Where is it? And this can be confusing sometimes. You're like, where's that object? And it's because it's parented to the donut. So it's now underneath in this little drop down here. It's in there. It's also a good idea to use like what is connected to what as a hierarchy. So for example, the donut is connected to the plate. So, I'm now going to select the donut, shift, select the plate, ctrl P, keep transform. And so, now I can move the doughnut with the icing by itself or the plate with the donut. I'm going to do the same thing for the foam on top of the mug. Ctrl P. Keep transform. And then also the plate and the cup. I'm going to parent to the plane, the table. I'm going to say keep transform. So, now all of our objects are in here, right? They're all parented. And you know, they're all found underneath this. So, we got to make sure that it's actually named correctly. So, I'll call that table. This is going to be called plate. And I think we're good. Okay. Excellent. Now, I've actually got two lamps in mine. Um, most of you don't. You've just got the one, so I'll just delete that. Um, but yeah, let's go into lighting. The fun bit. Actually making this look cool. Okay. So, we want this to look like a sunlit cafe. At least I do. You're welcome to do whatever you want, but if you want to play along, that's what we're doing. So, um, with our lamp here selected, you can see that we've got a number of different types here. We've got point, sun, spot, and area. I generally usually just use between point and sun. Occasionally, a spot lamp if I'm doing I just want to like focus on one specific thing, but I rarely use an area lamp because there's not much difference between that and a point lamp with a radius essentially like making it larger. Um, but in our case, we want to look like a sun, a sun lit. So, I'm going to check sun. And oh boy, we've got a nuclear blast of sunlight. So, generally I keep this around uh 10 cuz that's actually what it like maxes out at when you just like drag it over. It comes in at 10. Um, so that's yeah, that's about what we'll use. I also changed the temperature, which is I don't think I think it was 4.5 they introduced this. Um, but yeah, you can now adjust this. So this is a black body scale. So like the closer like the lower this Kelvin scale is, the more it's like fire and like you know incandescent bulb and then like warm LED and then you can get to like skylight and you can go all the way and it's just like crazy blue. But anyways, so sunlight um you know until it looks right to you. [laughter] Um I don't know something. That's a bit too much. Let's go. Oh boy. I don't even know now. I I feel like I was just twisting that too much. Now I'm not actually sure what looks like sunlamp. Anyways, good thing is we can change it later if we want to. Um, now the interesting thing about a sunlamp is it doesn't actually matter where it is positioned. You can see if I position this close to my donut or my thing like nothing happens. Whereas a point lamp obviously is very largely dependent on its location cuz there is the inverse square law where like light falls off at what is it uh four times for every doubling of distance. So a huge sharp fall-off but sun because it's so far away there's no fall-off and so it doesn't matter where it actually is. So the only thing that matters with sun is the rotation of it. Right? So I'm just going to rotate that to look like early morning sunshine. Right? because it's going to, you know, trying to tell a story with a donut. It's challenging, but we're trying. So, early morning, somebody's got their coffee in a cafe or something. Um, that's what we're going with. Oh, look at that. My mug is just slightly off the table. And now it is not. Excellent. Now, this by itself is uh is pretty boring, right? If you were to do a render of this, which you can do just by hitting uh F12, right? That's it's okay. But it's like this feels too naked, right? It's just being blasted with light everywhere. It helps to try to shape it and kind of highlight what is important, which is these two elements. The rest of the scene that can just Yeah, it's not important to us, right? So, we can throw that into shadow. Um, and it's also an opportunity to make it look like there's a a scene outside of the view there, which you can do by casting shadows um into the scene. So, I want to basically set up two blockers to make it look like this is shining in through a window. Um, and as is typical with uh with 3D, you don't have to model the windows because we're not looking at them. You they can just be blockers. So, I'm going to hit shift A. And for my blocker, I'm going to use a plane. Okay. So, it brings in this. I'm going to move it over there. I'm going to go R and then X. holding down control until it says 90 at the top of the screen there. Do a single click. Um, all right. That is my first blocker. And then I need another blocker going uh this way. So I'm going to have like a slither of light going across there. So shift D. Move this to Oh boy. Y then X R Z to rotate it by 90°. And then here we go. like that. All right. And then I'll move this one over a little bit. Maybe just make it a little bit bigger. Okay. To just try to shape it to just