Sculpting in Blender for Beginners (Full Course/Tutorial) #b3d transcript

In this full Blender sculpting course for beginners, you will learn all important sculpting basics while step -by -step creating this fun Moai sculpture from scratch, including sculpting, coloring, animation, and rendering. So you will end up with a fun looping video that you can share with the world. All you need is Blender 4.0 or above, a simple graphics tablet and a basic understanding of Blender's general functions like navigation and basic modeling.

Check out my other free Blender beginner course if you never used Blender before, link below. However, for this course here, no prior sculpting skills are required. By the way, if you want to have a better experience watching this free course, head over to our CG Boost Academy and join the course there. There it is separated into bite -sized lessons. You can download all accompanying project files like the reference sketch, modeling sheets, the 3d files etc. at cgboost.com/resources, link below.

Hi everyone, my name is Zach Reinhardt for cgboost.com. I'm a 3D artist and instructor, and I'm enjoying working in 3D tools like Blender for over 20 years now. And I'm quite passionate when it comes to digital sculpting in Blender. I hope you can feel it when watching this course. Enjoy. The best way to enjoy the sculpting process is to use a simple graphics tablet instead of a mouse, which gives us more fine control when sculpting.

I use an old Wacom Intuos Pro M and after I installed the Wacom tablet software, I set my pen to use middle mouse button click on the lower pen button, which is a bit easier to access, and right mouse button click on the upper button. I also enabled click and tap and set the mapping to be projected only on one of my two monitors. I highly recommend setting up your graphics tablet the same way so you can easily follow the rest of the course.

Click the link in the video description to find a more detailed video on how I set up my graphics tablet and what type of graphics tablet I recommend. And if you're wondering, sculpting with a mouse is possible too, although it might be a bit harder to get nice shapes and it could spoil the fun. So if possible, do yourself a favor and get a simple graphics tablet. So in Blender, to get started with a new sculpting file here on the splash screen, we find new file and then let's click on sculpting.

This means we will land in the sculpting workspace automatically and we are also in sculpt mode. And instead of the default cube, we will get this subdivided sphere and we could start sculpting right away. However, before let's talk a little bit about navigation and with my graphics tablet pen set up as before, I can now click and hold the lower button, which equals middle mouse button click on the mouse. And since I enabled click and tap, I also have to kind of draw on the tablet and then I can rotate the view as you can see.

In addition, I can hold down shift, lower pen button, click and hold, and then draw on the tablet to pan the view. And the same works with control. If I hold down control, lower pen button, click and hold, and then draw on the tablet to zoom in and out. And this is a great way to navigate by only using the pen and our keyboard. And in this way, we never have to switch hands to the mouse. By the way, if you find it annoying to always press the pen button to navigate the view, you can also go up here to edit, preferences, and then here under input, enable emulate three button mouse.

If you do this, you can hold down alt left click, meaning drawing on the tablet, which equals middle mouse button click. And then with Alt Shift left click, you can pen and with Alt Control left click, you can zoom in and out. In addition, if you like, you can also use the gizmos up here, simply left click and hold up here to rotate the view, left click and hold here to pan the view, and left click and hold here to zoom in and out.

You can also switch to the direct viewpoints if you click on these Xs here. Z is for example top view, minus Y is front view, and X is right view. You can also see the current view up here. And then when you rotate the view, you will get out of this direct viewpoint. In addition to make navigation in Blender a bit easier, both in sculpt mode and also in other modes, let's adjust the preferences a bit, press control comma or click up here under edit preferences, then click on navigation here and then let's enable orbit around selection, depth and zoom to mouse position.

All these options will make it way easier to navigate in the viewport, especially orbit around selection is great for sculpt mode. Meaning if you sculpt somewhere on the object, this position of the last stroke will be recognized as the last origin point to orbit around. So if I now rotate the view, you can see that this point stays in the center. And if I make another stroke down here, you can see this other point will stay in the center or will be used as rotation axis.

Let's press control Z a couple of times to undo all this here. So we have our clean sphere back. And now let's have a very quick look on the user interface. Here on the left side, we can see all our brushes and tools, and you can either use the scroll bar here or middle mouse button, click and hold, and then drag to move this up and down. And to better understand what all these tools mean, we can also move the mouse closer until this double arrow appears.

And then you can left click and hold and drag to the side to either get two rows, which is a bit easier to see everything in one place, or drag this even further and then we can see the names, which is especially useful when you're learning all these tools and brushes. Talking about learning all this stuff, don't worry about this now. We have a lot of brushes and tools as you can see, but in the end, we will only use a couple of brushes and tools frequently and most other brushes and tools are only used in very specific circumstances.

So you don't have to learn everything here in order to have fun in sculpt mode. Up here we find all the important brush settings for quick access and also up here we find a couple of important options. However, you can see whenever I click one of these menus and move my mouse away, the menu disappears. Luckily, we find all these options also in the active workspace and tool settings over here. You can see we have radios, which is also up here.

We have the Strengths, which we can find up here. And we also have, for example, all the Texture settings, the Stroke settings, Falloff, and so on and so forth, which are identical to all these settings up here. And in addition, we find, for example, Dentopo, Remesh, Symmetry and Options down here, which is the same we find up here. And then we have some more general options here, for example, in these menus, we have this auto masking menu, and also this menu here is sculpting related.

But again, don't worry about all these tons of options and settings, nothing of this matters right now. And throughout creating our little sculpture here, we will only touch on the most important stuff. Talking about the most important stuff, let's learn the four most important shortcuts for sculpt mode. First of all, we can change the radius of our brush, which defines the size, which we can see here on this blue circle.

And in order to not always go up here, change this and then go back to see how big this is, you can simply press F, move the mouse left and right to make it bigger or smaller, and then left click to confirm. The next important option is the strength. That means how much we are adding or removing. Let's press F to make the brush a bit smaller, and then we can change the strength up here. And now when I sculpt over the surface, you can see the stroke is barely visible.

Let's undo this, and if I make it really strong, it will be much stronger as you can see. And of course we can control the strengths also with a shortcut by pressing Shift F. And now you can again move your mouse left and right in the center you see the strengths value and then with, you can confirm, and then you can see this value will be added up here in the strength settings. So then we have the possibility to either add geometry or remove geometry.

When the plus is enabled, we can add geometry, as you can see. 00:08:02.600 --> 00:08:01.280 So we are lifting the surface up, and when negative is enabled, we can add geometry as you can see. So we are lifting the surface up and when negative is enabled, we are removing geometry as you can see. So and you don't have to click on these buttons here, you can simply hold down control to invert what currently is enabled.

So that means currently add is enabled. That means we are adding geometry. And if I hold down control, this will be inverted. So we are removing geometry. And the other way around, if subtract is enabled, by default, it will be removed. And if I hold down control, it will be added. And for the last shortcut, let's re -enable the plus up here, draw a couple of strokes here. And then all we need to do is hold down shift to smooth out whatever we have drawn here.

And this will temporarily switch over to the smooth brush since we use the smooth brush so often, it is easier to hold down shift instead of always switching to the smooth brush. So, and last but not least, we have these little buttons here, which stands for pressure sensitivity. And this is only important when working with a graphics tablet. So, and with this button disabled, no matter what I do, the stroke will always have the same radius.

Let's undo this and now let's enable this. And now with pressure sensitivity enabled, Blender will detect how hard I will press on the graphics tablet. So with low pressure, I get a small radius and with strong pressure, it will be big. So you can see the difference here. And by default, you can see pressure sensitivity is also enabled for the strengths. Let's disable this, then we can see it a bit better with the radius.

So it's getting bigger or smaller depending on how hard I press. And let's disable this for radius. Let's enable this for strengths. Let's make the strengths a bit stronger. And now with low pressure, it will be relatively weak. And with strong pressure, it gets stronger. And by using pressure sensitivity for strength and radius, you can start sculpting very dynamically. And the whole thing becomes way more intuitive, especially in comparison when using a mouse.

Yeah, and this is basically everything you need to know to get started here in sculpt mode. So let's undo everything here with control Z and jump into the fun. Blender has thousands of useful keyboard shortcuts which can help you to significantly speed up the work. This is great, however, finding the shortcuts you are looking for and remembering them all can be quite tedious. This is where our handy Blender hotkey sheet comes into play.

It is a 14 pages PDF carefully crafted to contain all important shortcuts for Blender, which also includes the sculpt mode related shortcuts of course. It has a clickable menu bringing you to the desired shortcuts in no time and for everyone enjoying weird things in your hand, there's even a version optimized for printing. And with each major Blender release we also update this PDF so you can stay up to date with any shortcut related changes in Blender.

You can download this PDF for free at cgboost.com/resources. When we started a new sculpting file, you can see the background is completely gray. That means the grid and the axis are disabled. And in most cases, you don really need them for sculpting so we have a cleaner 3D viewport which is really nice. However for what we want to do now this can be quite useful. So let's go up here to the viewport overlays, enable the floor and x and y.

We can disable them later again when we start the sculpting process. Now we wanna add a reference sketch and a modeling sheet. And for doing so, we need to switch over to object mode. By the way, if you don't always wanna go up here to switch to other modes, There's something very handy which we can enable in the preferences. Let's press control comma to open up the preference window, which you can also find up here under edit preferences.

Then let's go to key map and here make sure pie Menu on Drag is enabled. This allows us to press and hold Tab and move our mouse in any direction. Then this Mode Pie Menu will pop up and you can hover your mouse above one of these modes, for example, sculpt mode, and then just release the tab button and you will switch to sculpt mode as you can see up here. And in this way, we don't always have to move the mouse up here.

We can just leave the mouse where it is, hold tab, move the mouse in the direction of the specific mode and release tab. And when you know the direction of the specific mode, it's very easy and quick to switch to these specific modes. So let's stay in object mode here. And first of all, let's add the reference sketch. For this, let's move the mouse up here until this little cross appears. Left click and hold to split our view.

And then up here, let's switch this window to the image editor. In the project files, which you can download when signing up to the free course in our CG Boost Academy, link below, you can find the reference sketch and a modeling sheet. So first of all, from an external folder, let's drag and drop the reference sketch here into the image editor. This is a little sketch I did, so we always have something to look at when we are sculpting.

Here, let's hold down Control, middle mouse button click, then we can zoom in and out. And with middle mouse button click, you can move this image around. Let's make this window a bit smaller so we still have enough real estate here in the 3D viewport. And here you can also press Shift and the Home key to center the image and maybe let's zoom in here a bit so we can see this nicely. Next, let's add the modeling sheet.

For this, let's click this negative Y axis here. So we are in the front orthographic view and also make sure you're in object mode. And then again, from the external folder, when you downloaded the project files, drag and drop the front view here into the 3D viewport. Let's zoom back a bit. And to center this image, let's press Alt G. Then let's also add the side view. However, take care that you don't drag and drop it onto the other image, which will just replace the image.

So let's drag it here on the side and then let's press Alt G again. So this is centered up here. Let's quickly hide the sphere so we can see both images. And while creating these images, I took care that they are aligned correctly from the scale. So all the landmarks like the nose, the chin, the mouth should always lie on the same line. If you have a different modeling sheet, then this might not always be the case. So you can press S to scale the images up and down and with left click confirm or with a right click you can cancel.

First of all, let's align these images so that they show from the right angle. So the front image is correct. We are currently in the front view and let's click on the positive X axis here, which is the right view as you can see. However, we don't see the image. So let's click on the other image here, press R for rotation, don't hold the button, then lock this along the blue Z axis by pressing Z and type in 90 on your keyboard for 90 degrees.

And it's now perfectly in line with the right side view. And it's pointing to the left, which is actually the front side, which is correct. However, if your image shows into the other direction, you can also type in minus and then it's pointing into the other direction. But here it is correct, so let's press minus again. However, minus only works when the rotation mode is still active. If not, you have to repeat the previous steps.

And then with left click, we can confirm. And now we have these two images aligned. Let's select both images. Let's go to the front view. Make sure you're assumed so far in that you can see the finer grid in the background. Let's press G for moving the image. Lock this along Z by pressing Z. Hold down control so we are snapping to the grid here and align it with the red axis here, which is kind of the floor of our scene.

So this looks quite nice. However, if I re -enable the sphere here and let's have a look from the front view, you can see that this sphere is blocking our view onto the modeling sheet. And of course it would be hard to sculpt or model something if we can't see the modeling sheet. So let's click on the image here, go to this little image icon down here, and here we can change some settings for the image. First of all, under Depth, let's enable Front.

This will then show in front of our 3D objects. But now we have the other problem that the image is blocking the view onto our object. So let's make this a bit more transparent. For this, let's enable opacity and turn it down to something like 0 .3. Now we can see the reference image, but we can also see our 3D objects here. Let's have a look from the side view and here let's do the same. Let's set this to be in front and opacity to 0 .3.

So this is great. And as you can see right now, we are in the orthographic viewpoint, which gives us a perfectly straight view onto our objects. And we don't have perspective distortion, which is perfect for these modeling sheets. However, if I now rotate my view, we are automatically switching to the perspective projection, which you can also tell by this little icon. If I click here, we are switching to orthographic.

If I click again, it's perspective. And the perspective view is perfect to inspect our sculpture and see if the proportions are right. However, these images are in the way. And for that, we also have a little trick. We can disable them for the perspective projection. So let's do this for both images. So as long as we are rotating around our object here and perspective is enabled, we don't see the images. And as soon as we are switching to orthographic projection, the images will appear.

So you don't have to click this button because as soon as you click the front view, for example, we are switching to orthographic projection automatically. The same applies to the right view, for example, or any other view. So whenever we are in the front view or the side view, we will see the image. And as soon as we are rotating around the view, the images will disappear. One quick side note, besides the gizmo up here, you can also use the number pad to quickly switch to different viewpoints.

You can press numpad one for the front view, numpad three for the side view, numpad seven for the top view. And when you hold down control, you can invert everything. So by pressing control one, you have the back instead of the front view, control numpad three is the left instead of the right view and control seven is at the bottom instead of the top view. And you can press numpad five to switch between perspective and orthographic projection.

And if you don't have a numpad, simply press control comma to open up the preferences, go to input and enable emulate numpad. Then the numbers above the letters on your keyboard can be used to change the different viewpoints. However, in my case, I will use the gizmo up here for this course, since it is more visual and easier to understand, especially for beginners. So let's organize our scene a bit. Let's zoom back here a bit because there are two other objects in our scene, the lamp and the camera, and we don't need them right now.

So let's press M to move them into a new collection. Let's click on new collection and call it a render. Let's hit okay. A collection is something like a folder which appears here in the outliner. And now you can see camera and light are in the render collection. And if I uncheck this box here, this whole collection will be hidden. So if I re -enable it, the objects are still there, but they are not in the way anymore when this is disabled.

Then let's select the two images. Again, in the 3D viewport, let's press M, new collection. Let's call this helper. Now we have this helper collection with the two images. And let's go to the front view so we can see the images. Let's select the front image, call this front. And here, the other one should be side. And then we have the collection up here where we have our sphere inside and let's double click and rename this into sculpture.

By the way, later on, I don't accidentally wanna select these images and maybe move them around so we can disable them for selection. For this, let's click on this little filter up here, enable the mouse cursor restriction toggle, and then we have this mouse cursor over here, and then we can either disable them for the two images or for the entire collection up here. And now if I click on these images, I can't select them, but I can still select the sphere, which is in the other collection.

One final note, of course, you don't always have a modeling sheet when sculpting something. However, what I would highly suggest is to have at least a sketch, a concept art, or a photo of the thing you want to sculpt or model. Although it is of course a bit harder to sculpt something only from a reference image where we don't have the direct front and side view, for example, it will still help a lot to get the proportions right.

So always use some sort of reference when you're sculpting or creating something in 3D. So but here I took a render of a sculpture which I created before and this will make our sculpting life now a lot easier. Before we start our base mesh, let's quickly analyze our sketch. Over here with the mouse hovering above the image editor, let's press control space bar and then shift and the home key. Now let's press T to open up the tool shelf.

Let's enable the annotate tool and then let's press N to open up the sidebar, go to view annotations andations, and then let's create a new one, and let's give it a strong yellow color here. And for now, let's totally ignore the headphones because they are quite simple. Let's only focus on the head sculpture itself. And if we just look at the main head shape, it's basically just a big cylinder as you can see. So a basic shape which we can use for the head is a cylinder.

Let's create another node here. Maybe let's make it more red. Then the neck area is basically again a cylinder. So we have two cylinders sticked into each other and down here for the body, if we ignore the arms, let's create another node here and let's go into more blue, I think, make it bright. We have basically half a sphere. So if we draw a sphere here, as you can see, and then cut it in half, we basically have this lower body shape.

And then later on, the headphones are basically made out of some cubes and rectangles. So with this planned out, let's press Control Spacebar, then over here, Shift and the Home key, maybe let's zoom in a bit, and then let's get back to the other tool here so we don't accidentally draw on this image and for now let's press N. Up here, make sure the sculpture collection is selected so all the new objects we are creating will be added to this collection.

Then first of all, we have this sphere here already, which is nice. So let's press S and scale it up a tiny bit. And then let's have a look from the side view. Press G, Y, move it a bit to the back and press S, Y and squash it together. For now, let's continue and add a neck. For this, let's hit Shift A to add a new object, go to mesh cylinder, and we can leave the settings as they are for the cylinder. If you want to add a higher resolution, you could do it down here if you increase the vertices.

However, we don't really need this. We can change the resolution later on in sculpt mode. Then let's press G, move it up, left click to confirm, then press R. Let's rotate this, S, scale it down, and then let's have a look from the front. I think the neck could be a bit wider, so let's press S, X, and scale it a bit wider, something like this. Then let's press N, go to item and make sure that the X axis is set to zero so that this object is perfectly in the center.

Let's check the sphere also, X is zero, perfect. Let's press N again and let's add another cylinder. Again, let's leave the settings for the cylinder as they are. Let's press G, move it up, R, rotate it, S, Z. But now you can see it's scaling weirdly. So let's press Z another time. And then we can scale along the local axis of the object, scale it something like this, confirm, press G and adjust the position and the rotation until this cylinder fits the shape of the head.

Let's go to the front view and I guess this can maybe push down a bit more, something like this. However, if I quickly hide this object, you can see the head is a bit tapered. So let's actually adjust the shape of this cylinder a bit more. Let's tap and hold and switch over to edit mode. Then up here, if you can't see all these buttons, middle mouse button, click and hold and drag this to the side and let's enable X -ray.

