Complete Blender Creator - Section 6 - Fluffy Bunny

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In This Section

1 Section 6 Introduction

Mikey and Ben Introduce the Fluffy Bunny Section.

1a What's Coming Up In Section 6

• Michael Explains what we are covering
• Showcase of student work

2 Section 6 Assets

5 Planning Our Scene

• Get familiar with rabbits!
• Look at the desired outcome and plan our modelling journey towards that goal.

Section Brief

• Rabbit is sat in grass and is still.
• It is a summers day with a light breeze.
• There should be additional foliage around the rabbit.
• The Rabbit does not have to be realistic.

6 Knowing Your Subject

• Re-enforce the importance of reference material.
• See what happens when you just plough forward with out consulting your reference material, like I started to do!

7 Layers

• Know how to turn layers on and off.
• Turn on the layer management tool.
• Understand layers are useful for working on separate parts of a scene or even model.
• Realise if a layer is OFF the final render will not contain anything that was on that layer.

8 Meta Balls

• Learn how to add a meta ball.
• Use them to quickly build up a base framework.
• See they’re great for modelling organic objects.
• Understand they need converting afterwards to a mesh so we can add further detail.

9 Basics Sculpting

• Learn the basics of sculpting.
• Adjust your brush’s type, strength and size.
• Understand how ‘Dyntopo’ works and when to use it.
• How to find a brush if you have deleted it!

10 Basic Sculpting Solution Video

• See my solution to the ‘Define Your Bunny’s Shape’ Challenge

10a GPU Rendering In This Section

• Understand that even with a dedicated GPU you may end up with out of memory issue if your card doesn’t have enough RAM.
• Some AMD cards may not render hairs correctly.

10b Applying Transforms With Particle Systems

• Refresher on applying transforms
• Show you why you need to do it.

###10c Alternative Ear Construction

• This may help with your particle system and hair placement
• Always more than one way, to do something in Blender
• Thanks to Alberto for experimenting and contributing to the community

11 Your First Particle System

• Create a particle system.
• Understand children and how they relate to their parents.
• Hopefully avoid crashing your computer! (or waiting a VERY long time)

12 Fake Users

• Learn how to give your hair/fur colour!
• Understand about Fake Users and how to use them.
• Realise what the 0 before anything in Blender means.

13 Particle Editing

• Be introduced to the Particle Edit option.
• Learn how to edit the particles
• Style the hairs to make them flow in a more natural manner.
• Learn how to reset the hairs back to default state.

14 Weight Painting

• Use weight painting and vertex groups to control where the particle system actually appears, and where it does not.

15 Adding Randomness with Children

• Adjust the particle’s settings to get a more realistic and less uniform hair appearance.

16 Multiple Cameras

• Add another camera to the Scene
• Change the primary camera
• Learn how to quickly move the camera around.
• Change the Camera Properties.

17 Exporting and Particle Systems

• See how particle systems export from Blender.
• Learn how to convert them.
• Understand that this can break your modelling flow.
• Realise you may be better off using the particle system in the other program you are exporting too.

18 Hiding Objects

• Learn more about Hiding objects in Blender.
• See how to Hide everything except the object you are working on.

19 Introduction To The Image Editor

• Make the Iris for our Bunny.
• Learn how to Export an image with transparency.
• Only Use Blender - so there will be some limitations.
• Understand there are better programs for image creation and editing (Photoshop, Gimp etc.)

20 Combining Shaders In Cycles

21 UV Unwrapping and Texture Mapping

• Understand an image texture replaces the colour of a material.
• Learn how to Unwrap part of a mesh and apply the texture to it.

22 Adding a Sky Box

• Add a skybox to our scene.
• Use that skybox as the primary light source for the whole scene.

23 Using Textures Vs. Geometry

• Understand you need both - the texture has to exist on something!
• See that Geometry is for detail and textures are for the illusion of detail.
• Realise that the appropriate combination of both is used to create models

23b Understanding Textures & Nodes

24 Importing Images As Planes

• Setup the Add-on that enables you to import images as planes.
• Be able to import an image into a scene.
• Realise this can be another way of importing reference material.

25 Packing External Data

• Learn how to embed images into the blend file, both individually and collectively.
• Understand this is essential when sharing a file with someone else.
• Can create bloat if the external data becomes obsolete.
• Show you how to remove external data

26 Node Type Overview

• Look at the Nodes that are created for the textures.
• Learn about the different types of connection points and what the coloured dots are.
• Which ones can be connected together and what they would do.

27 Textures With Transparency

• Learn how to use cycle’s nodes to apply transparency to your image.
• Use groups for nodes for simplicity
• Use those node groups again on other materials.

28 Textures Without Transparency

• Import an image without a transparent layer - no Alpha Channel.
• Understand that this is useful if you have no image editing software, no time to process a load of images, or just trying out images for your textures

What is Alpha?

• If an image contains an alpha channel, each image pixel is represented has an value which specifies the opacity of that pixel. In alpha channels, 100% is opaque pixel and 0% is transparent pixel.

Not the best way…

• Ideal to have a Solid coloured background, either 100% Black or 100% White to separate the image from the background.
• It would be best if your images are processed to include an alpha (transparency) channel RGBA.

29 Testing The Grass

• Name your new texture layer.
• Turn back on the camera and lighting and the grass layer.

30 Light Path Render Settings

• Learn about light paths and how there are critical when using transparency.

31 Making Textures Look More 3D

• Play with the texture planes to alter their appearance.
• Understand, the more complexity you add here the less you may need later on.

32 Using Objects With Particle Systems

• Learn how you can place hundreds of objects easily and fluidly using the particle system.
• Control the distribution of particles using Weight Painting and Vertex Groups
• Turn off outlines when they clutter the view.

33 Layering Particles Systems in Blender

• See the Solution to the last lecture.
• Use a series of particle systems to plant our various grass types.
• Use low values during prototyping to get a feel of how the grass will look.

34 Introduction to Sapling

• Turn on the sapling add-on.
• Learn the fundamentals of sapling.
• Understand to save before using sapling.
• Learn how to prevent blender ‘crashing’ when using sapling.

35 Using Sapling To Make A Basic Tree

• Look at the tree presets.
• See how to add leaves to your tree in sapling.
• Learn where leaves are placed on the tree.
• How to get it looking more like a tree at the base.

36 Depth Of Field Using Cycles

• Let's make this scene even better
• Add in a Camera effect called depth of field
• Pretty easy using cycles
• Learn better control of tracking

99 End of Section 6 Wrap Up

Mikey talks through the end of section wrap up.