get some of that light to be a little bit more targeted. I'm also going to move this mug just further in the back. Um, so I'm going to hit G. And yeah, if you want to lock something to a specific act, like I want to move it along the X and the Y, but not the zed. We talked about this with scale, but applies for everything. So, if I hit G and then shift zed, it'll move it along the X and the Y, but not the Zed. And so, this is an easy way if like you've got, you know, that it's touching the ground where it needs to, but you just need to move it around, you can quickly move things by G and then shift Z, and it'll move it around the plane, but it won't lift it off of the table, which is uh useful. All right. And then I'll move my plate over like so. And yeah, that looks okay. All right. Now, yeah, like I said, this this this looks okay, but it also looks kind of a little bit like film noir, right? And what does film noir look like? Looks fake. Looks very like curated and designed in a comic strip, right? And the big telltale for that is like we've got almost complete darkness over here, right? Um, and the real world is not that like that. If this was a cafe, you would have things bouncing off uh other objects to the left hand side outside of frame. But not only that, this is a sunrise. It's not happening on Mars or anything like that. So, the sky is blue, generally speaking. So, uh there needs to be some blue light as well. So, what I'm going to do is Oh, look at this. We've got our blockers and yeah, let's actually move my light and my blockers. So, shift selecting those. I'm going to hit M and I'm going to create a new collection and I'm going to call this lighting. Um, and then we can call these two objects. By the way, if you want to rename two objects and at once, uh, you can do it by I was just trying to remember the hot key. [laughter and gasps] Uh, there you go. It's Ctrl F2. Um, which is the same hotkey I think. Actually, no, I don't think it is in Windows, but anyways, Ctrl+ F2 and then you can just say uh find and replace or you can just say set name and then you can say new and I can just call this blockers or blocker and then just say okay. And there we go. It's call it blocker and then the other one blocker.00001. Okay, cool. So now I uh as I said I want to create some skylighting. So I'm going to add a new lamp or I could duplicate the sun. I'll just duplicate the sun. So, I'll move this over to there. And I'm now going to hide I'll call this one sun, right? My original one. And then this new one I'm going to call sky. And I'm going to change this to be a point lamp. Like this. Um, and now I'm going to disable the sky. And this is actually a good tip to do. It's a really uh bad trap that a lot of beginners do is when they're they're working with lighting, they end up just kind of like throwing in lights. But you have to work in isolation. You should only be looking at each light separately to understand what purpose it actually has on the scene. So, hiding my my sun lamp. I'm going to position this up high because the sky is high even though there would be like a window there. Something about actually let's just see the scale in relation to get real mathematical here. The scale of the doughut in relation to how tall would the window be? Maybe up to about I don't know. um about there, let's say. And let's move it over a little bit. Okay. And then let's uh increase this. Let's remove the tint. And instead, I'm going to make this like you can actually like keep the tint, right? Make it go like all the way to that. But I want to have a little bit more control over it. I might want to make it look a little more purplish or, you know, we're not going for something entirely photorealistic. We're going for like exaggerated realism. um which can often look way better than real realism. So this you can see this is a soft color. This is like moonlighting but it just needs to be a little bit just so that there's the hint that there is skylighting along with the uh sun. Now the other big factor that it's missing is that the skylighting is not casting shadows like this. Right? If the sun was away and it was just being lit by like think of like an overcast day, right? The sky itself, the entire dome is the size of the light. So the radius of our lamp here needs to increase right by a lot. Now this uh this is a very underused value like it's one of the most important values when it comes to lighting is the radius of something because it's the softness of the shadow. As an example, let's just bring this in or actually hang on. Let's just increase this so we can actually see it. What can I do? Exposure. There we go. All right. So, this is uh like the default it comes in like this. Okay. And you can see how harsh those shadows are. So, as a as a rule, harsh shadow is very good at revealing detail. So, we often use it a lot at Polygon cuz we need to show the the detail of textures along a surface. So, if you want to highlight the sprinkles or something like that, you would use a very small radius like this. So, it's really sharp um shadows. Whereas if you want to reveal more of the form and just the overall color of a surface, that is when you would use a larger radius, right? As