You can also enable X -ray by pressing Alt Z. Now make sure select box is selected and select the top portion here. And then we can press S for scaling and scale this down. Down here, let's select all this, press S and scale this up slightly. Let's have a look from the side and we can also make some more adjustments, select this, press G, let's rotate this slightly, something like this. Now let's hit tab, go back into object mode, disable x -ray or press Alt Z.

And now let's have a quick look. And this gives us now a good basic shape to work with. Of course, we could go even further and add some shapes for the nose, for the ears, and of course, later on for the headphones and maybe for the arms, but these are all shapes to practice the different sculpting tools with. So let's don't go too detailed with the base mesh here. And again, with the cylinder for the head selected, let's press N and make sure the X location is set to zero.

So it's perfectly at the center. Next, let's quickly rename the three objects here into neck, head, and body. Of course, at some point later on, we will merge all these three objects together, but this is not happening right now. And this makes it a bit easier for us to work with the three objects. Also over here, let's press T to hide the tool shelf. Let's press N to open up the sidebar, go to view annotations and either disable the individual annotations here, or you can also fully disable them up here.

Then let's press N because for the next steps, we don't need them anymore. Now we want to make a few more adjustments in sculpt mode. However, there's one super important thing to keep in mind when you're working with different objects and especially if you scaled objects in object mode, which we did. Let's select this sphere object here, let's press N, and you can see the scale here is non -uniform, so we don't have 111.

And that means we scaled the object in object mode and this uneven scale will also affect our brush strokes. Let's make it a bit more extreme so you better understand what I'm talking about. With shift D, I quickly duplicate the sphere. You don't have to do this. And now let's scale it on the Y extremely. So we have an extreme un -uniform scale. And all these scale values on X, Y, and Z will also be applied on the sculpting brush, for example.

Let's hit Tab, go to Sculpt Mode. And now we get this warning message down here. So whenever this pops up, you have to do something which I will show you in a second. And you can also clearly see it right now that our brush is weirdly stretched and this even affects the sculpting here. So imagine our object is kind of squashed together and stretched and we are now in this weird dimension where everything is squashed and stretched.

So, but of course we don't want this. So let's go back into object mode, make sure this object is selected. And now we wanna tell Blender, hey Blender, we stretched and squashed this object, but this should now be the default scale of the object and all the tools should also behave correctly. And for this, you can either go to Object, Apply, and click on Scale, or let's undo this, you can also just press Control A, and then you also open up the Apply menu, and then click on Scale.

And now you can see the object has not changed in shape. However, the scale value is set back to 111. And now if we are switching to sculpt mode with tab, you can see that the brush has now a nice circular shape. And if I sculpt here on the object, this looks also pretty nice. So that means whenever you shape and scale an object in object mode, I would recommend applying the scale. So let's remove this object here. And now we can just select all these three objects with holding down shift and clicking on one object, make sure that one object is active.

So we have this brighter outline up here, and now we can press control A and apply the scale for all the objects. And now you can see the scale is 111 on all these objects. And whenever you face some sort of problem with sculpting, check this first, because in most cases, this is the issue. So now let's press N to hide the sidebar, select the head object, and with Tab and drag, switch to sculpt to sculpt mode and now again we can disable the floor and the axis we don't need them anymore.

Let's go to the side view and you can see we have this nice cutout shape for the chin area and this cutout for the eyes. And let's quickly hide the neck and the body here so we can see this a bit better. And for cutting out shapes like this, we can use the trim tool inside of sculpt mode. Over here, let's scroll down to the box trim tool, left click and hold and switch to the lasso trim tool. And now we can just draw a little shape down here, make sure it is one closed shape like this, and then this will be cut.

By the way, this cutting can be quite performance intensive. That means if you have a low spec computer, this might take a little longer or when the mesh has a higher resolution, this can also take a bit longer. And now let's cut also out a triangular shape for the eyes. And while we're at it, we can even cut out a little shape here in the front. And we don't have to be too precise here because here in sculpt mode, we can shape around everything as we like.

Now let's middle mouse button click and have a look. And now you can see where we cut things off, we now get these weird colors. And these colors are called face sets. And face sets are some sort of masks. That means Blender automatically created some masks where we cut away geometry. And this can be useful, however, in our case, we don't really need it. So let's go to face sets and click on face set from visible, which will essentially create one big face set for everything visible.

So everything will just be default gray. So then let's re -enable the neck and the body. And the last thing I wanna do now is to remesh the head and the neck, because if I quickly enable wireframe here and set the value to one, by the way, I only enabled wireframe to show you the individual polygons better, so you can also leave it off. You can see the sphere down here has a quite high resolution already, but the head and the neck are very low in resolution.

And what we are essentially doing in sculpt mode is to push vertices around. That means if I quickly grab the grab brush and make it a bit bigger here with the radius and move this around, you can see this looks super ugly and we get really weird distortions. So what we wanna do here is, let's middle mouse button click, drag this over to remesh the object. That means with the voxel size, we can define a different resolution and then clicking this remesh button.

However, defining a value up here is very unintuitive because we don't really know what this means. So what we can do instead here in the 3D viewport is pressing R, which gives us this nice grid and shows us the exact voxel size. And then we can adjust this. And by the way, if you wanna more precisely adjust this value, simply hold down shift, and then let's go to something like 0 .03, which I think is a good starting resolution.

Never ever go too high with the resolution when you're just starting to sculpt because the higher the resolution is, the harder it will be to get the main shapes right. A higher resolution we only need for the details later on. Left click to confirm the voxel size, that means the mesh is not remeshed yet, and then either go up here and click on Remesh or press Control R. And now since I still have wireframe enabled, you can see that we now have a much better resolution here.

And if I would grab something here, you can see the shape looks much nicer. Then let's disable wireframe here and let's switch over to this object. Right now, I can't sculpt on the other object because in sculpt mode, we can only sculpt on the previously selected object. However, we don't have to switch to object mode, select the other object, switch to sculpt mode. There's a much quicker way. We can either just click this little button here to switch the sculpt mode to other objects, or right now we are on the body, we can also hover above an object and press Alt Q, then this will be quickly highlighted, and then we are in sculpt mode of this specific object.

So let's hover above the neck, Alt Q, and then let's press R, set the resolution to something around 0 .03, left click to confirm, and then press Control R to remesh this. Yeah, and now our base mesh is complete and we can start the sculpting process. So although we remeshed this head and the neck already, you can see it still looks kind of weird and as if we still have a lower resolution. So let's smooth out the surface.

For this, we can use the smooth brush. Let's zoom in here a bit, make this a bit smaller with F, and then we can smooth carefully the surface here. But before we do this, since our head is currently still symmetrical, we can make use of symmetry. So with control Z, let's undo what I've just did, and then let's enable symmetry. And you can see the axis up here. So in our case, if we look from the front, we wanna symmetri the X -axis.

So let's click X. And now if I smooth one side, you can see that the other side will be smoothed as well. Later on, I will also show you how to apply a smooth filter onto the entire object. But for now, let's learn how to use the different brushes. And as you can see, the smoothing is quite strong down here. So let's undo this and let's lower the strengths. And we know the shortcut shift F. So let's turn it down a bit and try again.

And yeah, now we have more fine control over the smoothing. And the smooth brush is actually a brush which you nearly never need to click on because no matter what other brush you have selected, let's use the default sculpt draw brush, you can always hold down shift, which will switch to the smooth brush. So although the sculpt draw brush is selected right now, when holding down shift, I can smooth the surface. So let's quickly go over the surface here and smooth everything so that everything looks nice.

That looks good for the head and now let's switch over to the neck. For this, let's press Alt Q and actually I just wanna see the neck without the other objects. Of course, we could hide the other objects over here, but we can also switch to local view. For this, you can press slash on the numpad, or you can go up here to view, local view, and then click on toggle local view. Here you also see the shortcut. So slash on the numpad, and then up here we can see that we are in local view right now.

So only the selected objects are visible. And then before we smooth this object, you can see symmetry is now disabled. And that's because we switched to another object and the symmetry options is an object based setting. So if I would switch back to the head symmetry would still be enabled. But since we haven't enabled it for the neck, we have to enable it now. Now hold down shift and let's smooth out the neck. And here we don't have to be that careful with all the edges here because they are sticking in the head and the body and we won't see them anyway.

That looks good. And now let's hit slash again to get back out of local view or again up here, click on view local view and toggle local view. So that looks pretty nice already. Now before we add any specific details like the nose, the ears, the mouth and so on, we have to adjust the general shapes. First of all, with Alt Q, let's switch over to the head and here comes the next brush, the grab brush. This is a super important brush, especially at the beginning stages of your sculpting process, since with the grab brush, we can kind of grab the geometry and move it around as you can see.

And this allows us to make bigger adjustments to our sculpture. So for example, if we have a look at the eye area here, it is a bit more boxy and not so eye shaped. So what we can do is to press F and make the brush a bit bigger, left click to confirm, and now we can drag this out here. Maybe it's a bit too big, let's make it a bit smaller, something like this, and the same up here, let's drag this out a bit. Of course, always check your sculpture from different angles to see if there are some weird deformations and then you can make further adjustments.

And of course, make sure X symmetry is still enabled so everything happens on the other side as well. Then this whole area looks a bit weird and we don't wanna have this harsh shape down here. So let's hold down shift and smooth out this area even more and also this harsh edge down here. And then with the grab brush, let's grab this and push this out a bit, make it a bit smaller and shape this a bit around. So now you can see we have this weird bumps over here, which I don't really like.

And here we can make use of another brush, which is the clay strips brush. This is a fantastic brush if you wanna make smaller or more careful adjustments. Let's make it a bit smaller with F, and this time I don't wanna add geometry, I wanna remove geometry. That means I can simply hold down Control and carefully cut away the geometry here. So we are slowly layer by layer removing geometry. And of course, this looks a bit ugly, but when I hold down Shift and smooth over this area, it looks much better already.

And we are getting rid of these bumps. And up here, maybe we wanna keep this more boxy shape here. You can see the upper head is more boxy. So we can add geometry here. So I don't hold down control, I just add a few layers of material up here, something like this, and then with shift, smooth out this area nicely. We can also switch back to the grab brush and maybe have a look from the top here and then press F to make it a bit bigger and push this out a bit so it becomes a bit more boxy.

And maybe let's do the same thing back here, maybe push this in a bit. Something like this. And also over here, let's push this in a bit more. And what we can always do is to check our model and compare it with the reference image. And as you can see, the chin down here is much shorter. So let's actually grab this with a big grab brush, push it a bit inside. Then here you can see this lower eye socket area actually is pushed out more.

So let's push it out and push in this area a bit. And the forehead can also be pushed out a bit more, something like this. Let's push this down a bit. Of course, we don't have to align the concept 100%, but we can at least get a bit closer. So I think here it's a bit more towards the outside. Here we can push this in. Let's push this down here a bit. Then let's have a look again from the front. Let's click minus Y. And I think in general here it looks already quite nice.

We can push this up here a bit. I think compared to the reference image, it can be even a bit wider. Something like this. And I think here the chin area can be pushed out a bit and kind of flattened a bit. Then let's get back to the clay strips brush and let's smooth out this area here a bit. So let's cut away a little bit of geometry here by holding down control and then with shift, let's smooth this out again. Maybe let's add a bit more geometry down here and maybe let's cut away a little bit geometry here.

Let's cut away a little bit from here and smooth this out. So I think right now we are going into a good direction, but of course we can do more adjustments later on. Then with Alt Q, let's switch to the neck and I feel up here it can be pushed in a bit more so we can see the shape of the head a bit better. So let's switch back to the grab brush, make it a bit bigger and push it in a bit, maybe push it out down here and then let's compare it with the reference.

You can see it's a bit shorter here, something like this. And you can also see that the body is actually a bit higher. So let's press Alt Q, switch to the body, make the brush relatively big and push it up a little bit. Let's also check from the front, push this in a bit. And now I did a little mistake, but actually it's quite good that I did this. You can see I made some changes over here on the sphere, but since the sphere is again a different object, symmetry was disabled.

However, we can still symmetrize the object afterwards. For this, simply click this little dropdown here, and then we find this symmetrize option. And here we have to decide the direction. So we wanna symmetrize from this side over to this side. And this side is positive x, and the other one is negative x. So we wanna symmetrize from positive over to negative. So let's click up here, select positive x to negative x, and then click on symmetrize.

Now you can see the other side was adjusted as well. And now we can enable symmetry so that further changes will be symmetrized on the other side as well. Now let's have a look over here. And all in all, I quite like it, although this shape up here still looks a bit wobbly. So then let's switch to the head again and let's take care of this wobbly surface here. And although we have this flatten brush here, let's quickly switch over to it and try to flatten the surface.

You can see it looks a bit weird and it's not really giving us what we want. The flatten brush can be useful in some cases, but for this specific case, I would suggest the scrape brush. The scrape brush, as you can see, it's creating this more harsh but very clean cutaway, and you can kind of cut away this wobbly surface. And then later on, we just go over it again with the smooth brush and then it looks quite nice. So still be careful that you don't take away too much, but if you carefully and slowly go over the surface here, we can make it look quite nice.

And this brush will also serve us later to make the whole sculpture at the end look as if it was carved out of stone. So let's go over this a bit. Always make sure to check the sculpture from different angles. And this looks good to me and now hold down shift and carefully smooth out the surface a bit more. So this looks already much better. So although it might look as if we haven't made big progress here, we made big progress in terms of learning the sculpting tools.

We learned how to use the smooth brush, the grab brush, the clay strips brush, and also the scrape brush. And we also learned about the symmetry options here. So now it's time to define the different landmarks like the nose, the ears and the mouth. For this, let's make use of the masking tools. Let's middle mouse button click and move this up here until we find the box mask. Middle mouse button click and hold here and let's switch to the lasso mask.

Over here in the active workspace and tool settings, make sure front faces only is selected. That means when we are drawing a mask here at the front, it will not show up here at the back. So let's start with the ears. Let's have a look from the side. And here you can see the shape of the ears. And now with left click, let's roughly trace the shape of the ears. Of course, make sure that you have the head model selected.

So now we have this black mask. And actually, I feel that the ears are going too far behind the head here. So let's clean up this mask once again. Let's go to Mask, Clear Mask, or press Alt M. Then let's middle mouse button click and drag, go up here to the grab brush once again, with F make it a bit bigger, and let's move this section a bit further to the outside so that the back of the head becomes more flat. Same as the sides here.

Yeah. And then let's go along here with the scrape brush once again, flatten this area a bit more. And then same here at the side. And with a grab brush, let's clean this up a bit. And then with shift, let's carefully smooth out this section here. So I think this looks way more interesting. So we have a more rounded shape at the front and a very harsh and flat shape here at the back. So second try, let's move down here, click on the lasso mask, side view, and let's trace the ears here.

Something like this. Based on our mesh resolution, we can see these jagged edges here. So we can try to smooth this out a bit. Let's go to mask and click on smooth mask. If we click down here on mask filter, we can disable auto iteration count and then we can manually change the iterations here to get something we like. Let's try three for now. And then let's go to mask and click on sharpen. And also again here, increase the iterations a bit, and then you can see the mask looks much better.

However, we can tweak this even more with the mask brush. Let's click on the mask brush, make it a bit smaller, and let's set the strength up here to one, so we can fully add or erase the mask. So if I wanna erase something, maybe this section up here, I can simply hold down control or just enable the minus up here. So let's hold down control and then I can carefully cut away sections which I don't like. We can also have a look from the side view again and maybe check if the different sections here are nicely added to the ear.

And then if you wanna add more , simply draw over the section to add more masked areas. Maybe let's make it not too wide here at the back. And the cool thing is with having the mask here, we can already check the model and see where the ears will be placed and imagine if this shape will look nice. So now let's switch back to another brush, maybe the sculpt raw brush, make it a bit bigger and let's try to sculpt over the section.

However, you can see that we now masked out the section. So it's protected and we can't sculpt on the section anymore. However, we wanna do the exact opposite. So we have to invert the mask. So let's go to mask and click on invert or press control I. Now the whole thing is inverted as you can see and now we can drag out the ears. And for dragging out the ears, let's middle mouse button, click and drag. We have the move tool down here.

Let's have a look from the front. And now we can move out the mask section because everything else from the head has a mask now except the ears. And when I move something now, you can see I will only drag out the ears. And since we have symmetry on, it will also do it on the other side. So let's undo this one more time and then carefully drag this out. Something like this. Let's have a look. This looks quite nice. However, if we want to have like a perfect straight line from the front, let's drag this out a bit further, something like this, and then let's cut away this line here.

So let's have a look from the front. Let's press Alt M to clear the mask. And then let's try another tool, the line project tool, which is similar as the trim tools. However, it will not really cut something away. It will just project everything onto a flat plane. So let's click somewhere up here and drag a line down. Now you can see this gradient going from the line, which shows the direction which will be cut away.

And if you look down in the info bar, you can see we have some additional shortcuts which we can press. So we can press F to flip this, so the other side will be cut. We could hold down control to snap it to a certain degree increments, which is not really useful here. However, you can also press space bar and hold to move the whole thing around to perfectly align it, something like this, and then release the mouse. And now we have this flat surface.

However, you can see it looks a bit rough on the edges, but this we will fix in a moment. For now, let's create the basic shape for the nose as well. And for this, again, let's use the lasso mask. Let's have a look from the front and let's try to trace the nose roughly. But for now without the nostrils. Let's have a look. Looks super rough. So again let's try to smooth out the mask a bit. Not too much. And then let's sharpen the mask.

And now let's tweak it with the mask brush here. And let's draw over this. Let's have a look. To see the modeling sheet. Let's hold down control and cut away something here. And of course we have to tweak it more down the line, but for now let's press control I to invert the mask. Just check the model if there's no other place unmask, looks good. Then we can even tweak the mask here a bit more. Something like this. And now let's use the same trick with the move tool.

Let's have a look from the side and move the mask out. And if we click on this circle here, we can also freely move the whole thing. So let's move it in the direction of the nose, something like this. And then here, let's use the lasso trim tool because the nose has a bit more organic shape. And then let's cut away the upper section here, something like this. And again, the trim tool can take a short moment until the action will be performed.

So now we have this face set again, which we also had when we cut away certain other sections. You can get rid of this if you click on face sets, face set from visible. Now let's press Alt M to also get rid of the mask. And the last landmark which we wanna add is the area where we wanna add the mouse. Middle mouse button click, drag this down and let's switch over to the clay strips brush. Have a look from the front.

