EP. 13: Blender – Modelul / The Model (RO/EN)

I'm sorry that you got stung, Grandpa, but at least you found the needle. With Blender it's actually very easy and it doesn't even hurt! For example, you just need to left click on an object in the 3D Editor to select it, or, in case you can't find it in the 3D view, you can left click the object's name in the Outliner Editor in the top right. You will know when you've selected it when the object gets an orange outline. See how easy it is, Grandpa?

Then, to move the cube, and it is the same for any other object, in the menu on the left inside the 3D Editor you have the following tools:

Select - Used for different select modes, but if we don't change any of its settings it will work just like we found out, left clicking being used to select objects. If you hold down [SHIFT] on your keyboard, you will be able to select multiple objects at the same time. Objects can be selected in this way even when we do have other tools active, but we can come back to the select tool to get rid of the overlays other tools will put on the screen.

Move - You can drag the arrows to move the object along the desired axis, or drag the squares between the arrows to move the object on two adjacent axes at a time. There is also a white circle in the middle of all of the axes which you can drag to move the object based on your current view of the scene.

Rotate - Just like with Move, the coloured circles will rotate the object on individual axes and the white circle will turn it around from our point of view. If we click and drag in the space between all the axes, the object will Trackball rotate the object, allowing for a more intuitive way to make broader changes to the rotation as opposed to the more refined tuning the separate axes provide.

Scale - The coloured arrows work the same as with Move to scale the object up or down on the axes, with the white circle scaling the object on all three axes at the same time, preserving its shape.

When we'll make a cube spinning animation, Blender will spin it on its own, but for that we will first need to turn our camera to see the cube from different perspectives.

To move around the scene, we have some buttons in the menu on the right of the 3D Editor:

Gizmo - A set of axes inside a circle, which, if you click and drag, will orbit you around the scene. If you hit a single click on any of the axes, your view will align with one of the main viewing positions, like front, side, or on top.

Zoom - If you click and drag the button, you will get closer or further from the object. This same thing can be done by using the scroll wheel on your mouse.

Pan - If you click and drag, the view will be pushed left to right or up to down depending on your mouse movements.

Camera - Clicking this button will make you look through the view of the camera, which is what you will also see of the scene in the final animation. To change the way the camera is looking, you can click the new button with a lock in the menu on the right, allowing you to use the gizmo, zoom and pan as we have demonstrated before. Another option to move the camera is to go out of its view and move it with the tools in the left menu, just like you would do with the cube.

Another important movement button to know that is not part of the menu on the right is "Frame Selected", which you can find in the menu at the top of the 3D Editor under View - Frame Selected, or pressing [.] on the numpad, if you have one. This button fits the selected objects on screen, helping you arrange the camera quickly to focus and turn around an object, as long as the lock in the camera view is active.

Now that we know how to move around, and how to also move the cube, let's start working on our character. To add in more shapes, go to the menu at the top of the 3D Editor and press on the Add button, where we will select Mesh - Cube from the list.

We will use the cubes to create the clothes, hair, arms and optionally some accessories with the help of the tools in the menu on the left of the 3D Editor as we explained before. We also need to make sure to build our character above the plane of the green and red axes, lifting it above them as if it was standing on the floor.

Once we've made an arm on one side, it's easier to not make it again on the other side from scratch, if instead we select the parts of the arm and then press the keys [SHIFT] + [D], then right click to confirm the duplication, after which we can move them to the other side using the Move tool arrows.

It's time to add the colours now, Grandpa, but first we need to make sure we turn on some settings. In the 3D Editor, we need to click on the rightmost circle of the menu at the top to see the colours change in the 3D scene. We will need to repeat this step every time we reopen Blender, as the setting is not saved and the 3D Editor will revert to the Solid Mode view, where you will not see colours.

In the Properties Editor, we need to check that Blender is set to a Standard colour profile to get nice and vibrant colours, and we also need to tick the Transparent box under Film, because our animation will be used in a game and we don't want to cover the background there.

Then, we also need to go to the scene properties where we will change the background light colour to be brighter, so we can have more uniform lighting for our character.

To give our character some colour now, let's select the cube for the body and then go to the Materials tab in the Properties Editor, where we will click on the plus to add a new material slot, then press on [+ New]. Roughness is used to define how reflective the material will be, 0 being like a mirror while 1 being as dull as a piece of paper. We also have the colour, the most important, which we can change by using the circle that shows up when we click it or by adjusting the values below it.

To reuse the same colour between other parts of the character, so that it changes in both places when adjusted, we have to go to the other object we want to share the material once we created the first one, which we should give a name that's easy to understand and remember, then add a material slot and, instead of pressing the [+ New] button, we click on the arrow next to it and choose the material we want to use from the list of the ones we've created.

We will not model the face of the character in Blender, since we will instead draw it in GIMP after the next episode about Blender.

We will draw the face in GIMP because this course is made to help anyone easily create characters like the ones in Yoohpey World and use them in your probably first game made by yourself, so for our character it's more efficient to just draw the face. On top of that, we can also show how to use GIMP, because it's a program with many uses. But, until then, we still have an episode in Blender, about how to move our character. Don't forget to always Save your file! It's very important to not lose your work, and you can even do it by pressing [CTRL] + [S] when you're happy with the progress you've made.

For those of you who want to become 3D animators, continue practicing what you learned today, it's worth it! I can tell you from my own experience!