a general rule. And it has a huge impact on uh on lighting. The other big thing is is distance. So there's I mentioned briefly the inverse square law. Um a lot of beginners, you know, they're going like, oh, it's like skylighting. I'll just position the lamp up here, right? The problem with that is because of the inverse square law, every doubling of distance, so from like here to here, right, it's going to uh well, hang on. From here to here, what am I thinking of? But basically, like from the the mug to the end of the donor, it could lose something like a third of its energy. Um, it's it's a it's just an uh what do you call it? It's not something that is obvious, but it is really really important. So something needs to be far away or appear to be far away. You got to try to make it look really far away basically. Um [snorts] so you know something up in up up in the air basically. All right, let's clear that and let's increase it and go back to the radius. So nice large radius in the sky. You know, it's not as big as the sky actually is, but you know, something like that. So we've got smooth lighting over everything. And now with my sun. Haha, look at that. We've got the tinge of blue lighting in the air. Um, but we have the lovely hot, warm sun uh coming through as well. All right, the final lamp that I need is that bounce lighting for the rest of the cafe. So, I'm going to duplicate my uh skylighting there. And I'm going to position this. I mean, you know, how what's the height of the ceiling or what is it even bouncing off? Who knows? There could be a wall here and it's bouncing off that. This is more where you get to control um you know what it what is it that you're actually doing. So again, I'm going to hide my sky, hide my sun. So I'm just looking at this bounce lighting coming off the wall. Um and I'm going to uh clear this to make it look uh just like white light. Um and by the way, if you want to change something to the default value, just mousing over a color here, just hit backspace and now it goes to its default value. I can also backspace on the power and it goes to its default value of 10. Um, so that's a handy one to know. And again, I will Yeah, I mean, I can have a little bit of control over this cuz there could actually be a lamp off in the distance there. We don't really have a lot of rules for this bounce one. I'm just looking at trying to fill in the darkness there. Right. Right there. Because without it, and we'll call this uh indoor bounce, right? If you don't have it, it just looks too dark. So, there needs to be something there just to fill in this area of our donut. All right. So, that's what I'm looking at there. Something about that. Let's look at it from the camera view. And I think now my skylighting is uh a little bit too blue. I'll dial it back a little bit. I think it might actually be a little bit too bright. So, let me just dial that in. In which case, now I can make it a little more saturated. Pull it in. Okay. How's that? Okay. That's the sun. That is the indoor by itself. Okay. All right. And that's pretty good. That is not bad. Now, you can play with it a little bit. Um, but that's generally we've got it in the right place. Now, I'm going to move my camera in a little closer. So, I'm going to check this little uh camera view thing. And, uh, sorry, lock toggle lock to uh, camera view. And now I'm just going to move around and just pull the camera in a little bit just so we've got a tighter view of our donut. And then again, just make sure you uncheck that so that we can uh move around freely without it interrupting. Okay. Now, some of you might be wondering, how can we improve this so it doesn't look crap? [laughter] Because what we are using right now, um, this is called the EV rendering engine. And it's the reason we've got this kind of fuzzy noise to our shadows. It's the reason we have some of our objects are not really casting much of a shadow in our scene. Um, and it's also the reason you might notice that as you like rotate around, right, you got like wow, look at this like bright lighting on the plane here. And watch what happens as I move the camera just disappears. [laughter] So Eevee is a game engine. So it's doing a lot of game hackery and that means it is largely it is due to being screen space meaning that it's doing bounce lighting here. Okay. So it's bouncing the off the plane onto this wall here. However, it's it's only visible um it can only see what the camera sees. So it's called screen space. And that means that the moment that this moves away and we no longer have that bright light reflecting off there, it doesn't know that that plane exists and that something should bounce up there. So, it can result in these like large changes of lighting. It's kind of the biggest issue if you're making animations um and the camera's flying through some spaces and you don't want to have lighting kind of changing all over the place. I've got a whole video on EV if you want to watch that. Um I talk all about this and go into more detail. Um but, you know, these are kind of one of the the biggest limitations. Now, the main thing you should be trying to do if you're using the EV rendering engine is the default value right