And now let's just add a bit of geometry where we wanna add the mouse later on. Something like this. And then smooth out this area a tiny bit. So these are the major landmarks of the head. And now let's also add the arms down here. So with Alt Q, let's switch to the body. First of all, since we symmetrized the body here, let's use a different brush, maybe the sculptor brush and then hold down shift and smooth over this section.

And then let's use the scrape brush once again, make it quite big and go over this back section here and make this a bit flatter. Something like this. Let's have a look from this side. Let's use the grab brush and push this a bit to the back to make this a bit bigger, something like this. And then we're holding down shift, let's smooth out the whole section a bit more so it shouldn't be like super flat and harsh, something like this.

Then again, let's go down here to the lasso mask tool and draw a shape for the arm. Then when you're using the mask brush, you can also hold down shift to smooth this out. However, that's a bit strong. So let's undo this and lower the strength of the mask brush here. And if you like, you can also extend the mask area here a bit or shape it how you like. Let's increase the strength back to one so we can more easily add and remove sections here.

Something like this. Let's press Control and I to invert the whole thing. And then similar as before, let's use the move tool, make sure symmetry is enabled. Let's have a look from the front and push the whole thing to the out. Let's go a bit wider than the arms on the modeling sheet, because now we can make the brush a bit bigger and hold down shift to smooth out everything. But this does not work when the move tool is enabled.

So just click on any brush you like up here, hold down shift, and then we can smooth out the whole section a bit more. Because you can see it's quite rounded here. And then let's press Alt M to remove the mask. And then we have added the sections for the arms. And actually, I think I don't want to cut off this lower section because later on we will stick it into a ground and when the whole thing is moving around, parts of the lower body might appear above the surface.

So let's actually keep it as it is right now. So however, the mouse, the nose and the ears look quite ugly With Alt Q, let's switch back to the head. And while we pushed out the shape for the nose, we actually stretched the geometry here. So if I go up here to the viewport overlays, enable wireframe, set it to one, you can see that the geometry is stretched here on the sides, same applies to the ears here. So that means when I, for example, use the clay strips brush and sculpt above here, this looks absolutely ugly.

So let's undo this. Let's middle mouse button click and hold and drag to the side. Go to the remesh options and we could just remesh the whole thing with the same resolution. However, I go a little bit lower with the voxel size here, which gives us a little bit more resolution to work with when cleaning up the nose, ears and mouth. Let's click on remesh and voila, you can see we have a higher resolution. Let's go up here and disable wireframe and let's get started with the nose.

First of all, let's have a look from the front and we can't really see the background image anymore. So let's disable the head for a moment so we can better see where the nose is going. And I can hold down D to draw in here, something like this. So we better see where the major line of the nose goes and then we can unhide the head again now let's use the grab brush with f make it a bit bigger and now let's try to bring in the nose into one straight line so let's grab the geometry here and for now let's push it all further to the inside, something like this.

And then with F, let's make the brush a bit smaller, left click, and then we can adjust this a bit further. Doesn't have to be completely perfect, but let's try to get it as good as possible. Then also down here, we want to have a relatively straight line. So let's also try to push all this a bit more to the inside. Something like this. And now let's have a look from the side. To get rid of this blue line, let's press N, go to View, Annotations, and just click on the minus to remove this annotation here.

Let's press N again. And you can see this looks quite nice already. Now let's have a look from the side and let's also make this a more straight line. Let's press F to make the brush a bit bigger. We're still using our grab brush. And of course we still have X symmetry enabled all the time. So something like this should do the job. Now let's use the scrape brush first, make it a bit smaller and then carefully go along this uneven surface to make it a bit flatter and straighter than up here.

It's also straight in this doesn't has to be perfect now, but let's get it as clean as possible here. Also on the sides. So let's get it as clean as possible here also on the sides so for the side it's not working that well so let's hold down shift and also carefully go over this with a small brush and smooth out the surface here. And don't worry if we are losing some sharp details here, we will sharpen the whole thing later on again.

Let's smooth out the tip of the nose a bit and also this line here, let's carefully go over this so it's not so harsh. And also up here, let's smooth out this section so it looks a bit nicer. So I think something like this will do the job for now. And now let's add the nostrils over here. So let's zoom in here a bit. And for this, middle mouse button click and drag down. Let's use the mask brush. Make sure it's set to one.

And now let's draw in a shape for the nostrils. We can also have a look from the side to have a rough idea where it is. Here it is, let's re -enable this. And now let's draw over this section here, something like this. And then let's have a look here. If we have a good mask, you can hold down control to erase some of the mask, something like this. Then let's press control I to invert this. And now let's use the grab brush with F, make it a bit bigger.

And let's have a look from down here and let's start on the portion which is connected with the face and drag it out. And up here, it should be angled a bit. So at the front here, I don't push it out too much. And the cool thing here is now we can just stick it into the face. And then in a moment when we remesh the whole thing, again, these two shapes will be merged nicely into each other. So let's have a look from the front once again, and I think we can even push it out a bit more.

Something like this. Then let's press Alt M to remove the mask, and then let's press Ctrl R to remesh the whole thing once again. Now you can see how nicely this is merged into each other. So and then let's use the scrape brush, clean up this section down here a bit. And then with holding shift, let's smooth this out a bit more. So now I think we can drag this down a bit more. So let's use a grab brush, drag this down a bit more so that the lower portion here is roughly one flat plane.

And of course, you can totally go off track and adjust the nose to your liking if you want to have a completely different nose here. So but I think something in this direction works nicely. Let's have a look from further away. In general, the nose feels a bit bulky still. So maybe we can push everything a bit closer to the inside. Let's have a look from the front and let's carefully push this a bit more to the inside, but nothing too extreme.

Maybe push it a bit up. And from the side view, maybe let's push this bit down and let's go a little bit up here. Something like this. So and while we're at it, let's quickly add some nostrils here. And for this, let's try out a new brush. Middle mouse button click and drag this up. Let's use the blob brush. Let's make it a bit smaller and with the blob brush, you can create pimples or any little blobs and when you hold down control to invert it, you can also easily add holes into your sculptures.

So let's make it a bit longer. You can see the nostril is quite long. So something like this. Let's have a look. Maybe we can go a bit deeper here and no worry, we are losing some geometry here because we are stretching it quite a bit, but we can easily adjust it. So here we removed too much so we can get back to our grab brush, get a bit bigger and try to push it to the inside once again, straighten this line a bit so that it looks nice.

Something like this should do the job for now. And then let's press Control R to remesh the whole thing with Shift. Let's smooth out the whole thing. And in the front here, we are losing a bit from the hole. So let's get back to the blob brush, hold down Control and let's push it in once again. And maybe let's go around here carefully to add a bit of roundness. So let's have a look from further away. I think it's a bit too big.

So let's get back to the grab brush and let's push it back down a bit and make the nasal wings here at the side a bit wider. So let's have a look. Yeah, I think that looks good. Maybe a little bit of smoothing on top. But yeah, we will adjust this a bit further later down the road. And for now, let's move over to the ears. So the ears are pretty straightforward. For this, let's use the scrape brush and go over the flat surface here on the side.

And after this, we will smooth out this surface a bit. So let's already pretty good. However, I still wanna go over this with a tiny bit of smoothing to get rid of some ugly artifacts. But yeah, no worries, we will sharpen all this later on again. So something like this. That looks pretty good. Maybe go around here on the face as well to get rid of some of these lines which we just accidentally created. And yeah, that looks good already.

Yeah, nice shape. And now let's go over to defining the mouse a bit more. So for the mouse, we first need a sharp line here at the center. And you can see for the mouse, we have this smiling mouse corner here. However, this will only be on one side. And since right now we are using symmetry to make our life a bit easier, we don't sculpt this specific detail. This we will add a bit later when the rest of the sculpture is done.

Then we can start adding non -symmetrical details. So for the sharp line, let's use the draw sharp brush. Let's actually have a look from the front view so we can see this line a bit better. It's pretty much here. So let's go from here carefully over to the side. Let's keep it relatively straight. So let's go over this three or four times to have a relatively sharp line. Then let's also add the lips for this. Let's use the clay strips brush, make it a bit bigger and carefully go over the lip section, but don't make it too strong.

We don't wanna have these super strong full lips here. It's a sculpture after all, with relatively flat lips, I would say. Let's hold down Control and take a little bit away down here. Then with Shift, let's carefully smooth this a bit, not too much so that we don't lose all the details again. And now we can use the scrape brush to flatten this surface here nicely. Maybe let's smooth this section here a bit more and up here.

And now let's use the pinch brush, which as you can see from this little icon here is pushing geometry closer together. And this is nice to sharpen lines a bit more. So we can either sharp creases, if I carefully go along here, it's pushing it together as you can see. So here at the corner, let's push it more together. And then here at the rest, not too much. And we can also use this to make edges a bit sharper, which we will do later for the rest of the sculpture.

Now, if I go here, you can see it looks quite nice. What we can try is to use the crease brush here, make it a bit bigger and sculpt here on the mouse corners to push them a bit to the inside. But I wouldn't overdo it since this is not a realistic sculpture. So let's smooth out this area here a bit. But something like this might do the job. Let's get back to the draw sharp brush and go carefully along here a bit and also along here to sharpen this line a bit.

And then again, smooth this a bit. And with the pinch brush, let's go along here once again. But yeah, since we might remesh the whole thing one more time, we might lose some of these details once again. So we might have to restore them later on again. Now when we have a look at the mouse once again, you can see that the line is a bit pushed up to the top and I wanna push it down a bit. And to do so, let's actually use our mask brush, set it to one and mask this section here and also this lower section so that we can push the inside of the mouse up and down without affecting the area around the mouse.

So we can either go with the grab brush, so if I make it a bit bigger, we can move it up and down. Or if you wanna push something more carefully, you can use the notch brush. This one allows us to push something in a specific direction, as you can see. So we can push this down a bit, or this can also help us to straighten lines a bit more if they are a bit wobbly, something like this . Then let's press Alt M to get rid of the mask and now this looks already much better.

Great. I have the grab brush selected and when we have a look from the front here, it looks a bit as if the sculpture is set and over here on our reference, we can see it's more relaxed pose. So let's adjust the eye sockets here a bit and I think it's relatively easy. Let's make it a bit bigger, the brush, and then push this one down a bit, this one up a bit, something more neutral. And I think maybe we can also push this here up a bit, which also makes the nose feel a bit longer if this is a bit smaller up here.

Then let's push this one in a bit and make some slight adjustments to the nose. And also here, I think we can adjust this a bit. Let's push this in a bit more, this down a bit more, and maybe the tip of the nose out a bit, something like this. Also, I would like to make the chin a bit longer, as you can see here. So let's push this down, but I don't want to stretch the mouse here. So what we can do is middle mouse button click, drag this down here, use the box mask, and then let's drag and drop a big mask above the head, including the mouth.

And then let's go to mask, smooth mask, make sure auto iteration count is disabled, then we can adjust this value here. So let's make the mask a bit smoother. And now with the grab brush, make it a bit bigger, we can adjust this here without stretching the mouse so we can make further adjustments. Maybe let's make this a bit more pointy here. Let's have a look. Let's smooth this out a bit. And yeah, let's press Alt M.

And I think in general, I quite like this. Now we wanna finalize the symmetrical sculpting process of the sculpture. So first of all, let's check if all the major shapes are in place. I think for that, let's have a look from the side. With Alt Q, let's go down here. We still have the grab brush selected and let's move this portion up a bit and maybe let's make the back a bit wider so now we are also moving the arm around which I don't really want so let's push it back and let's push this section up a bit.

Because you can see here, it's kind of more boxy shaped, so this arm should not be too flat on the body. Yeah, but we will make further adjustments in a moment. So now I wanna merge all these three objects together. For this, we have to switch to object mode first. So let's press Tab, switch over to object mode, then let's select the head first, then with Shift, the neck, and and then with Shift the body. So we are merging all the objects to the body object.

And now we can go to Object, click on Join or press Control J. Now we joined all these objects together. Now you can see here we only have the body left. So let's double click here and let's call it sculpture. Now let's switch back to sculpt mode. Now we have different faces on the different body parts as you can see. Let's get rid of these by clicking on faces, faces from visible. So now the problem is that these objects are merged into one object, but the different mesh parts are actually not merged into each other.

So we still have these sharp lines. And when I press shift and try to smooth this out, you can see not much is happening. So what we have to do here is to remesh the whole thing. So up here, middle mouse button click, drag this over, go to remesh. And now you can see the voxel size is not what we set up before. And we can actually test the voxel size of our mesh by clicking on this little eyedropper here and click on the mesh here.

And then you can see here on this specific spot, the voxel size is 0 .02. And I think let's go down a tiny bit more to 0 .015 to get a little higher resolution here. So this is now remeshed. And now you can see here on this jagged edge, all the three objects were merged into each other. And now if I hold down shift, go along here, you can see this can be smoothed. And now we could go over the entire mesh and smooth everything by hand.

However, we can also do it more quickly. Middle mouse button click, drag this down. And let's go to the mesh filter. Here under filter type, let's switch to smooth. And now I can simply left click and hold somewhere in the screen and drag to the right. And now if I drag very far, you can see it's getting smoothed a lot. And if I go back here, it will be less strong. If I go into the other direction, it will apply an opposite effect, which is kind of a sharpen effect here.

So, but I want to smooth everything a tiny bit, something like this, I think. So now it's time to sharpen all the different lines and make it look pretty nice. So first of all, let's go up here and let's use the draw sharp brush. First of all, we want to draw some sharper lines in all the creases. So let's draw a line here, then one line here, another here, and I think also around here, then one line here, another here, and I think also around here.

Here let's keep it a bit more boxy. And maybe even go in here. I think that fits the style of the sculpture. Then here carefully, let's do one more time. Then also around here with low pressure. No worries, we will adjust this further. This is just like the first pass. Then here, and I think here, I hold down control to invert this to add this sharp line on top. Yeah, something like this, maybe the same up here. Maybe here, here and maybe here.

Then I think around the ear, we can also draw a crease down here. And of course, when you're doing all that, make sure X symmetry is enabled so everything will be automatically mirrored to the other side. Something like this. I think the neck looks pretty good so far. I think there the line shouldn't be that sharp, but here on the arm this looks quite ugly still. So let's actually smooth this out quite a bit. Something like this.

And with the grab brush, let's push this down here a bit more. And let's smooth out this top portion a bit more so everything merges better into each other. Also this portion here could be smoothed out a bit more. And keep in mind that in the end there will be some sort of ground here so we only see the upper portion. So we don't really care about the lower portion here. So now let's go back to the draw sharp brush. And let's draw a sharp line here.

But let's make it way smaller. Something like this. And with a bigger brush and inverted, let's draw a sharp line around here. Something like this. And then I think we can also apply a slight sharp pass around here, around this and around this. And I think maybe even here on the nostrils, we can also add a sharp line here and maybe go around somewhere here. Maybe here. Yeah, now it looks as if we applied some sort of sharpness filter and now let's clean this up a bit further.

For that, let's use the scrape brush and first of all, let's go along all these sharper lines here, which allows us to flatten this a bit. So we get rid of the peaks, but we will end up still with a relatively sharp line. And then with a very small brush hold down shift, we can also smooth out the sides here of the surface a bit. In the end, we will break it up even more so it looks as if it was carved out of stone, but for now we try to make it relatively clean.

Up here, let's also draw along with the scrape brush to make this section a bit sharper. So I'm just using a mix of the scrape brush and then the smooth brush to smooth out the flat planes which I created. So also let's go in here and here and along here. And also here, this shouldn't look that bumpy. Maybe a bigger flat plane here. And maybe let's soften this a bit. Just a bit. Then let's go around the mouth with the smooth brush here to get rid of this stronger crease.

Then we can still flatten the lips a bit with a scrape brush. And then let's use the pinch brush again and go along here to push this together. And with the nudge brush, we can make further smaller adjustments. Let's get rid of this little bump here. Yeah, that looks quite good. You can still go around with a smooth brush on certain sections, something like this. Now let's go around the ear with a scrape brush and also around the creases to make them a bit sharper if you like.

But yeah, I would say don't overdo it because in the end we will, as mentioned, break everything up again anyway. I think the upper portion looks quite nice already. And then let's have a look down here, especially the arms. So I think this portion here can be smoothed out quite a bit. So this is a softer edge here. Something like this. And then let's hold down shift, smooth out this section around the arms. And then with a pinch brush, we can go around here and make this a bit sharper.

So something like this. I think that looks pretty nice. And that means we are pretty much done with cleaning up the mesh. And next, before we add any finer details or asymmetrical details, let's create the headphones. So the headphones will be a separate object. That means we have to switch to object mode. So press tab and hold and let's switch to object mode here. And now let's add a new object. And a quick way to do this is to use this add cube tool here.

If you left click and hold, you can even add other shapes, but in this case, a cube is perfectly fine because you can see the base shape here is a cube. And the cool thing is that this tool aligns to the surface. So if I now draw a cube here, and I think I wanna make it a bit wider and not as long as the ears so that it feels as if the headphones are something which is sticked on later. So make sure that this grid aligns to the major shape of the ear.

Left click and then I think maybe something like this. And then you can drag this out, but we can't really see it from here. So let's press escape. Let's have a look a bit more from a 45 degree angle, and then let's try this again, something like this maybe, and then drag this out, not too thick, something like this. Now let's enable the move tool, and up here, if we switch the transform orientations to local, we can see the local axis of the object, which makes it a bit easier to place it correctly.

Now let's click this little square here so we can move it along the Y and X axis and exclude the Z axis. So it stays on the same plane. As you can see, it's still aligned with the ear. Now let's use the rotate tool and rotate it around here a bit to align with the ear. So let's have a look. I think that looks quite nice. So now let's adjust the shape a bit. You can see we have this beveled edges here. So let's switch to edit mode.

Tap and hold and switch over to edit mode, release tab. And now we can adjust the shape. Let's first go to edge select and let's with Shift select all these four edges here. Then let's go to Edge and click on Bevel Edges or you can also press Control B. And now we have this line here and you can see at some point if you move your mouse away from the object, we can bevel these edges and you can hold down shift to make it more precisely.

So maybe something like this. And this portion should actually be the cushion of the headphones. So I wanna make this look a bit more roundish. For this, let's press Control R and hover above a horizontal line here of the headphones. Then we have this yellow line up here, left click, then we are in this slide mode, but you can hit escape so it will land directly here at the center. Now let's scale this up a bit. Let's press S and scale this.