here for steps is wrong. Like there's no reason it should be that low. Steps, you could think of this like accuracy. Um, now if I increase this to 16, which is the maximum value, look at how much better those shadows are. Right? This is the before and then this is the after. Okay? And it's even more stark here. Right? Look at look at how much more connected that is. And then if I go back to here, look at all this extra crap, right? It's it's basically an accuracy amount and it should be maxed out unless you're working on a really really poor computer and it happens to stall it or something, you know, but even then you you double it at least go to 12. Um, but that by itself will improve the look of shadows. Um, the other thing as well is my icing. I just want to check. Okay. Oh no, that's the sprinkles. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I think I said that I had the scale of my icing too high on my donut. I think a 03 looks good. And on my sprinkles, I'm also going to drop that. I'll make it 06. Nope. Nope. Nope. Let's go 08. So, we want a little bit, you know, this is a little bit of pass through here, but not a crazy amount or else. Yeah. And that's this is quite common to do, right? If you're making something, you might set a value when you're in one state of Blender and then when you add in lighting from, you know, a more extreme like sunlight coming in, you start to notice that some materials actually, yeah, it doesn't look good. Um, and so you need to adjust it and that's a totally fine thing to do. Um, there's not really any way uh around it. Now, the fuzziness, this fuzziness that you can see right here, um, that is a result of the samples. So samples you can think of I mean it's it's like samples per pixel on a screen and like basically the more samples you have the clearer it's going to be. Now what you're actually looking at right now is the viewport samples which is set to 16. When you do your render it will kick in and use this amount which is 64. So see how fuzzy it looks there. I do my render and it comes in not so fuzzy. There is still fuzz. There's always going to be a little bit of fuzz, but at least it's not uh, you know, crazy. But yeah, if you want to increase it, you can uh, you know, double that or whatnot. You can have fun with that. Another thing that can improve the realism of an EV render is using a light probe. So, as I mentioned, with the light bouncing off here, as it fluctuates around, it's kind of throwing light as it goes around. But the other issue is that for example um the the it doesn't actually know that light is hitting the underside of the donut here and it would blast out in that direction because it can't see what is behind the donut right now. It also can't see um uh like light that would be hitting the edge of this plate here and then bouncing it back this way. Right? It can't see it because from where the camera is, it just can't see those objects. So, if you wanted to um add that, you could add in a light probe volume. So, I'll show you what that looks like. Uh first of all, I'll just shift rightclick on my donut just so that that's the point it comes in at. I'm going to say shift a light probe volume. So, this will cast like a grid of ping pong balls over your scene. And I say ping-pong balls cuz I'll show you what they look like soon. Um, but basically you want to scale this to look to kind of encapsulate everything you've got in the scene. And we've got way too much vertically, so I don't need all that much there. Um, and you want the ping pong balls, these little balls, to be sitting just above the surface of the table. Again, I go into way more detail in my EV video, which you could watch if you were interested in this. You really want to dive into EV, by all means. Um, I think I probably only need about three. No, I'll go four. Why not? Um, okay. And then now that you've got this, if you hit the bake light c, you'll see that the scene gets a little bit brighter. So, this is how it looked before and this is how it looks after. And you can uh improve this a lot by just like shuffling the balls around. So, that now I've got one ball that is going to be let's say let's go a little bit. Oh boy. Here and here. So, I've got one that's going to be resting right on the edge of that plate there. And I want one inside the donut. All right. And now, let's do that now. All right. And now we've got more bounce coming from there. So, each of these you can think of like little lamps that are going through the scene and able to see things from the other side that the camera cannot. So, it's able to break that limitation of something being screen space. And you can see that looks better. So, this is with the light probe on. And then if I was to turn my probe off and do another render. So this is with it off. This is with it on. All right. So very big difference. Definitely worthwhile having a light probe if that's what you're going to use uh to do your render. Uh and by the way, if you want to visualize what they can see and uh underneath viewport display, you can enable data and then each of these points become little ping pong balls. That's why I think of them like that. Um, and you can see the actual light that was