And I think to make it more equal here on the sides, we have to also scale it along this axis here. So let's press S and X and make it a bit wider, something like this. And now I wanna bevel this edge also. So let's press Control B, bevel this, something like this. And then down here, we can increase the segments and we can also increase the width. Again, hold down shift if you wanna make more precise adjustments. Maybe add a few more segments, something like this.

So next we wanna add the extrusions here. So let's go to the face selection, select this face, and then we can either use the inset faces tool over here or just press I, then we can make this inset. And for now, let's don't go too far, something like this. And then we can use the extrude region tool or simply press E to extrude this out. Let's go somewhere here. Then let's press I for an inset face once again. And now I wanna move this out a bit, which we can do directly with the inset faces tool down here.

We can adjust the depth and then this will be pushed out a bit, something like this. And then we need another bigger square here where we attach the bracket of the headphones. So let's press E once again, something like this. Let's have a look from further away. And yeah, I think that looks quite nice. Okay, then let's go up here, select this section, press I again for inset face and I think I quite like the shape here and now let's go up here, something like this and now here I wanna have this sort of 45 degree angle.

For this, we can use the shear tool here. And I think in this case, let's use this one here, move this, something like this. And then down here, let's set it to a negative one, which will end up in this 45 degree angle. And now let's press E for extrusion, go something like this. So, and then let's press E once again, but I don't wanna move in this direction. So hit escape, then it will jump back. Actually, let's go back to the move tool so we can see it a bit better.

And now the extrusion is still here, but it lies flat on top of the other face here. And now we can move this over. But for this, let's go to front view and I wanna have a perfect straight line here. So I switched back to global transform orientation and now I can perfectly straightly move this over. Let's not go beyond the blue Z -axis. Let's stay here for a moment. And now let's mirror this over to the other side and then we can fix this section up here.

So for mirroring this, we can add a mirror modifier. Let's go to the modifiers, add modifier, generate and click on mirror. However, this will not do the job for us directly because the local axis of the object here is not aligned with the world axis. Let's hit tab and go back to object mode. Let's click on the move tool and click local. And you can see this is basically the axis which is used for mirroring. And in the viewport overlays, if I enable the origin, we can see this origin point of the object, which is basically the rotation point.

And this will also be used as mirroring axis. However, we wanna mirror this over to this side, so we have to use the center of the head as mirroring axis. So, luckily the origin of the head is directly here at the center. If I go to the front view, you can see it perfectly aligns with the blue axis. So we can use the head as target object for mirroring. Let's select this object here and under mirror object, click this eyedropper and select the sculpture.

So we don't need to adjust anything on the axis of the headphones for now, because we are using the axis of the head here. And now let's fix this hole up here. Let's switch back to edit mode. This one is still selected. Let's select the global transform orientation. However, if I now move here, you can see it's just sticking into each other. So let's enable clipping here in the mirror modifier settings. And then on the mirroring axis, you can see how it sticks to the mirroring axis.

However, we now have an internal face here. If I look inside, this is still here. So let's press X and delete the faces. And now this is open, which is exactly what we want. And now we have this shape up here. However, I feel that this is a little bit high. So let's go to the vertex selection up here. Let's enable X -way so we can see the vertices of the other side. And then with the select box tool, let's select this section here, go back to the move tool, make sure we have the local transform orientation enabled so it aligns with the headphones here, and then we can move this down a bit.

So something like this. Let's disable X -ray. If you don't see X -ray, by the way, you can middle mouse button click and drag this over here. So, and this is the general shape of the headphones. Let's switch back to object mode. And now let's smooth out the edges here because everything is like super sharp. And for this, let's add a bevel modifier and down here in the bevel modifier settings, let's increase the segments so everything becomes a bit more roundish.

And to fix these edges here, we can go to geometry and change the outer value here to arc. And you can see how this geometry then will be fixed and everything looks a bit nicer. So now we have to apply all the modifiers. You can either click this dropdown, hit apply, or you can also apply all modifiers on one object. Here we now have two. By going to object, apply, and click on visual geometry to mesh. Then all the modifiers will be applied as you can see.

So, and now we modeled some nice headphones. However, in the next videos, we wanna make some adjustments in sculpt mode. And if I now switch over to sculpt mode and let's enable wireframe, you can see we have a pretty low resolution here. That means if I try to sculpt here, this looks pretty ugly because we can only move around the existing geometry. And here we have these very long faces. So what do we have to do? Of course, we need to remesh the whole thing.

And if I press Alt Q over here, you can see we have the voxel size of 0 .015. So with Control C, with hovering my mouse above here, let's copy this value. With Alt Q, let's go back to the headphones. And then with Control V, let's paste the value and click on remesh. Now the headphones have the same resolution as the rest of the sculpture. So later on, the sculpture will sit on a ground. And I think before we change the sculpture, let's actually add a placeholder object for the ground so we can better see till what point we actually see their sculpture above the ground.

For this, let's hold down tab and go to object mode. Then up here, make sure the 3D cursor is enabled and with Shift S, click on cursor to world origin. So we make sure the 3D cursor is perfectly at the center. Then let's create a new collection for the environment. Let's click on scene collection and press C to create a new collection. Double click and let's call it Environment. Then make sure the collection is selected.

Here in the 3D viewport, press Shift A, go to Mesh and add a plane. Then let's switch over to Edit Mode, zoom back a bit and let's press S and scale it up quite a bit, something like this. Now let's tap back into object mode and now we can better see where the sculpture is poking out of the ground. Then here we can disable the 3D cursor again, we don't need it right now. And then we can also switch back to sculpt mode of their sculpture here.

So now we wanna start with the asymmetrical sculpting process and that means we have to disable X symmetry. That means if I do any changes here, it will not be mirrored to the other side. So, and let's start with the biggest change here, which is the smile. And as I mentioned before, this will only be here on one side. So that means first of all, let's deform the mouse so it has a more smiling shape. For that, let's use the grab brush and with F, let's make it bigger.

However, if I now drag this up, you can see it looks kind of weird. So the shape which we are generating is something like this. However, the mouse should be more shaped like this. So let's undo this and we can change the fall off of our brush. That means how the strength from the center towards the outside of our brush should fall off. And here, as you can see, smooth is enabled, which is exactly the shape which I just draw.

And if we switch over to sharp and now drag this up, you can see this looks much more like a smiling face. And we are now changing the geometry in this specific shape. Let's undo it and make it once again more precisely. Something like this and I think also let's drag it a bit inside here because when we are smiling we are pushing this mouth corner into the face more. Something like this. Yeah, that looks nice. And now let's create this triangular shape here.

For that, let's use the draw sharp brush, make it way smaller and draw one line from above here, down here, and then one line down here, something like this. And now to continue the shape, we wanna draw some additional lines. And here we make sure that where the two lines meet, it aligns with the corner of the mouth. So hold control and draw one line till this point here and then another line over here. And then without control, let's draw one line here.

Then with shift, let's smooth out this inner section and also this section here. Same over here. And then let's use the scrape brush, make it a bit bigger and draw along here. And then with shift smooth out this bigger portion here. Then we can use the grab brush, make sure the falloff is set back to smooth. Then let's make some smaller adjustments here. And then let's use the pinch brush and pinch these lines a bit more.

And here, make sure to smooth out any artifacts which are not looking nice and then pinch this to make it a bit sharper. Then let's get back to the grab brush and let's make some fine adjustments here. And the draw sharp brush. Adjust this section here a bit more. So something like this, maybe a bit of smoothing here, then a bit of pinching here, maybe also down here, and maybe up here. Maybe let's go around the nostril here a bit.

Something like this. Oh, there's still a little bump, so let's get the grab brush. And let's try to fix this a bit. Something like this. Yeah, doesn't have to be perfect. But I think I quite like this shape. So last but not least, let's make some bigger adjustments. Let's select the grab brush, make sure the falloff is set to smooth. And now let's make it relatively big and make some asymmetrical changes. So it's not perfectly symmetrical.

So maybe let's make this a bit smaller, make this section a bit bigger. Let's unstraighten the nose, something like this. And I think here we can push up the nostril a bit because of their smiling. Then here at the center, let's pull it down. Same here. And maybe here on this side, it can have a slight smile as well. Yeah, something like this. Then let's maybe push this one up a bit so it can really be a bit more deformed now as if this is some sort of cartoony sculpture.

Maybe let's push it a bit in here and don't worry, we will adjust the headphones in a bit. So maybe push this up and down a bit. Make this a bit wider maybe. Also over here, make some adjustments as you please. And in general, I just want that not everything looks perfectly symmetrical. Yeah, and as you can see, this looks way more organic. I think let's switch to the draw sharp brush and maybe let's add one line up here.

So one bigger line, something like this might look quite cool. Maybe not that strong. Let's press Shift F and make the strings a bit weaker, brush bit smaller. And let's draw another line here. Smooth this out a bit. And maybe let's draw another line down here. Smooth this out quite a bit. Something like this. And yeah, I quite like this. So let's switch over to the headphones. Let's press Alt Q. Let's get back to the grab brush.

And now let's adjust these. First of all, I think I want to make them a tiny bit longer. Let's push the inside a bit to the inside so it fits the ears better, something like this. Also, let's check the backside here. I think here we also have to push it in a bit so they pretty much align with the ears, but make sure they are not sticking into the head that strong because this will look not that nice. Something like this.

Then again, I think it's cool to have them a bit asymmetrical. So one side is a bit bigger than the other side. Also from the side, we can have it a little bit adjusted like this. Same over here. And also up here, I don't want to have this perfect straight line. So let's bend this down a bit, push this in here a bit. Push this out. Yeah, so it looks a bit more organic and fun. That looks quite cool. Yes, I really like this.

Let's try one last little thing Alt Q to switch back to the head and let's use the scrape brush and to better fit the other shapes. Let's try to flatten this a bit more. So we have a more flat and harsh area up here, something like this. And the same down here, let's draw over here, which looks quite nice, I think. And then with the pinch brush, and store over the sections a bit. Yeah. And then up here, in a similar fashion, but not too strong up here, I think that's quite okay.

Let's click on the scrape brush. And the cool thing about the scrape brush is that we can sculpt over a certain section and then we get this very flat shape. And now if we sculpt above this section multiple times, you can see it looks as some sort of tools carved this surface here. So it's not perfect anymore. And we get these little flat shapes. And if you do it with a smaller brush along these edges here, not perfectly, but here and there, some little things.

We also get the feel as if this was carved out of stone, for example. So, and basically all I do now is to go over the whole sculpture and try to add these flat shapes all over the place. And since this is a very repetitive process, I will fast forward this a bit and yeah, feel free to do the same on your sculpture. Enjoy.... So now I'm pretty much done with most portions of the head and now I wanna continue on the ears.

However, the headphones are in the way. So up here, the cube are the headphones. So let's double click on here. So let's call this headphones so we know exactly what it is and then let's quickly hide it over here and then we can continue on the ears. So, and then let's get started here. 01:34:46.670 --> 01:34:46.660 So that looks pretty nice already. Now let's continue here with the neck and the body.. All right, I think I'm done with the head and the body and now let's continue over to the headphones.

So let's press Alt Q, switch over and continue the same process here because also the headphone should feel as if this was made out of stone.. Yeah, I'm done with this sculpting layer and now you can see it feels as if this was made out of stone and it also gives this sort of cartoony look to the whole thing. So now let's continue with the second layer of details. For the next layer, make sure you have with Alt Q the head sculpture selected.

Let's go up to the draw brush and by default, this just adds this basic shape to the surface. However, we can make some adjustments to the brush to make something really interesting. First of all, let's set the falloff to something like sphere, which is a bit more sharp, as you can see. Then we can go over to stroke, which allows us to adjust the stroke and we can, for example, adjust the spacing. If I increase the spacing, you can see that we get a bigger gap between these dots and all these dots are building the stroke.

So we can increase this like a lot, maybe to 300%. Then we only get a dot every now and then. Then we can also add jitter to it. So if I increase the jitter quite a bit, maybe let's go down with the spacing for a moment so you can better see what the jitter is doing. Then you can see our dots will be placed randomly around our mouse cursor. So and when we have like a huge spacing, big jitter, relatively small brush, we get all these little dots here.

Then in addition, we can invert our brush, set it to minus, then you can see we get these little dents. And then we can also enable pressure sensitivity for the radios. That means the stronger we press with our pen on our tablet, the bigger the dense will be and the lower I have the pressure, the smaller they will be. And currently also pressure sensitivity for the strength is enabled. Let's disable this, make this a bit weaker, and now we can sculpt here over the surface to get these surface imperfections as if we are having a material like stone, for example.

However, I feel we can maybe crank up the resolution a tiny bit more. For this, let's middle mouse button click, drag this over, go to remesh, and maybe let's put it down to 0 .01, then click on remesh. Now we have a few more details here. So, but now you can see we are losing some of the sharp creases. So we might need to go in here again with a pinch brush. Maybe first let's smooth this out a bit and then use a pinch brush to go over this section one more time.

Maybe even with a draw sharp brush, increase this line a bit, make this a bit stronger. And other than that, I think the rest is fine. Maybe let's smooth this a bit and draw a sharp line here once again, something like this. Let's quickly go over to the headphone, Alt Q, and here also let's remesh this with 0 .01 remesh to have the same amount of details. Now let's go back here, switch back to the draw brush. And now all I really do is to go over the surface here and create these little dents.

Let's play around with the strengths a bit up here until we get something that works. And let's also make one more adjustment. Right now you can see this blue circle around my mouse cursor will scale up based on how far away I'm from the sculpture or it will be smaller the more I zoom in. However, let's go to brush and switch the radius unit from view to scene. Now when I zoom away, the brush will have the same size relative to our object.

So when I zoom in, it will be bigger and when I zoom away, it will be smaller because our sculpture will be closer to the camera or further away. That means the radios we are setting up here will always be the same. But yeah, I feel the radius is a bit big, so let's make it smaller. Yeah, something like this, maybe a tiny bit bigger. Let's lower the strings a bit. We want these details not to be too strong. So let's go over this and with different pressure applied, I can add bigger and smaller circles.

And if I go over the surface here quite a bit, we are adding these interesting details. I can also make it a bit smaller feel. So now I just go over everything basically to add this layer of detail. And you can vary the radius a little bit, of course, with how strong you press your pen on the surface of your tablet and also by pressing F and make them a bit bigger sometimes. Here, let's hide the environment for a moment so we can view it from below...

So and as you can see in this way, it feels as if we apply some sort of material to the surface, which I think looks pretty nice. Now let's re -enable the headphones, press Alt Q, switch over here, and let's continue the same process here. First of all, with some bigger circles, and then in the second run, I can make it a bit smaller to add smaller details and smaller circles here. We can also hide adjust it and then you can see it's working.

Not sure why exactly this is happening, but this seems to be some sort of little issue here.. So now let's re -enable their sculpture and let's have a look over here and here it gives us this kind of stone look right now it's pretty uniform across everything as you can see and now we want to add little cracks and broken parts and for this let's switch over to the clay strips brush and basically make it relatively small.

Let's invert this and then with the strength set relatively high, we can add these little cracks here. Just like draw some wild little strokes here and then it looks as if a certain section is broken here. And don't make these like too tiny and too uniformly spread, just like in very different places, break a little piece apart basically. You can also go somewhere here and make it less strong. This This statue is standing somewhere for hundreds or thousands of years and of course the time is damaging the surface a bit. 01:44:20.010 --> 01:44:20.000 Let's hide the headphone and let's continue here on the ears..

So let's have a look. That looks pretty nice. Now let's enable the headphone, Alt Q, go over here's also add some bigger sections here. Something like this. So we are nearly done. However, there's one more layer I wanna add, which is the moss, which we can see here on our reference image. And for that, let's draw some masks. So I think the moss should grow here somewhere on the top on the flat surfaces. And then we have some sort of vines going down here, similar as we have it here.

So on the one hand, we will use the mask brush, but before we use a mask brush, let's fill in some areas with a big mask. And we can do it up here by clicking on mask and click on expand mask by normals. If I click here, I can click on one surface, left click, hold and drag, and then fill out this flat surface. But don't go too far. You can see then you will just fill up the whole sculpture, something like this. And we also have a nice shortcut, Shift Alt A.

So just hover above a flat surface, Shift Alt A, and then drag out, and then you can fill this up, something like this. And let's see, maybe here, maybe here, maybe a bit of here, but not too much, I would say. We will adjust it a bit further with the mask brush, maybe here on the back a bit. You can also hold down space to move the starting point of the mask around, something like this. This already gives us these nice veins.

Then let's add something on top here, something like this, maybe here a bit. Yeah, I think that looks nice. And then let's go to mask, smooth mask, disable auto iterations, and then increases a bit, something like this. Now with a mask brush selected, here let's also change the falloff to sphere and let's add a bit of jittering here as well and maybe even pressure sensitivity for the radius. And now with a small brush, we can add these harsh dots here and you can here, we have something going down here.

Although we have nothing here on the inside the eyes, I think it might still look cool to have something there. And now let's just add a little bit of these dots here. And if you hold down control, you can also erase certain sections. If you feel that something is too much, something like this, then let's maybe go down here a bit. Go around this and also erase a little bit, something like this. Yeah, that looks nice.

Here on the nostrils, let's erase this a bit and maybe go down here on the sides a bit. Same here. Then up here on the edges, you can see it here in the reference image. Let's also draw some here, go around here so the edge looks a bit more interesting. Then here on the side, we can go down a bit. And I think in the end, this might look even like hair, which might be quite funny. Here on the ears a bit. Then let's go down here and adjust these.

Something like this and then here. That looks pretty good to me. And before we continue here, let's Alt Q switch over to the headphone and don't worry, you won't lose a mask. You only see it in sculpt mode of this specific object. If I switch back with Alt Q, you can see they are still there. So now with Shift Alt and A, let's also add some masks to the flat areas here on the top, maybe on the top here. And then with mask, smooth mask, let's smooth this a bit.

And then we can go in here and similar as before, adjust the edges a bit and make some further adjustments here. And also here on the other side. Let's check from further away. And I think that could look quite cool. So these are the masks. Let's switch back to the head sculpture. And now we wanna apply some mesh filters to these areas. So that means first of all, we need to invert the mask with Control I, so we will only affect these areas.