captured at each one of those points and, uh, essentially, yeah, what light it's going to be throwing out into the rest of the scene. And the final thing that's going to make a big difference to your final render here, um, and one of the big reasons that this feels like a, you know, a CG computer graphics render is that right now everything has the same amount of focus. And that is physically impossible with a real camera. There's no way to have something that doesn't have um depth of field unless you were using a pinhole camera, believe it or not. Um but anyways, so to get that look, to get depth of field, we're going to select our camera object in our outliner and then down here there is a checkbox for depth of field and ooh already it's starting to look cool. Now you just select the object that you want to be in focus. So you click the little eyropper tool and then you want to click on the object. Now, if you've got what I have here, you can see it's always clicking on the volume um because it thinks that the volume is in front of it. But anyways, yeah, I can now just click on my icing object there. And um you can see now this is the before and then this is after. So, you can see in the background there that noisy uh you know concrete texture that isn't relevant to the viewer um is now buttery smooth. And that's a really nice way to not only make something look more realistic, but also to guide the viewer to what is important cuz that is one of the biggest problems you have as an artist is you're giving somebody an entire image and you're trying to tell them like what is the important bits like what should they be looking at and they don't know if everything has just got like hyper noise and detail and color and everything. So you're trying to guide it and that's one of the tools uh to do that. And one final other tip as well. Um because the the biggest like downside to using EV is like the shadows just don't feel crisp enough. They don't feel like tight enough to the object. It's kind of a little bit too it's a little bit too blurry. If you select a lamp like this one here, the sun lamp, and then you go to your shadow settings here, there is a box that says jitter. And you won't see any change in the viewport unless you were to go to your viewport settings and enable jittered shadows. But I don't think you should cuz it's just when you've got that enabled, it just like every time you move it, it just jitters around and it's super annoying. But if I was to do another render now, you will see that the shadows just feel a little bit more accurate, especially in the background there, right? Um, and essentially it's uh I believe it's like rendering each like multiple versions of the lamp at like because it's got a radius on it, a little soft radius. Um, so enabling jitter can work a lot better for like soft lamps like what we've got here. So, um, there you go. So, that's one of the other tips. But if you want to go very realistic and you want to avoid the light probes, you want to avoid all these settings like jitter and all this kind of thing and you just want to you just want to make something and then just have it come out beautifully, then you should be using a different rendering engine. You should be using cycles, cycles, cycles, cycles. Now, my recording has slowed down because it's using my CPU. Um, this is cycles. Now, I'll actually uh I'm going to just turn that off for a sec cuz it's slowing down my computer. The first thing you should check if you want to use cycles because some of you just tried that then and much like my computer, I don't know if you can hear that, but it has started to wor up. the fans are like, "Whoa, this is using maximum uh maximum heat." Right? So, first of all, go to your edit and go to preferences and then go to system. Then at the top there, you've got cycles render devices. Um, what you want to see is if you have any graphics card on your computer that you can use to render, you should be using it. So, if you've got an Nvidia card, you would be clicking CUDA or optics. Optics is preferable. So, if you've got a card that supports optics, use the optics one. HIP is for AMD cards. Open API is for Intel, I believe. And then metal. You'll see metal if you've got a Mac. Um, in my case, I've got a uh Overkill RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, which I just got, given to me by the kind folks at Dell. They gave me a Whisbang um Dell T2 Pro, and uh it's amazing. I think it costs like $20,000 or something stupid. Just the card by itself, I think, is like 15,000. It's It's ridiculous. It's obviously enterprise and prolevel. But for the three people watching this that happen to own a studio, if you really want to deck it out and give artists stuff that they'll never have to worry about render times, this is the card. It is amazing. So, if you've got one of those cards, use it. And then make sure here where it says device, you want to make sure instead of CPU, it is using uh GPU instead. And now you can see how much faster that is. Right now this is in 4K on my computer and this is the size of the window here. If you want to like speed up your render, you can also just change the size of the window, right? I can drop the