Then middle mouse button click and drag this down. Let's click on mesh filter. And first of all, let's use the inflate filter type. Left click somewhere here and drag it to the side. And then you can see, we push out the whole geometry. Let's push it out a bit, not too much, something like this, which already looks pretty nice, I think. And now let's add some uneven surface here by using our random feature, left click and drag.

But here let's be very careful. You can actually go a bit stronger because next we can use the surface smooth filter type, left click and drag and smooth out the surface a bit. And then we get this nice moss all over the place. Really cool. And before we remove the mask, let's press control I once again to invert this. Then let's go to face sets and click on face set from masked. Now we created this face set, which is also similar as a mask, but we can have multiple face sets on a sculpture, but only one type of mask.

And now if I press Alt M, we get rid of the mask. And on we can use the face set to mask out only the area with the moss. And funnily, this face set is green, so it even looks like moss, which is really cool. So we get an impression of this will maybe look later on when this is painted. Now let's switch over to the headphones and here let's do the same thing. First of all, control I to invert the mask. Then let's use the inflate filter type and let's try to get a similar thickness as before, something like this, I think.

Then let's use the random filter type. Let's go a bit stronger here, something like this. And then let's use the surface smooth filter type to get a similar look as we had before. Something like this. And then press control I to invert the mask and create a face set from masked. Let's press alt M to get rid of the mask. And now we have another face set up there. So that means we are basically done with the sculpting process of the sculpture here.

Let's switch over to object mode, select both objects, right click, shade smooth. Now we are getting rid of all these harsh faceting here. And if we disable all the viewport overlays and gizmos and press control space bar above the 3D viewport, we can view our sculpture in full screen. And if you followed along so far, you can be proud of yourself because you created a pretty cool sculpture. However, this is not the end of the course.

So let's continue by coloring it, add a little environment and render out a nice little animation. My best guess is that when you enjoyed this course till here, you are interested in digital sculpting. And I can tell you there are so many more exciting things to learn about sculpting in Blender. Good news, in my Master 3D Sculpting in Blender course, you will not only learn the sculpting fundamentals in greater detail than I could cover in this free course here, you will also learn how to create this cute creature from scratch.

We cover additional sculpting approaches and also a detailed retopology workflow where we create a production -ready 3D model from our sculpture, which is important if you want to use what you have sculpted in animations or video games. We will also take a look at additional tricks for coloring and presenting the cute creature with nice lighting in some still and animated renders. In addition, we'll cover the ins and outs of every sculpting brush and tool to give you a proper overview of what is possible with all these tools at your disposal.

While going through the course, you can put your sculpting skills to the test in 13 fun challenges. And as a little tip, when you sign up to our free Blender Sculpting for Beginners course in our CG Boost Academy, you will find a special discount code for the Master 3D Sculpting in Blender course. Find all the links in the video description below. And now let's continue with our Moai sculpture. So for coloring this sculpture we don't want to use any image textures nor do we want to use any UV maps.

Why? Because it's taking a lot of time to set all things up for that. However if we take a look at the wireframe here, we can see that we have a quite dense mesh and later on, we don't really wanna animate the facial features, so it's a kind of static mesh. And since it has this high resolution, we can use the vertex painting. That means we are basically painting the individual vertices of the mesh with color. And since we are looking at the mesh from further away, it will look quite nice.

And it's super easy to get started with. So let's disable wireframe. Let's select the head and switch over to sculpt mode with tap. At the moment we can still see our face sets which we set up for the mossy areas but when painting the color it's a bit distracting. So let's click up here and disable the face sets. So they are still there, but we just have hidden them in the viewport. Then we have two tools which are of interest for us.

Let's middle mouse button click, drag this down. We have the paint tool, which basically behaves similar as all the other sculpting brushes. So I can press F for making it bigger or smaller. I can press shift F to change the strengths and up here we can change the color. And then we have the color filter down here, which allows us to paint the entire mesh with one color or apply certain filters like hue, saturation, value, brightness, contrast, and so on and so forth.

So first of all, let's get started by coloring the whole thing with one base color before we start adding details and such. And while we are picking our colors, I would suggest to set up a palette. This we can do with the paint tool selected. Then up here in the active workspace and tool settings under brush settings, we can find the color palette down here. Let's click new. Let's just call it palette. And then we can pick a color up here, click the plus, and then add this to our color palette.

So that means if I have multiple colors here and later on wanna use a specific color, I just need to click on this. So we are not losing any colors. So, but we don't wanna have black and blue. We wanna have this brownish stone color here. And for that, we can hover our mouse above the primary color here, press E to open up the color picker, and then just pick the color from our reference image. And then let's immediately add this to our color palette.

Now let's copy this color by hovering the mouse above this, pressing Control C. Then let's go to the color filter because here we don't have access to the color palette, unfortunately. Then up here, control V to paste the color. And now left click and hold and drag this to the side to color the entire object. Then with alt Q, let's switch over to the headphone, left click and drag and also color the headphones in the same color.

With Alt Q, let's get back to the head. Now, before we continue to make any adjustments to the color itself, let's also color these areas with the moss. Remember for this, we created this face set, which is kind of a mask. However, you can see the edges of the face sets are very harsh, opposed to the general mask. So what I wanna do now is to use the face set to generate a mask. So let's hover my mouse above the area, which is not the face set and press H.

So we are hiding everything but the face set. Now let's click on mask and click on fill mask. So everything which is visible will be filled with a mask. And now you can press Alt H to unhide everything. And now you can see we have a mask nicely placed on the area where we have the moss. Let's quickly do the same over here. Alt Q, hide everything with H, but the face set, and then click on mask, fill mask, Alt H, and then we can hide the face sets up here, so we will only see the mask.

With Alt Q, let's go back to the main head, and now I wanna feather out the edges of the mask a bit. For this, let's go to mask, smooth mask, disable auto iteration count, and then hold down shift and left click and drag. And then we can adjust this a bit. I think a value of three should do the job. And with Alt Q, let's switch over and do the same here. Mask, smooth mask, and we still have the value of three. Now let's get back to the head with Alt Q.

With Control I, let's invert the mask. And now let's pick a color for the moss. I guess this color might be a bit strong, but let's see. So let's press E up here above the color, pick the green and then let's drag to the left. Of course, you still need the color filter enabled and let's quickly hide all the overlays. And yeah, it's a bit strong as you can see. And also you can see that the mask is a bit too far. So we are also painting a bit of the area around the moss, which is not really what I want.

So let's re -enable the overlays, press control Z to get rid of the color. And now since the mask is on this area, we wanna grow the mask a bit. So let's go to mask, grow mask, and let's see. Let's try two for now and left click and hold and see if it looks better. Let's disable this. And yeah, I think I like this more. That looks definitely better. So, but still, I don't really like the color here. So let's adjust the color a bit.

Let's maybe go a bit more into the yellow and make it slightly darker and less saturated. Left click and drag. Have a look. Yeah, this looks kind of good. Maybe a bit more situated. Yeah, something like this. Then with Alt Q, let's go over here. Of course, make sure to re -enable the viewport overlays. Then with Ctrl I, invert the mask. And also let's go to mask and grow the mask a bit. We still have two enabled here and then left click and drag to add the same color here.

Let's go back to the head, Alt Q, and then let's copy the color here, Ctrl C, go to our paint tool, scroll down to the palette, Ctrl V, paste this color over here and then add it to our palette as well. Now we have three important things. We have the base color for the stone, the base color for the moss and we have a nice mask which we can invert with Ctrl I to either mask out the moss or the stone area. So I will not remove the mask at this point because this will be still quite handy throughout the entire painting process.

So now let's start to add some color variations to the stone materials. So make sure with control I, the mask is inverted in a way that the moss is masked. And if you don't see the mask, make sure the viewport overlays are enabled and the mask is enabled over here. Now let's pick our stone color from the color palette. And I think let's create a color variation, make it slightly darker and a little bit more green, I would say.

Something like this. And let's add this to the color palette. And with the up and down arrows, we can also move the colors around. So now we have this dark green brown color. this I wanna add in larger areas which are more dark or where more moss or dirt would accumulate. So first of all, let's lower the strength quite a bit. Pressure sensitivity for the strength is enabled and let's also enable it for the radius and with F, let's make the radius a bit smaller.

Now let's see if I paint here what we have. I think it could be a bit darker. So let's actually make it a bit darker, add this to the color palette and let's remove this one. Let's move this up and yeah. And what we also can do is to go to stroke and increase the jitter a bit. You know the jitter from these little 02:01:23.320 --> 02:01:23.300 dense we added to the surface and we can also add the jitter from these little dents we added to the surface, and we can also add the jittering to our painting brush so we don't just paint a straight line and the brush stroke is a bit more rough, which I think fits nicely for our sculpture here.

So let's add a bit of dark area to the eye sockets and also in other areas which are a bit more close together, maybe here around the nose, maybe inside the nose. So make it smaller and paint a couple of times over this section. So since we have a very low strength, you have to really paint multiple times to increase the intensity of the color here. So now I basically just go around the mesh and add some color variation in certain areas.

And I think I speed up this section because it's very repetitive work. Oh, and by the way, if the ground is in the way, simply disable the environment collection, then it's a bit easier to navigate around their sculpture here... Then let's re -enable the environment collection here so we can draw some sort of a line around the bottom portion of the sculpture so it feels a bit more connected with the ground here. So when you're done with the head sculpture with Alt Q, let's switch over to the headphone, press Control I so the mask is on the MOS and then just continue with the same process here.

Yeah, I think that should it be with this process. Maybe let's go back here and a little bit more here. Usually I also paint this around the moss a bit so it feels that the moss is affecting the stone material a bit. Something like this. Now let's add some brighter sprinkles on top of their sculpture. For this, let's get back to our base color and make this a bit brighter. Add this to our color palette, move this to the front, maybe even brighter and a bit less saturated.

Then make sure to make the brush relatively small and in the stroke settings increase the spacing quite a bit and also increase the jitter. Make sure radius pressure sensitivity and the strength pressure sensitivity is enabled. And now we can add these little sprinkles. However, I feel they're still too close together. So increase the jitter and also increase the spacing quite a bit. So we can draw these little sprinkles on top to add a bit of color variation, which feels more like stone.

And now I just go over the entire surface and add a bit of these sprinkles here and there.. So, and you can see that immediately the whole thing looks a bit more like stone, pretty cool. Maybe here on the ear a bit more. 02:06:20.010 --> 02:06:20.000 And then when we covered everything, let's switch over to color to brighten up the areas where some stone was broken apart. For this, let's set the jitter down to zero and let's set the spacing back to the default value of 10.

And I think that it's increases strength a bit here. And of course with Alt Q, we have to switch back to the head sculpture here and then maybe not too much. We can brighten up these areas a bit. Yeah, I think that looks nice. So let's go over the entire sculpture and brighten up these little spots a bit... So, when you're done with the sculpture, let's switch over to the headphone sculpture. Let's select the green color here and let's pick a brighter variation here, make it brighter, maybe a bit more yellow, add this to the palette and with control I, let's invert the mask, then let's increase the jitter of the stroke and also the spacing, and then we can add a bit of color variation to these mossy spots here.

It's a subtle effect, but I think it's still nice to have a little bit of color variation here. Then with Alt Q, let's switch over to the headphone, Ctrl I to invert the mask, and then let's draw over this section here. Yeah, and that's pretty much it with the moss. Let's switch back with Alt Q to the head. Now since we will remove the mask, I would suggest to save this blend file with a new name like MauiSculpture01 or whatever number you are at at the moment so that we can now make a drastically change of removing the mask and then applying some additional filters here.

So let's press Alt M, but yeah, in the end we can still get our face set back and use the same process as before to regenerate the mask if needed. So, but here let's hide the face set. Let's get back to the color filter and let's use a very extreme color for now so we can see what's going on here. Because I wanna show you the cavity auto masking function. Let's enable cavity here and let's leave everything by default here and then let's left click and drag to paint in the blue color.

Of course, this is only temporary, but now you can see we are basically painting everything except the peak area here on the surface. So all the sharp edges will not be colored because with this auto masking set to cavity, these areas will be masked. And if I press control Z to undo this, we can also use the inverted cavity. So if I now paint here, you can see we are painting on the flat surface on the sharp edges, but not in all the crevices here.

So, and we can tweak this a bit more. We can, for example, change the blur value. So this will be blurred a bit more as you can see, so we don't get these very harsh edges. The same applies to cavity, of course. As you can see now, these edges are a bit softer. And then with the factor, we can control the contrast between the area which is masked and the area which is not masked. So if I lower this, let's see how this will affect the whole thing.

You can see now we are also coloring the sharp edges here a bit. And if I increase the factor quite a bit, the difference will be even stronger as you can see. So, and in our case, I think I wanna use a relatively high factor and I think let's also crank up the blur even more. Let's see how this will affect the whole thing. Yeah, I think something like this looks nice. But of course I don't wanna add blue color, I wanna make something else.

I just wanna affect the brightness of what we have already painted. And this is why I removed the mask from the moss since we can also use other filter types for the color filter. So we can, for example, change the saturation value brightness. So let's go with value for now, which basically just kind of darkens or brightens certain areas, but it will not really use the underlying color. It will just make it more white or more black.

So if I drag to the side, you can see it's getting brighter. And if I drag to the other side, it's getting darker. So we can add these sort of shadows in all the crevices. And if I release, I can also set up a specific value here. So maybe negative 0 .12 . And then if we go to the headphones, press Alt M to get rid of the mask. We can also do the same here, negative 0, 1, 2. So we have the same values here. Let's go back to the head with Alt Q and let's also use the brightness value.

And this will actually use the underlying color because if I go down, you can see this will become more brown, which I also quite like because then we are adding a bit more color variation here as well. So let's add a slight value here, 0 .025. Let's do the same here. Let's use the same value, something like this. Oh, this looks pretty nice already. Let's get back to the head. Now let's do the opposite. Let's start with value here.

Over here, let's switch to cavity inverted, and now we can brighten up the harsh edges and the bigger surface area. And maybe let's use a value of 0 .1, and let's do the same thing over here, 0 .1. Back to the head with Alt Q, and let's also try the brightness, but then you can see we are making everything more white, which is not really what I want. So then let's disable cavity here. And if you like, you can now play around with hue, saturation and so on and so forth.

So with the hue, we can actually change the color of the whole thing. So if you want to have it a bit more, I don't know, greenish, then you can add this tint. Of course, you will change the color of both the moss and the stone. But if you're regenerating the mask for the moss, for example, you can of course also mask out certain areas to only affect the stone here. But yeah, I don't really want to change the color here.

Let's play around with the saturation. Maybe we want to make it a bit more colorful, which I kind of like. So maybe not too strong, but maybe let's go up with the saturation by 0 .1. Let's do the same here. 0 .1. So it looks a bit more colorful, which I quite like. Now looking at this, I feel that this section here is a bit strong. So what we can do is to use the mask brush, make it relatively big, disable pressure sensitivity for the strengths, and then let's draw a mask over this section here.

Of course, with Alt Q, make sure you have the head selected. And as you can see, we still have the jitter enabled for the mask brush. So let's disable jitter here. Let's undo this with Control Z. And we also have the harsh sphere falloff enabled. So let's go back to smooth and then we can draw over this section which we wanna affect. Yeah, something like this. Let's invert this. Then let's go back to the color filter.

Let's try try brightness and let's re -enable the cavity. And then we can brighten this up. Let's try value instead, which I think I like here a bit more. Let's brighten this up a tiny bit. Let's hide the mask by disabling the viewport overlays. And I think I like this a bit better. Yeah, let's press Alt M. And one other thing I wanted to try is to use cavity inverted, use the saturation filter type. And you can see this actually looks quite cool if we increase the color here a bit by using the saturation, but still leaving out all the crevices.

So let's go a bit up here, 0 .3 maybe. Let's try the same thing here. 0 .3. And yeah, I kind of like this a bit more. Then there's a higher contrast between these areas here and the overall face. And let's disable cavity and let's just see what happens if we are using the contrast here on the head, Alt Q. And yeah, I think this is a bit too much. But yeah, as you can see with the color filter, you can do a lot. I think let's re -enable the environment and let's switch back to object mode.

So when we have a look at our reference image, we can see we have these little rocks here, some flowers and some grass and all that we wanna create now. However, before we do this, let's set up the camera so we know exactly what will be visible in the final image. And if you remember, we still have our render collection up here, which includes the default camera. Let's zoom back here a bit and here we can see it. And if I click on this button over here, we can look through the camera and see from where we will generate the final image.

So basically everything inside this rectangle will be our final image. However, you can see it's not really nicely aligned at the moment. But before we do this, let's quickly go over to the output settings here and change the X and Y resolution to 1920 by 1920 pixels, which will result in a square format, which is a bit more common nowadays with social media. And what I find a bit distracting is that we can still see what's outside the camera view.

In order to fix that, let's switch to this camera icon down here, click on viewport display, let's move down here a bit and change the password to 21. Now everything here is black and we can only see what will be on the final image. Now let's move this window a bit to the side and over here, let's switch also to a 3D viewport. Now let's zoom back here a bit. And now we are seeing the same scene from two different angles.

Let's press T over here. And here we can see the camera from outside. Now, since the camera is just a 3D object, we can move it around as any other 3D object. However, there's a much more convenient way to move the camera to the exact spot we want. First of all, with our mouse cursor over here, let's press T to hide the tool shelf, and then let's press the home key to full screen the camera view. You can also find it over here under view, cameras, frame camera bounds.

So now all we need to do is pressing N, and here make sure you're in the view tab, and here under view lock, enable, let's move this a bit to the side, camera to view. Let's enable this. Let's press N once again. And now let's select the sculpture. And when I move my view around, you can see that the camera is now attached to where we are looking from. So it's very easy to pick exactly the camera position we want. We can even disable the viewport overlays and even the gizmos here to better see what's going on.

And I think I wanna have the camera slightly looking at the sculpture from below so it appears a bit bigger. And yeah, I think something like this works already really nice. So that means let's re -enable the gizmos and the viewport overlays. Let's set this one here back to the image editor where we have our reference image. And then we can even hide the render collection. That means our camera is still here so we can switch out or into the camera or we press numpad zero to switch in and out.

And to not accidentally move the camera around, I would press N and here under View Lock, disable Camera to View. So that means when I now press middle mouse button click to navigate the view, we will move out of the camera view immediately. So now let's create one rock and then we can easily copy it around in our scene. First of all, let's enable the 3D cursor so we know exactly where it is. Let's press Shift, right click, place it somewhere here.

I'm in object mode, by the way. Shift A, mesh, and then let's add a simple UV sphere. The resolution is quite low, as you can see. So let's crank up the segments and the rings here a bit. Let's try 32 here, 64 here. Oh, it could be more. Let's type in times two and here as well times two. And then we have a relatively high resolution to get started with. Let's press T, go to the scale tool and then click on this blue square here.

And then we can make it longer as if we get some sort of egg shape here. However, now we scaled the object in object mode, and that means we have to apply the scale as we learned earlier. So let's click on object, apply scale, or you can also press control A and apply the scale. We did this because a scaled object can also squash and stretch our sculpting brushes. Now let's switch over to sculpt mode with tab. And for this object, I think we had a voxel size for the remesher of 0 .01.

So let's set it to 0 .01. And then let's also remesh the whole thing once again. So we have the same resolution as over here. Over here, middle mouse button click, drag this down to the mesh filter and let's click on smooth up here for the filter type, left click and hold, drag this to the right just to smooth the surface a bit more. So and for the shape of the object, I wanna keep it very simple and it should also look a bit different from the statue here so it's not too distracting.

So all in all, what I really want, middle mouse button click, drag this up to use the scrape brush and just scrape away some flat shapes here. Quick side note, make sure that up here, all the auto masking features are disabled since you might have the cavity option still enabled from the painting lessons. So let's quickly do that. So I just take something away. You can also change the size of the brush with F, make it smaller and bigger to get different results here.

By the way, make sure that this sphere is in the environment collection. And then we can also hide the sculpture collection for a moment. So we can better see what's going on here and the sculpture is not blocking our view. So this should be a more cartoony rock I would say so nothing too realistic. Let's soften some of these edges a bit. I think that works quite nicely. What we can also try is to use the grab brush, have a look from the top and just deform the whole thing a bit more so it's not just one big egg shape, something more organic like this.

And even from the side, we can just change the shape a bit more. Something like this. And we can add a few more details in a moment, but for now, let's duplicate the object. But before we do this, let's press F2 and call it rock, something like this. Then let's unhide the sculpture with tab go to object mode, click on the move tool. Let's already right click and click on shade smooth. So everything will be smooth. And now let's look through the camera over here.

Let's switch back to the 3D viewport. Let's have a look from the top and now we can move the object here and we can see here from the camera perspective how it looks. So let's create one rock over here. And now I just press Shift D to duplicate it and then let's scale it down, rotate it a bit and then it looks like a completely different rock but we can still go in here and make some further adjustments later. Then shift D, I think let's place another one somewhere here, make it smaller, shift D, another one.

Let's rotate these two a bit. Actually, let's split our view up here and let's switch quickly to the image editor to see what we have here. So we have basically two here. Here's one actually, but I think two works as well. And then over here, Shift D, let's place one small here. Rotate it a bit, something like this. And I think back here, we also need something. So let's take these two, let's press T, shift D, scale it down, rotate it a bit.

And with shift and D, let's add another one, scale it down a bit. Or maybe let's move this one over here. Make sure that these rock formations don't look too similar. These two look too similar at the moment. So let's have a look what we can do. Maybe shift D, add a third little one here, something like this. Now over here in the outliner, we're holding down shift, let's select all these rocks here. And here, let's press Ctrl A and apply the scale because we scaled all these objects here.

So now let's move our mouse cursor down here until this cross appears, left click and drag it down. So we get rid of the other 3D viewport. And now let's adjust these rocks a bit. So since we scaled some of these rocks bigger and smaller, the resolution is quite different now on all these rocks. So let's switch to sculpt mode, make sure the remesh is set to 0 .01 and then press control R to remesh this. With alt Q switch to another one, press control R and let's quickly do this for all the rocks.

So all the rocks will have the exact same resolution. Alt Q, Ctrl R, Alt Q, Ctrl R, and so on and so forth. So then let's go to this one here, Alt Q, scrape brush is selected, and then let's get rid of the top portion here and make some further adjustments. So it just looks a bit different. And let's go to the others and also make some further adjustments. Of course, you can also use the grab 02:24:33.350 --> 02:24:33.340 brush to shape these rocks a bit differently, maybe make them a bit flatter, Alt Q to look through the camera.

Let's press T and this is what we have so far. Looks quite nice, I would say. Now let's press T, go to the draw brush up here, and here we still have our setup for the fine details. The stroke is set to 300 % spacing and a quite high jitter. The falloff is set to sphere and it's also set to subtract. So it's removing geometry. And that means we can go to our rocks here and then add these details with a very small brush, something like this.

And then similar as for our main sculpture, we can easily add these tiny dens, which just makes it feel as if this has a higher resolution. Old cue, and then let's also add these details here. And since we changed the resolution of all these objects, the details should have the same level of quality on all these rocks... So, something like this, I think should do the job here. And now let's quickly add some color. And as you can see, I wanna have them colored a bit differently so they are not distracting too much from the main sculpture here.

And I think I don't wanna add this moss here so they also feel a bit different. So, and I think to speed up this process quite a bit, let's switch back to object mode over here with shift, let's select all the rocks and then in the 3D viewport, go to object, click on join or press control J. So all these objects are in one object and we can quickly color them all together. So let's go back to sculpt mode. Let's press T and let's go down to the color filter, set the filter type to fill and up here, hover mouse above this press E and then let's color pick this gray and left click and hold, drag this to the side and see how it feels.

So I kind of like this color and now let's add some simple effects with the auto masking. So let's go up here, click on cavity and then as filter type, let's switch to brightness, left click and hold and see what's changing. We are changing the inside. So make this portion a bit darker, I would say. And then we can invert this and make this portion a bit brighter. Then let's switch to a saturation and let's go to cavity here once again, left click and hold.

So we can make this a bit more colorful, something like this. Let's have a look from the camera perspective. Yeah, something very simple like this should do the job here. Now we have the rocks and now the flowers and the grass is still missing. So let's add the grass here. However, we don't wanna use this big square plane. We wanna create a circular shape plane. So let's press X and delete this one. Make sure the environment collection is selected.

And I wanna have the 3D cursor directly at the center here of our sculpture because at the position of the 3D cursor, our new objects will be added. So let's press and hold Shift S and click on cursor to world origin. Now it's here at the center of our sculpture and now let's hit Shift A, mesh and add a circle. Now the circle is relatively small, so let's make it a bit bigger by changing the radius here. And by the way, if you don't see this menu, it is down here, Click here and it will appear.

Have a look from the top. Yeah, something like this should work. And now let's increase the vertices to something like 64. So we have a relatively even circle here. But now we can see through the ground, which we don't want. So let's add some faces in between here. So let's switch to edit mode. The whole thing is selected. Go to face and click on grid fill. Now the whole circle will be filled with quads. Let's have a look from the top and down here.

Let's spin this until it is straight. Yeah, something like this. So and for adding the grass, I don't want to run a complicated simulation geometry nodes, particles or anything like this. We want to use sculpt mode. However, before we can do this, we need to subdivide this a bit more. So let's right click, subdivide, and then down here, number of cuts. Let's increase this a bit. Let's try 50. Let's zoom in here and see.

I think this can already do the job. So let's switch to sculpt mode and let's middle mouse button click, drag this down, go to mesh filter, and then let's go to random. And now simply left click and hold and drag, and then we can randomize this. And if we make it a little bit longer, it looks as if we have grass. So, but maybe let's color this first and then we can better see how long we wanna make this. So let's go to color filter up here.

Let's change this to fill, hover above the color, press E and then let's pick this green color down here and then left click and hold and drag this to the side, something like this. And of course we can change the color later on if we need to, but for now this gives us a good base color. Then let's go into the camera view and then left click and hold and drag this to the side. So I think something like this. And if you feel that this is too low resolution, we can still go into edit mode with everything selected, right click, subdivide and subdivide this maybe one more time.

Then let's go back to sculpt mode, left click and hold. And now let's drag this out, make this a little bit longer, something like this. In object mode, right click and click on shade smooth. Now we have something like this. And now back in sculpt mode, we can adjust this a bit if we like. So what we can do is to go to the smooth brush, let's press F to make it bigger. And if I now smooth certain areas here, the grass will be shorter.

And if I hold down control to invert this, the grass will be getting longer on this position. And that means we can now randomly click over the surface here to make it a bit shorter in certain places and then holding down control and make this a little bit longer here and there. So everything is randomized a bit more. And the other thing we can do is to use the grab brush, make it relatively big and then grab it, move certain portions a bit up and certain portions a bit down So it's not perfectly even everywhere.

Let's go into the camera view, press the home key with control middle mouse button click, let's zoom back here a bit. And this is what we have so far. Looks pretty nice. And of course, later on when we have light and shadow and so on, this will look much better. But I think it's a funny and quick way to add grass to a simple scene like this. Let's quickly switch over to object mode. Let's select the rocks here. And now I wanna move the rocks individually.

However, they are now just merged into one object. What we can do is to switch to edit mode. You don't need to select anything. Press P, then we are opening this separate menu and then click on by loose parts. And then everything which is not connected will be separated into an individual object. Then let's switch back to object mode. Before you click anywhere else, right click, set origin, origin to geometry. Now you can see these orange circles are here inside of these different rocks.

And now you can see the gizmo to move them around are placed on the individual rocks again. So, and now we can go into the camera view and move stuff around. So maybe this here could be a bit closer and this one could maybe moved a bit upwards. Maybe this one here a bit more like this. This here is pretty far away. So let's move this a bit closer. And maybe these three also bit over here. Maybe these a bit more like this.

Yeah, something like this. Let's select the circle here, over here, double click, let's call it ground. So now let's create the flowers for this, make sure the environment collection is selected. Let's press Shift A, Mesh, and let's add a cylinder. And let's lower the depth quite a bit, something like this. Let's move it out of here. Over here, double click, let's call it flower. And then let's go to view, local view, toggle local view with only the cylinder selected.

Now everything else is hidden. Let's switch to sculpt mode. Then the resolution is relatively low. So let's middle mouse button click, drag this over and let's remesh this. Let's go with a voxel size of 0 .05, remesh. And yeah, since the flowers will be relatively small, I think we can go with a lower resolution here. Then let's go to the mesh filter, set the filter type to smooth and left click and drag. And as you can see, nothing is happening.

And that's probably because we still have some auto masking enabled here. Let's disable cavity and then left click and hold again. And now you can see it's smoothing everything nicely. Next, let's go to the mask brush, make it relatively small and then middle mouse button click and drag. Click on this little arrow here and let's try out the radial symmetry around the Z -axis. Let's set it to six. And now you can see we have these little dots here and we can paint on six sides simultaneously.

So let's draw this little shape here. Quick side note, if your radial symmetry is not working properly, then switch over to object mode and here make sure that the little orange dot, the origin of the object is at the center because this defines the axis for the radial symmetry. If it's not at the center, you can right click, set origin, origin to geometry, or you can go up here to options and enable effect only origins.

And then when you have the move tool enabled, let's go to the top view, then you can move the origin around until it's perfectly at the center. This is only useful when your object is not perfectly symmetrical. So in our case, it should be perfectly at the center, then let's disable this and let's go back to sculpt mode. Let's press control I to invert the selection. Then let's go down here to the scale tool and let's click on this little blue square and drag this out.

And you can see we are drawing the shape of a flower. Now let's use the move tool and then let's move these petals up, something like this. And I think let's remesh the whole thing once again, Control R and with Alt M we can get rid of the mask. And now I think let's change the shape here a bit. I think it's pretty harsh. So let's go to the grab brush and let's push this a bit inwards. And since we still have radial symmetry enabled, we can do it on all these pedals simultaneously.

And then with Shift, smooth this out a bit. And with Ctrl R, let's remesh this once again. And this looks much better, I think. Then let's have a look from the side and push this down a bit. And maybe the inner portion we can push up a bit . Then let's go up here to the clay strips brush, make it relatively small, then make sure it's set to positive. So we are adding geometry. However, you can see this leads to some weird issues and that's because the mesh is relatively flat.

And when we try to sculpt on this side here, we will also affect the other side. To avoid this, we can go to brush and enable front faces only. And that means we can only draw on one side and will not affect the other. So let's draw out a little shape here with shift. Let's smooth this out a bit. So we just have something which we can use to stick into the other objects, maybe with the scrape brush, let's flatten this surface here a bit.

And I think that's pretty much it a nice simple flower. And now let's quickly color this. For this, let's go to the color filter down here. Fill is set. Press E by hovering above the color and pick one of the red color here and then left click and hold and drag this to the side. Now we have this. Now let's go to the paintbrush and let's change this to a nice yellow. Something like this. Make the brush a bit smaller. Strength set to one and now color this.

You can see it's behaving weird. Of course, we still have the radial symmetry enabled, but this shouldn't be a problem. But I guess the stroke settings are still messed up. So spacing, let's set this back to 10, jitter down to zero. And now let's check once again. Yeah, now it's working. And with the radial feature, we can color this quite quickly and also quite nicely as you can see. So, and I think that's pretty much everything.

Now let's disable radial symmetry. Middle mouse button click, drag this to the side and set this back to one . And then let's get back into object mode, right click, shade smooth, and then go to view, local view, toggle local view. And now we are back. And now we have this giant flower. Let's press S, scale it down. And now let's move the origin a bit down here. For this, let's enable Effect Only Origins. And now we can move the origin of the flower a bit closer towards the bottom here.

Then let's disable this. And now we can enable snapping. We want to snap to faces, enable face project and align rotation to target. And now whenever we are moving an object, so let's press G to move an object, it will snap to the surface of the other objects. So it's relatively easy to place it somewhere here. Quick side note, when you have the snapping button enabled up here, then snapping is always on when you move an object.

However, this can sometimes be a bit annoying. So you can either press and hold control to temporarily disable snapping, or you disable the snapping button up here, and then you can hold down control to temporarily enable snapping. And you can see we have some flowers up here and I think it fits nicely with the moss up here. So let's scale it down, something like this. And of course, I think it's best to go to the camera view.

So we make sure that we can nicely see the flowers, something like this, shifty. Let's add another one here and maybe a third one on top here somewhere. Something like this. And now you can see it's snapping the position of the origin down here. And this is why I moved it down. So the whole flower is not sticking too much into the object. Then let's press Shift D to duplicate it. And now let's disable snapping. Now let's press Alt R to reset the rotation.

And now we want to add some flowers here on the ground, but since the ground is extremely uneven, we can't really use the snapping here. So let's just move it down until it roughly touches the grass, make it a bit bigger. And then from the camera perspective, we can press double R and then slightly rotate it towards the camera view. Now I would change the transform orientation back to global, and then we can click on this little blue square and easily move the flower around.

Shift D, duplicate it, place it somewhere here and move it around, scale it down a bit, press double R for the free rotation, maybe move it up a little bit. And now let's play some flowers here on the ground. Let's have a look from the top. Shifty, scale it a bit. And then over here, here we have a little bit longer grass, so let's move it up. And let's add some here. So now let's have a look from the camera perspective and let's see how it looks.

Of course, this is not ideal. So first of all, I think these are too close together here. So let's push them a bit further away. And maybe let's add another one over here. And let's check. Let's move it down. And these here are okay, but these here are hovering above the ground, which is not what I want. So let's move them down a bit for now and later on if we feel that some of these flowers are out of place, we can still move them around.

So that means our environment is done and we can move over to animation and rendering. But before we get started with the animation, let's prepare our workspace here. First of all, up here, let's switch this to a second 3D viewport. So when animating the camera, we can have one viewport looking through the camera and here in the other one, we can freely navigate and animate everything. Then in order to animate, we need the timeline.

To add the timeline, let's go down here into the corner until this little cross appears, left click and drag up and then over here in the top right corner, left click and drag to the right. So we have this one long window. And then up here, let's switch to the timeline. Then by hovering above the timeline, let's press N to get rid of this side panel and then let's drag this down a bit. Then let's move this over to the side.

Over here let's press T to get rid of the tool shelf and middle mouse button click and drag this to the side. And let's disable the gizmo and the viewport overlays. Then let's press the home key to full screen the camera. And over here, let's press T to get rid of the tool shelf. Then let's collapse the environment collection. Let's hide the helper collection and let's unhide the render collection. Let's collapse the sculpture collection.

Now we have the camera back here and we have this light object, but this light object we can hide with this eye here. We don't need it right now. And over here, let's actually zoom back a tiny bit so we can see the frame, which usually gives a bit better context on what's inside the camera view. Then before we get started to animate anything, let's go to the output settings here. And here under frame rate, currently 24 is set up, which is a default frame rate for video.

However, this video is for social media or online use. So I wanna make it feel a bit more smoother. So you can go either with 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second, but keep in mind the more frames per second you have, the longer the render time will be at the end. So in my case, I go with 30 frames per second. So 30 FPS means 30 frames equals one second of animation later on. So, and then we have to decide how long the animation should be.

Of course, we can always tweak this later on, but I think it's good to have a nice starting point. And for our animation, it shouldn't be too fast. So I think 10 seconds might work. So that means we need 10 times 30 frames. So let's go to end over here and type in 10 times 30 is of course 300. Let's zoom back here a bit with middle mouse button click, we can move this around and zoom in here, something like this. So we can see all the frames of our animation.

The last thing to check, let's press Control, comma, to open up the preferences, go to Key Map, and make sure the spacebar action is set to play. That means when we press spacebar, the animation will play. So, now let's animate our objects. First, let's get started with the camera. And here I wanna have a simple animation where the camera is going back and forth. And in the end, the whole animation should be loopable.

That means whenever the animation starts again, it looks as if there is no cut in between starting and ending the animation. So this camera should slowly rotate around the object. However, animating a rotation animation just with adding keyframes here is a bit hard. So let's use a different trick. First of all, up here, middle mouse button, click and drag. Let's enable the 3D cursor and the origin. Then with Shift S, cursor to world origin, make sure the 3D cursor is here at the center and then make sure the render collection is selected.

Hit Shift A and let's add an empty plane axis. Now we added an empty object, which we can't really see because it's inside the sculpture, but it is already at the right spot. So in order to make it visible, go to the object settings. Of course, the empty needs to be selected. Then go to viewport display and enable in front. And now we can see this axis. It's a simple cross as you can see, and it's an object which will not be rendered.

So we can use it as some sort of helping object. Let's double click up here and let's call it camera rotation. And now we want to parent the camera to this object. That means later on, we can simply rotate this object and the camera will rotate along. And a quick way to parent something is to left click and drag, hold down shift and then drag this onto the object you want to parent this to. So in this case, the camera rotation, and now you can see the camera is inside.