size of this like this, right? So, it's only going to be rendering on how much it can see here, right? So, as I move around, you can see it's much faster now because the size of that window is so much smaller. Um, so that's another thing you can do if you want to be able to move around whilst it's uh whilst it's rendering. Now, the fuzziness that you can see here, that is samples. So it's still the same term samples, but the difference is is that cycles is a path tracer, not a rasterized engine like uh uh EV. So path tracing means that you don't have to deal with any probes or anything like that. It can see what is behind the donut. It can see between the sprinkles. So it's actually casting like a bounce off this sprinkle into that sprinkle into that one. It's also doing it on the other side of the doughut that we can't see. It's actually shooting rays from the camera out into the scene and whatever it hits, it's collecting that information. So, it is much more physically accurate. It is the gold standard for rendering um that um you know computer graphics researchers use and you know every movie VFX shot is generally nowadays using path traces. It results in a way better image but obviously you have to pay for it with render times. Now, one thing as well is uh this noise that you can see here when we do our render, it's going to kick in a D noiseise, which is going to clear that up. But you can also enable it in your viewport. And then as you move around, you can see that it's uh it's still got like a little squiggle to it. Um but it is uh it's obviously much clearer and it's easier to see things uh with that on. But now that I've got that, I can do a render. It's going to load in everything. The first time you use cycles, by the way, it might be slow. Um, especially the first time if you use a card like an Nvidia card or AMD or anything like that, it will be slower. Um, but after that, it should be relatively quick. I say relatively quick. I've got the fastest card available right now. And you can see it's no longer instantaneous. It is well over 20 seconds. There we go. 23 seconds. Okay. But the difference, right? Like if I go to right EV like there is a big difference there. I mean, actually, that was um before I did the jitter. Actually, let me just let's really compare apples to apples. Okay, there we go. But yeah, there there definitely is a big difference, especially in the shadows, um especially in the reflections. So, there's it's a noticeable difference, but it's also a noticeable difference in the time, right? The EV1 is less than a second. The Cycles one is 23 seconds, and that's on the fastest uh card available. So, you're going to pay for it. And this matters most when you're doing animations because how many frames is there in one second of footage? Generally 24 to 30. Um I'm actually recording in 60 frames right now. So that would be uh 30 frames a second. So 30 * 23 just to get 1 second of footage. So if you're doing an animation, that's where Eevee really um can speed up your workflow. But also like Eevee is just so much more accessible. Part of the reason I stuck to EV for all this tutorial up until now is that uh I learned from uh talking to people who did the previous donut that some people's renders were taking like over 20 minutes. Some people were over an hour to do one single image of the donut. And I couldn't believe it. I just I I thought, "All right, we have to use Eevee then because there's just no way people are going to be able to finish this thing." So Eevee definitely can get a great result. um it's not going to be as good as cycles, but like I said, the times you can't beat it. It's so much faster. Um so there's no shame in uh using it if you don't have a computer that uh can't do cycles. Now, you can experiment with your lighting. You can experiment with your scene. You can add in different assets. You can change the colors, make a whole bunch of different variants. If you want to go further, you know what I'm going to say. I have released a course and it is designed for people literally in your shoes right now that have just finished the donut and they want to know what they can do next to improve and learn more about Blender. So this course it's called the beginner's academy and it teaches you the core essential Blender skills which is modeling, texturing, shading, lighting, camera and rendering. And although we touched on all of those in this series, that's really just the tip of the iceberg because there's so many different techniques to modeling. There's so many different approaches to texturing and to rendering and to lighting. And we go through all in much more detail in this course. So if you finish this donut and you want to go off and learn by yourself, there is a whole YouTube full of tutorials out there. But if you want something that is targeted, more comprehensive, and will walk you through the 8020, the 80% of Blender's uh tools and techniques that you use 20% of the time, then this is the course for you. All taught by me, uh all taught using the latest Blender 5.0. Um and I hope that you will uh enjoy it. Otherwise, thank you for watching this entire series. If you want to join the course, you can click the link below.