And when I select the rotation object, press R for rotation, you can see how the camera is also rotating along. Next, to make the animation a bit more easy, let's recenter the camera here so it looks straight to our sculpture. Let's have a look from the top. Let's press N and let's set the X location, which is the red axis here to zero. And let's also set the Z rotation, which is this one here to zero. Now you can see we are looking straight from the front onto our sculpture.

And now it's relatively easy to animate the rotation object by pressing R and then you can see how nicely it is rotating around the sculpture. Right now it's perfectly rotating around the Z axis because we are looking from the top. However, if you are looking from the side, you have to press R, lock this along the Z axis by pressing Z, and then it's working the same. So now we just need to add some keyframes here. Let's press N.

Let's have a look from the top. It's a bit easier to animate. And with the playhead at frame one, let's press R, rotate this a bit so we get a nicely angled view onto the sculpture, something like this. And then with the mouse hovering over the 3D viewport, press I and insert a keyframe for rotation. So we are saving the rotation of this empty object at frame one. Hey, Zach from the future here. And starting with Blender 4 .1, the new shortcut for inserting a keyframe is K instead of I.

So whenever I press I here in the course and you're using a new version of Blender, press K instead. So we have 300 frames, so the middle is of course frame 150. Then let's press R, rotate this more towards the front, but not perfectly from the front. I think still something slightly angled, maybe something like this. Then let's press I and click on insert keyframe rotation. And now you can see we have this animation here and to make it bounce back and forth, let's select these keyframes here, Shift D to duplicate them and then move them to frame 300.

Zoom in here just to check it's perfectly aligned with 300. And now when I hit space bar and play back the animation, you can see that the camera is moving back and forth and it's looping perfectly because the last keyframe and the first one is the same. Let's press spacebar again. And if you feel that the animation is not strong enough, you can always go in here and rotate this a bit further. For example, press I, insert keyframe for rotation.

And then also here at the beginning, if you want to rotate it a bit further, press I, rotation, and then select this one with left click, shift D, and replace the other one by just moving it on top. So let's see once again. Now it's a bit stronger as you can see. Yeah, use a quick side note. We now created three keyframes here and Blender is interpolating everything in between. And by default, Blender is using a Bezier interpolation.

That means the motion starts slowly, gets faster, stops slowly, and then here the same again. So we have this very smooth animation. However, if I hover my mouse down here, press A to select everything, press T to open up the set keyframe interpolation menu, it might be that your interpolation is set to linear. Let's click here, and then you can see the difference. The motion of the camera is exactly the same, but when we have a turn in animation, it is very harsh.

So there is no smooth transition from one keyframe to another. So if this is the case, again, press A to select all the keyframes, press T and then switch to Bezier. And now everything should be nice and smooth. Now, another little thing I would suggest is to set the playback not to sync play every frame, but frame dropping. So if your computer is not strong enough to play every frame of the animation in real time, it will basically slow down the whole animation so it can show you each and every frame.

So you see each frame, but the playback might be super slow and you don't get the real feel for the animation. But if you enable frame dropping, it might skip a few frames, but you still get a good feel of how fast the animation is. So I think in my case, it doesn't make any difference. It will still play back the animation in the full 30 frames per second, which you can see up here. So this is actually real time here.

First of all, let's collapse the render collection and let's open up the sculpture collection. Let's select the sculpture and now if I press R and lock this along X, you can see we can move the head but the headphones are floating in the air. And if I do the same thing for the headphones, you can see the flowers are floating in the air. So we need to parent all these objects together. So first of all, let's select the flower, hold down shift and select the others.

And as last object with shift, select the headphones, then press control P and set parent to object. Now, if I select the headphones, then press Control P and set parent to object. Now if I select the headphones, press G to move them around, you can see that the flowers will move along. And now let's do the same thing with the headphones and the hat. Select the headphones, we'll shift the hat, and then let's press Control P and set parent to object.

So when I move the head, you can see the headphones and the flowers are moving along. So now I wanna have this funny bounce animation. So as if the statue is listening to music and is like shaking its head. And at the same time, the headphones should also wiggle around a bit, something like this. But first of all, we need to check the origin point because the origin of our objects is also the rotation axis. So you can see it's down here for me, which is kind of perfect.

However, it might be not perfectly placed for you. So in order to change the position of the origin, go to options and click on effect only origins. Now let's press T with the move tool active we can easily move the origin around but you can see the child objects will also move around. Let's undo this with control Z and then let's go up here to options once again and click on effect only parents as well. That means we will only affect the parent object and not the child objects.

Now you can see we can move the origin here without affecting anything else. So, and what I really wanna try here, let's have a look from the side to have the origin nicely placed at the center of the body here and up here for the headphone, let's actually do two things. Right click, set origin to geometry. So it's here at the center and then it's also weirdly angled. So let's press control A and apply the rotation. So the rotation of this object aligns perfectly with the world origin.

Let's have a look from the side. Now let's place it somewhere here at the center of the headphone or the center of the ear, and then let's use the rotate tool and adjust the rotation so it aligns roughly with the rotation of the headphone. Perfect. Now we can disable these two options here and now we are ready to animate the head. So let's get started by making it very simple. Let's select the head here, then let's press T and go to move just to see the axis here and then make sure the playhead is at frame one down here.

And now let's have a look, let's get started with pressing R, X, and then let's move it up a bit. And just so you know, I have the global transform orientation here enabled. So this axis will always show aligned with the world origin. Now let's press I and insert a key frame for rotation. And here in the timeline, we will add a keyframe for X, Y, and Z, as you can see. However, we really only animate along the X axis, so we can delete Y and Z.

Then let's go a few frames further. I have no idea how quick the whole animation should be. So let's just go to frame 60 for now. Then let's press R, X and move it a bit to the front. Press I and this time I click on available. So it will only add a key frame for the X rotation here. And now let's go to frame 120 for example, which is an equal distance as these two key frames and then shift D, let's duplicate this to frame 120.

So now if I play back the animation, we have this very simple bounce animation. No worries, we will adjust everything and we will repeat the whole thing. But first let's get over to the headphone and let's do the same animation with the same distance between the keyframes. So first let's press R, X, rotate this a bit back. I insert a keyframe for rotation. And again, let's remove Y and Z. Go to frame 60. R, X, move this a bit to the front.

I insert keyframe for available, and then let's duplicate this one here, shift D to frame 120, and now we have this weird animation which looks not good at all. Let's adjust this a bit. For this, I don't wanna use the timeline, I wanna use the graph editor. So let's go up here into the top left corner, left click and drag down so we can still see the timeline and the key frames down here a bit and then click on this button and switch this to the graph editor.

Let's move this up here a bit and let's select the head and let's zoom back here a bit. And over here, we can now also find our X rotation channel. So in the graph editor is showing us what's happening between the key frames. So you can see here at frame one, we still have our keyframe. At frame 60, we have one keyframe. And here at frame 120, we also have the keyframe. Same as down here in the timeline, as you can see.

And in the graph editor, we can now see the interpolation between these key frames. So how the X value in this case is changing over time. But here we don't really wanna change the curve. We wanna use some modifiers which are only available in the graph editor. So first make sure the X rotation channel is selected. Then over here, let's go to the modifiers. If you don't see the side panel, press N and then let's add the cycles modifier, which will repeat the whole animation.

Let's zoom back a bit. You can see it's now infinite. And if I now playback the animation, you can see it's bouncing forever. Let's quickly do the same thing for the headphone. Let's select it, make sure the X rotation channel is selected, and then let's add the cycles modifier. So now I wanna speed up the whole animation and I wanna make sure it's loopable because right now if we go to the last frame here in playback, there's a big jump, which I don't want.

So first of all, let's go to frame number one and let's set the pivot point to 2D cursor, which is basically the blue playhead here. And that means I can select all key frames with A, press S for scaling and scale kind of the whole keyframes. And the more of these waves we have inside of our 300 frames, the more often the head will bounce doing this 300 frames. However, I don't want to scale it like this because then I also make the whole thing weaker.

I wanna scale it by pressing S and then X to lock this along X. And now we can make it something like this. So, and I played around with this a bit already and I wanna have five bounces within our animation. And then you have to take care, you can hold down shift to more carefully adjust this, that we have a valley at the start here and a valley at the end. That means the start frame and the end frame should be the same.

And now if I play with the animation, you can see except for the headphone, now it's bouncing and you can't see the change when it's starting again. Now let's do the same thing for the headphone. Let's select it, select everything, press S, X, and scale it until we have five kind of hills in our animation, and we are ending on a little valley here. And now also the headphone animation should be perfectly loopable. Perfect.

So now I wanna do two more adjustments. First of all, the motion of the headphones is kind of weird because it's too aligned with the animation, but I wanna have a little delay here. And with having the cycles modifier, everything repeats infinite, so we can easily move these keyframes around and everything will still loop. So I can press G to move it, lock this along X, and then move it a bit to the side, and then let's just see how it looks.

Now you can see it's delayed a bit and this looks much more realistic. Very nice. I think we nailed it perfectly here already. So, and then I wanna weaken the animation a bit. I don't wanna make the bounce too strong. So we can also scale this by pressing S, but this time lock this along Y and then we can make the whole thing a little bit weaker. Let's go with something like this and let's see how it looks. Yeah, I think that's better for the head bounds and then the same for the headphones.

Let's select everything with A, press S, Y, and now you can see it's moving kind of up here. So let's change the pivot point back to bounding box center, which will scale towards the center of the selected keyframes. So let's press S, Y and scale it down. And then let's see. So the headphone motion is not as strong. And now we have this very nice head bouncing animation, which loops perfectly. So the last thing I want to show you here is something optional.

So basically our animation is done. However, there's a cool little trick I always use when I want to make something feel as if it's animated in stop motion. Stop motion means that real objects are animated frame by frame, often skipping a few frames to save time, which creates this more choppy motion. And in Blender, we usually don't animate frame by frame, but we can fake this effect. However, here we don't really have stop motion, but it's something big and heavy, and I felt that this fits as well.

So make sure the head is selected, make sure the X rotation channel is selected. And then here under the modifiers, let's add the stepped interpolation, which will add this kind of stairs effect to these curves. And this makes everything look a bit more choppy. And you can increase the step size. Let's go with 10, for example, then you can see it quite heavily. But I think in this case, let's go with something like three.

Now it has this more choppy stop motion animation, but it looks quite nice, I think. And then let's add the same to the headphone. Let's add stepped interpolation and let's set it to three. And now we have this step motion for both the head and the headphone. Yeah, of course I don't add the stepped modifier to the camera motion because this should move fluently. Yeah, and now our animation is done. Let's get rid of the graph editor here.

Let's still leave the timeline in our view here so we can scrub through the animation. And that means our animation is done. And it's time to make everything look beautiful. We're setting up the materials, lighting lighting and rendering. So now it's time to get into the whole rendering stage and for this we need to set up our materials. As render engine we want to use the default Eevee render engine which is is kind of a real -time render engine.

That means all the changes we are doing, we will see live in the viewport, which will then also look the same as the final result. And in order to see the rendered result here, we can switch over to the rendered viewport shading, but as you can see, we can't see much. If we go into our render collection, we can enable the default light we have, then we can see a bit more, but everything looks gray. Why is that? In the solid viewport shading, we painted everything, but this painting data was just stored inside the different objects and it's not connected to the materials yet.

And the materials is what we will see in the final rendered image. So we need to set up the materials first. For that, we can switch over to the material preview shading, which ignores the lighting in our scene so we can better see what's going on here. Then over here, let's middle mouse button click and drag to the side and switch this over to the shader editor. Here, let's press N to close the sidebar and inside the shader editor, we can adjust the materials using these nodes.

But before we get into this, let's go down here to the material settings. Let's move this up a bit. And over here, let's enable the viewport overlay so we can better see what objects we have selected. Let's select the sculpture here. Here you can see we have a default material already, which we can also see over here in the shader editor. However, the painted colors are not connected. And when we were painting the vertex colors, Blender stored this vertex color data in this object.

That means when this object is selected, we can go to the object data tab and here we find the color attributes. And this data set here contains the colors. It's currently called attribute, which is not really intuitive. So let's double click here and let's call it color because when I click on other objects, you can see for all the other objects, it is called color already. So that's great. Let's get back to the head here and then let's get back to the material settings.

And for this scene here , I wanna use the most basic materials. Right now we are using the principal shader, which contains all sort of settings like metallic, roughness, index of refraction, and so on and so forth. So we can make a metal material, reflective materials, you name it. However, we just need a simple diffuse color. So let's click here behind surface on this principled and change this to diffuse. And you can see it's changing over here and it's also changing over here because this here is just a different view onto the same settings we have down here.

So let's stay in this window for a moment and let's click on this yellow dot for the color and let's plug in the color attribute. Now you can see over here, it is doing the same. It's plugging the color attribute into the color of our shader. And this shader is then connected with the material output node, which is connected with the surface of our object. And now we can already see the color here because I think there's just one color attribute and this is picked by default, but we can also click in here or down here and pick our color just in case.

Then let's rename this material into sculpture. And the cool thing is that we can use the same material on all the objects and it will just work because the color attribute is called color for all the other objects as well. So I can select the headphone here, pick the sculpture material and it will just work. However, we might want to change these materials on the different objects a bit and then we don't want wanna affect all objects at once.

So let's keep this a bit organized. So for the headphone and the sculpture, we will use the sculpture material. Then let's select one rock here, add the sculpture material, and as you can see, it works. However, let's click here to copy this material, call this rocks and now we can make adjustments here or later on we can make adjustments and then we will only affect the rocks but we wanna affect all rocks at once. That means this material should be placed on all the different rocks.

For this, let's open up the environment collection, scroll down, select all the rocks with shift and make sure with shift in the 3D viewport, we select this rock with a material last. And then we can press control L and click on link materials. And now when I click on these different rocks, you can see over here, each rock object is using this rocks material. And we can also see it here on the nine that nine objects are using this material.

Now let's do the same with the flowers. Let's select one of these flowers here, pick one of these two materials, copy this, call it flowers. And then again, let's select all the flowers here with shift. And then over here with shift, this one is last. So it's active and then press control L to link the material from this object to all the other selected flowers. So, and last but not least, we have the ground here. And again, let's pick one of these materials, duplicate this and then call it grass.

So now each of the different portions of our scene has a different material, the grass, the flowers, the rocks, and the big sculpture here. So and to quickly show you what type of adjustments we can do here, let's select the grass for example, and over here, let's left click and hold and drag the color attribute to the side. So we are basically inputting the color which we have painted, which goes directly into this shader, which then goes directly into the surface of our object here, in this case, the grass.

And now in between here, before we plug the color into the shader, we can adjust the color. Either you can now click up here on Add or simply hit Shift A, click on Search and search for Hue Saturation Value. Click here and then we have this node which is now attached to my mouse cursor. And now I can put it directly here on this line which then will be highlighted. Left click and then this will be connected. So we are inputting the color into this hue saturation value node which we then can adjust and this goes out into the diffuse color and the surface of our object.

And here we can change the hue so we can adjust the color. Let's hold down shift and left click and hold and slide left and right to carefully adjust this value. So you can even make the grass purple if you like. Let's go back to 0 .5, which is a default value here. We can shift left click and hold and then drag to adjust the saturation to make it more saturated or less saturated. And we can also change the value to make it darker or brighter.

For now, let's set these values back to the default values. We can adjust them later when we have set up the whole lighting in our scene. And to save us a bit of time later on, let's actually quickly add this hue saturation value node to all the other materials as well. So right now we have it on the ground. Let's select the sculpture and with Shift A, search, we can see the hue saturation value node up here. Left click, place it here.

And let's do the same for the rocks and also the flowers. So that means later on when we are in the process of adjusting everything color wise, we can easily go into each of the materials and adjust the hue, saturation and value to better fit our scene. So, and now we have everything prepared to go over to the lighting stage. For this, let's switch over to the 3D viewport here and here let's disable the viewport overlays.

And in order to see all the lighting in our scene, we have to switch to the rendered viewport shading. Here we have a default light in our scene, but this we don't really need right now. So let's delete it. Then over here, let's go to the world settings. And I decided that this should be a very lighthearted and friendly scene. So I will create a daylight mood for the scene. And for this, let's first adjust the world settings here with the background color.

Let's make it something very light blue, something like this. And let's lower the strength a bit to something like 0 .6. And now we added this blue color in the background, which is tinting the whole image into blue. And this should give us a nice base lighting for the scene. And since we wanna add a nice blue sky to the scene, this base color works nicely. However, this looks super flat right now. We don't have any shadow information, but don't worry, this we will add through the lighting.

The blue background here is something which we don't wanna use in the final image. I wanna add a nice gradient later on. So let's actually get rid of this solid blue color. For this, let's go to the render settings, film, and let's enable transparent. Now we get this checkerboard here in the background, which means this whole section is transparent. And later in compositing, we can put anything behind this image, what we like.

In our case, a nice gradient. Then since we're here in the render settings, let's enable ambient occlusion, which adds this additional shadow in all the crevices here, which kind of gives the whole scene a bit more plasticity or volume. And let's also enable bloom, which we will only see when we have lights in the scene. So basically bright areas of the image will have this shine or glow to it. And here I would lower the threshold a bit to something like 0 .6 so that even not too bright areas in the image will have a little bit of shine.

Hey, Zach from the future here. When you're using Blender 4 .2 and beyond, you won't find the bloom option in the Eevee render settings anymore. This effect was moved to the compositor. I will show you how to enable it when we are adding compositing effects to this scene later on. So for now, leave it disabled then. So and with this setup, let's go to the render collection. So make sure this is selected. So let's press Shift A, go to light and let's add an area light.

Let's move it here to the top and make it a bit bigger with S. So, but we can't see any lighting here and that's because this light is too weak. So let's go to the light settings. The area light needs to be selected and then we can increase the power here. Let's go very high, something like 3000. Yeah, that looks nice. Let's make it a bit bigger and let's move it a bit further away. The further it is away from the object, the weaker the light on the object will be.

And the bigger we make this plane, the softer the shadows will be. So maybe let's move it slightly to the front, something like this. And maybe let's also tint this slightly blue because here I wanted to add another ambient light because the main light is coming from the skybox basically which is shining on the scene so the top portion of the sculpture should also be a bit brighter. And with having the light straight from the top we also have this little shadows and all these little bumps and dents which helps to highlight all the nice details from the sculpture.

And this is perfect since after all, we want to present our sculpture here in a nice way. By the way, we are using the Eevee render engine here, which is set up by default, which is a kind of real time render engine. However, not all effects are real time. And when you move something here, the shadow looks super ugly and that's because the shadow needs to be calculated. So every time you move here, the shadow will flicker around, but don't worry, this won't be visible in the final render.

So before we add the next light, let's double click on the area light and call it top light. And now let's add our second lamp, which is a sun lamp. So let's hit Shift A, light, and add a sun. In order to better see what the sun is doing, let's hide the top light for a moment. And the position of the sunlight doesn't really matter. You can see when I move this around, the sunlight here in this scene is not changing at all.

Only the rotation is important. So let's just move it here to the side so we can see the sunlight a bit better. Let's have a look from the front and I think let's rotate it a bit so the sun is shining onto the scene a bit more angled and from the top view, it's also rotated a bit. So now it's totally up to you to decide from which angle the sun is shining on your scene. You can go over something like this from this perspective, which looks nice.

I wouldn't recommend to have it straight onto the face because then we can't see all the nice sculpted details. But if you go more like this, more angled, then again, you get some nice shadows in all these little bumps and dents, and this looks pretty nice. So in having the sunlight here slightly shining from behind makes it feel a slightly bit more mysterious, but also it feels as if the sculpture is dreaming, listening to music, and it's not really noticing that we are watching.

So, but the sunlight is way too weak. So let's go to the light settings here and let's increase the strength quite a bit, maybe something like 10. And then let's tint it slightly yellowish, I would say. And now you can see we have this bloom effect. If I disable this, you can see the difference. And with this bloom effect, everything is kind of merging into each other better, and it's just a nice effect. And here the threshold, if I increase this, you can see not much is glowing and the lower this value is, the more of the brighter areas will glow.

So in something like 0 .6 should nicely work in this case. Then for the sunlight, we can also adjust the harshness of the shadow. If we change the angle value here to something like zero, we will have a pretty harsh shadow. And if I increase this angle, the shadow will be softer. And although bright sunlight usually has a very harsh shadow, I kind of like it when it's a bit softer in this case, because on the one hand, it's not a realistic scene, and on the other hand, it somehow supports the nice soft shapes of the sculpture.

So some adjustments, something like this, and then let's re -enable the top light, which maybe feels a bit bright. Let's have a look. Maybe let's move it a bit more towards the back, scale it a bit bigger and maybe lower the strength a bit. Yeah, something like this. But don't worry, it might look a bit boring at the moment, but we will change it quite a bit with adjusting the color and adding some compositing effects later on.

But yeah, I think this is a good starting point for finalizing our scene. The lighting is pretty much done now, but there's a lot more which we will add to the final look of the scene. So let's finalize our scene here. And first of all, let's select the camera, go to the camera settings and under viewport display, let's enable limits . Now we can see this line here and this we need for the depth of field. Let's open this up and let's enable depth of field.

And then let's lower the f -stop quite a bit. And now you can see we get this shallow depth of field with the background and the foreground being out of focus and a certain portion of the image is in focus. And this we can adjust by changing the focus distance here, which will adjust this little yellow cross, which defines which area of the image will be in focus. So let's put it quite close to the face here, something like this.

And now you can see the face is in focus and the rest is out of focus. And with the f -stop value, we can define how strong this effect should be. I wanna have it quite strong, but not as strong as before. So let's go with something like 0 .5. And of course we have an animation, so make sure when the camera is moving, the yellow cross is not pushing too far into the face. You can also zoom in here and see if it's still in focus and yeah, it looks like this.

So all fine. Let's go back. And this effect adds a bit more depth to the scene here. Next, a simple effect which we can add is in the render settings under color management. Let's scroll down here. And here under look, we can increase the contrast. So in this case, let's go with medium high contrast, which adds a bit more contrast to the scene. So brighter parts will be brighter and darker parts will be slightly darker.

If later on the image appears in general too dark or too bright, you can also adjust the exposure here, as you can see, but this is something I don't wanna do right now. Let's set it back to zero. Next, we can make bigger adjustments to the image by adjusting the color of our materials. So let's go over to the shader editor, make sure the sculpture is selected. And if you maybe remember, we added this hue saturation value node here, which allows us to change the hue, saturation and the brightness.

And I think here, I just wanna increase the saturation a bit, which will make the whole sculpture look more brown. And since the headphones are using the same material, this will be applied there as well. Next, let's select the ground here. And now we are in the grass material, which we can see up here. And again, we have this hue saturation value node. And I think I wanna make it way darker. So let's go with something like 0 .5 and then it's not so bright and distracting.

And maybe let's increase the saturation a bit. Yeah, I think I like it when the grass is more saturated. Then let's go over to the rocks here and maybe let's shift the hue a bit to be slightly more blue. And I think let's make the rocks quite dark and maybe also slightly more saturated. Something like this. And last but not least we have the flowers and here I want to have more situation but maybe not too much. So let's go with 1 .05 or 1 .075.

Yeah something like this. you like, you can also play around with the hue to get completely different colors here. But I think for our green scene, a nice complimentary color of a red fits perfectly fine. So now when we scrub through the scene here, this is now what we get. And I think this already looks way better than before with our lighting. Now we have kind of more contrast in the scene with both colors and also general contrast between the brighter and the darker areas.

So next let's take care of the compositing. For this let's switch over to the compositor, which is also a node editor similar to the shader nodes. And first of all, we have to click on use nodes to be able to use the nodes. Let's zoom back here a bit. And here we have these two nodes, the render layers node and the composite node. And the render layer is basically what we put in, which is basically the image which we see over here.

And the composite node shows everything we have adjusted in between on top of our image here. And to see the compositing effects in real time here in the viewport, let's click on this little arrow and enable compositor camera. That means whenever we are looking through the camera, we will see the compositing effects which we set up over here. So and since this is real time, we don't need to render our image first in order to see everything, it just works.

So first of all, I wanna add the simple background and for this, I need a texture. Let's go down to the texture settings here, create a new one. Let's call it background and the type let's switch to blend, which is a simple gradient as you can see. Let's change it to a vertical. So it's going up and down and then let's move the colors up here so we can better see them. Let's open this up, enable the color ramp, and now let's adjust it a bit.

So I wanna have a gradient from light blue to dark blue. So let's select the black handle here, click on the color. First of all, let's set the alpha to one so we have a solid color here, make it a bit brighter, and then let's pick a light blue, not too saturated color, something like this. Then let's select the white handle over here, click on the color and make it dark blue and very saturated, something like this. Of course, we can later on tweak this gradient as we like if it's not fitting already.

Then over here to add a new node, you can click on add or more easy hit shift A, click on search. And first of all, let's add a texture. So search for text and add a texture. Let's place it down here. And here we can now pick our background color. Then in order to place this image in the background of our scene here, hit Shift A, search and search for the alpha over node, which allows us to add multiple images on top of each other.

And since the background is transparent, which we enabled over here in the render settings under film transparent, we can now lay this image behind our scene here. So for this, let's plug in the image into one import, this color output from the background image into the other, and then plug this into the composite. Now we can only see the background image. That means the background image lies now on top of the other image.

That means we have to swap these two inputs and voila, this works perfectly fine. Now we have this gradient in the background and now you could go down here, change this gradient, for example, to purple, and then maybe you need to move the camera. You can see it's working nicely. However, let's undo this because I wanna have a nice blue sky. So here's a quick interruption from Zach from the future, because starting with Blender 4 .2, some things in Eevee have changed.

And as you can see over here in the Eevee render settings, the bloom option is gone entirely. And this is because this option was now moved into the compositor. And in order to add this bloom effect so that bright areas in the image starts to glow, let's either go up here to add or hit shift A and search for the glare node and then move it behind the alpha over node and left click on this noodle here so it's added in between.

And immediately you can see it starts to glow but with this interesting star shape here and that's because up here we can change the glare type. We can have these streaks, stars but in our case case, we wanna switch to bloom, which adds this haze or glow effect here, as you can see. Now the options are a bit different from what we used to know from the bloom settings. However, these are quite simple. First of all, let's change the mix to one.

This is just a temporary change because then we can only see what's actually glowing in our image. And now when we are playing around with the threshold, let's hold down shift and left click and hold, you can change the area that should glow and everything black will not glow. So, and since we had a very subtle bloom effect, let's not increase the area too much, which should glow. So maybe let's try 0 .8. Then with the size, we can change the size of the glow effect.

Maybe let's go with something like six. And with the mix, when we set this to one, we only see the glowing parts of the image, but not the original image. If we lower this to zero, this is a perfect mix. So we see 100 % of the original image and 100 % of the glow on top. And if we go below zero to negative one, for example, we only see the original image. So if we are using a value between minus one and zero, we can mix in the glow effect, as you can see.

So and I don't want to have it too strong. So I think in this case, I would go with something like minus 0 .6. And if you want to see the before and after, you can select the node, press M to mute it, and then you can see how much the glow effect will add to the image. So this is how you can add the bloom effect in Blender 4 .2 and beyond. However, since for the rest of the course, I use Blender 4 .0, I still use the old -fashioned bloom effect over here in the Eevee render settings.

And with this out of the way, Zach from the future out. Then next, I like to add a little bit of lens distortion to the image, which kind of merges everything better together. For this, let's hit Shift A, search, and go with lens distortion, and plug it onto this line here. And then we can distort the image. Hold down Shift if you want to slightly adjust this, but go with very low values here, so negative 0 .015, and with dispersion, we can have this chromatic aberration here, as you can see, so it's kind of shifting the colors a bit on the edges, but again, go with a very low value because this effect is usually overused.

But now you can see here, everything kind of blends a bit better into each other. Next, let's add a simple vignette effect. That means we are darkening the edges of the image so we can focus a bit better onto the center here. For this, we need an ellipse mask. So Shift A and search ellipse mask, and let's connect this directly to the image input from the composite node so we can see this ellipse mask here. Let's increase the width and the height so it roughly fits our screen here.

And then with Shift A, search the blur node and plug it behind here. Now we are kind of blurring this circle. First, let's enable relative. That means whenever we are changing the resolution of our final rendered image, this effect will adjust accordingly. And then let's left click and hold and drag down so both values are selected. And then let's go with something like 50. And now the circle is blurred a lot. And now we need to put this image on top of the rest we have over here.

For this, let's hit Shift A, search for mix and click on mix color. And then let's put this into one import here, this into another, and then this into the composite node. And then you can see we can mix these two images, but it's not really what we want. So let's set the effect to one and let's change the blending mode to multiply. Multiply will basically make all the white areas of an image transparent and only leaves the dark areas, which we can now see here in the edges.

However, when I go down here, you can see I'm not really reducing the strength of the effect. Everything becomes just white. And that's because the inputs are flipped. So this image input needs to go into the first one and the vignette into the second one. And now let's move this down here by pressing G and then we can lower the VEC and now we can change the strength of this vignette effect. Let's set it to something like 0 .6 so it's not too strong.

So, and last but not least, I wanna add a simple color adjustment node. For this, let's hit Shift A, search and search for color, balance this one here and plug it here. And now we have three color values. And with the left one, we can control the dark areas of the image. As you can see, this one controls the mid tones and this one, the bright areas. With backspace, you can reset the colors to white. So for the dark areas, I think let's add a little bit of blue.

So the shadow areas will be a bit more blue as you can see. And for the lighter areas, let's add a little bit of a yellowish tint so the whole scene becomes a bit more warm, something like this. So for our gradient here in the background, maybe let's adjust the light blue a bit more towards a less saturated blue, something like this. I think I like this a bit more. So, and just to recap here, we have our compositing set up.

So we basically mix our render, which we see here in the 3D viewport with the background image, with the alpha over node. Then we added the lens distortion. So if I press M, I can mute or disable a node and then you can see what effect this does. And then we added the ellipse mask, blurred it and multiplied it on top of our image. So everything becomes a bit darker. And then with a color balance node, we made some slight color adjustments.

Now, as mentioned before, you could go to the render settings, color management, and adjust the exposure if the whole image is too bright or too dark. And of course you can go in and adjust the lights, the materials of the objects. So it's completely up to you. Everything is fully adjustable. And of course, I would love to see a completely different lighting. So maybe you wanna have a morning mood lighting or a dark night lighting, go ahead, feel free to go completely crazy here.

So, and just for comparison, when I disable use notes up here, this is how we started before we added any compositing effects. And when I re -enable it, this is what it looks like now with all the compositing effects. And as you can see, only by tweaking our rendered image in the compositor, we can make a night and day difference. So at this point, I was basically done with the whole animation. I rendered it out and showed it to my colleagues and they suggested two little changes to improve the scene.

First of all, they suggested to add a little bit of color variation to the grass, which I think is a nice thing to quickly do. And the easiest way to do this is to select this over here. Let's go back to the 3D viewport, switch to sculpt mode and over here, middle mouse button, click and drag. We have the solid viewport shading enabled. Let's click over here and under color, let's enable attribute so we can see the vertex colors.

Then let's press T and make sure that the paint brush is selected. Then let's press T again, go to the active workspace and tool settings and down here in the color palette, let's pick the green color and let's make it a bit darker and maybe slightly more yellowish brownish. Let's increase the radius here and now let's just paint a few spots, but this is a bit strong. So let's undo this and let's reduce the strings here quite a bit.

And first of all, let's add some bigger colored spots, maybe a little bit stronger. So some slight color variations in between here. And then I would suggest to also go around the different objects. So maybe increase the strength tiny bit and then we can add some color variations around the rocks here and especially around the sculpture. And some smaller spots here in between as well. And besides some darker spots, maybe let's add this color to the color palette as well.

Let's also go with some brighter spots. Let's select the base color here again, make it a bit brighter and maybe also a 03:29:52.560 --> 03:29:52.550 bit more yellowish and less strengths. And then let's add some brighter spots here in between as well. Yeah, so like this. And I think immediately the whole thing feels a bit more connected. You can see, especially here around the sculpture, that looks pretty nice. So this is the first big change.

Let's go back to object mode. And as second change, they suggested to add some clouds here in the background. And a quick way to do this, let's shift right click somewhere here in the background, make sure the environment collection is selected, and then let's hit shift A, go to mesh, and let's add a quick icosphere, which is this weird sphere, which is created out of triangles. And down here we can increase the subdivisions.

I think let's go with four, which looks relatively round. Then right click, shade smooth. So it looks really like a round sphere here. And then from the top view, let's quickly shift D duplicate this, scale it down, shift D, put it on the other side. And by the way, when your viewport runs a bit slow, you can also disable the rendered viewport shading over here. And then let's create a simple cloud by creating these little spheres.

Let's have a look. This looks a bit too uniform. Let's push everything down here a bit with G and maybe let's go to the top view once again, Shift D, let's create another little blob here, something like this, this bit smaller, and this maybe a bit bigger, something like this. Now with Shift, let's select all these spheres, then with Shift, the last one at the center, let's press Control J to join this, and then over here, let's double click and let's call it cloud.

However, we can still see all the spheres. So let's quickly switch to sculpt mode up here, middle mouse button, click and drag until we see the remesh options here. Let's click inside here and use the eyedropper, click on the spheres so we get the resolution here and then we can remesh everything. Now everything will be nicely merged and then let's press T, go down here to the mesh filter, middle mouse button, click and drag, filter type set to smooth, and then left click and drag.

Let's smooth this quite a bit. However, I feel that this is still a bit too low in resolution, as you can see here when I go to wireframe. So let's undo this, and I think let's increase the remesh a bit 0 .05 remesh. Yeah, that looks better. And then let's smooth this once again, maybe a bit more. Something like this. Now let's go back to object mode, have a look from the top. Let's drag it here a bit more towards the back, press R for rotation.

Let's press T to hide the tool shelf. And now we have this little cloud here in the background. Let's switch to the rendered viewport shading and the cloud looks pretty good on its own already. However, let's go to the materials, create a new material, call it cloud, change the base color to be very white. And what we can also do is here under emission to increase the emission so it starts to glow a bit so we can create this very bright cloud.

So now what you can do is to duplicate it around with Shift D, place it somewhere here, press S to scale it bigger and smaller, and you can also go to sculpt mode, press T and use the grab brush to slightly adjust the shape. So if you go in here, you can shape this around, make it look slightly different. And in this way, I quickly create a couple of clouds and duplicate them all around here, but this I will fast forward a bit because it's super repetitive work.

And when doing this, I would suggest to also scrub through the timeline to see how the clouds will look in different perspectives. And I try to make something that looks nice from this perspective and also here at the end when the camera reaches the other position. So yeah, let's quickly do that. you So now I placed all these clouds here and I took care that I kind of rotated them in a way that the sunlight supports the nice shape of the cloud.

So we can see the light here on these little bubbles a bit better. And what I would also suggest is to switch to the local transform orientation, and then we can press S, X and scale this a bit longer. Let's go back to the first position here And let's do the same for the other clouds. So now let's have a look. And what we can do to make it feel as if the clouds are a bit further away in the distance, let's with Shift select them all from the top view.

Let's scale them up a bit and then push them further into the distance. Something like this. So it looks pretty much the same as before. But when I move the camera, it feels more as if the clouds are far in the background. Yeah, and just in comparison, if I press H to hide all the clouds, this is without the clouds and this is with the clouds. So the whole scene gets a bit more depth, which I really like. So that means let's play back the animation here and see how it feels.

I think really nice. And now all there's left to do is to render out the animation as a video file. For this, let's go to the output settings here. Make sure the resolution is set to 1920 by 1920 and 100%, 30 frames per second. This is all something which we have set up before. Now let's go to output. Here under file format, let's switch to FFmpeg video, which will result in a MP4 file. Then let's go to encoding, change the container to MPEG -4 and the output quality to perceptually lossless, which is really good quality.

Audio is set to no audio because here we don't edit any audio track. Then click the folder here, navigate to a folder where you want to save the animation and let's call it Moai Sculpture Animation. And then let's hit accept. And now all there's left to do is to go to render and click on render animation or press control F12. Now the animation will be rendered and don't worry if you don't see the composite here, sometimes it will still take all the compositing into account.

One side note, when your compositing effects will not show up in the final render, go here to the output settings and then you find post -processing down here and here make sure compositing is enabled. And of course, if I quickly switch over to the compositor, make sure use nodes is also enabled up here. Yeah, and then all the compositing effects should show up in the final rendered animation for sure. And another little side note from Zach from the future here, when you're using Blender 4 .2 and beyond, what you can also do is to enable ray tracing here in the EV render settings, which will improve the lighting of your scene since this will add