 Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming to my little chit chat here. Should be nice and fun and informal. I'm going to try to keep it tutorial-esque, but also just kind of be a sort of a small look into, you know, a sort of a daily exercise. It's kind of what I called it as a daily design warm up, because this is the type of thing that I would do, sort of regularly for fun and just to kind of, you know, get my brain moving. So, you know, we're not going to make any specific pre-planned thing, but so there will be a live portion of course, but I guess I should also say hello everyone and welcome. I'm Derek Elliott from Derek.com. That's, so yeah, some of you may know me. I know some of you may not, some of you may. I know that many of you do, because you've been coming up to me at the conference saying how excited you are for this, and I responded, but great, like what do you want to see? Because it's been mostly just kind of planned in my head up until now. So, like I said, we're going to be doing sort of a live tutorial, and we're going to be making something sort of similar to what you're seeing on the screen now, which is a project I did for 36 days a type several years ago. So this is an older project, but I've done a lot of similar ones. This is just the only one that I have nicely compiled into a long thing that I could put on the screen and draw your attention while I ramble on for less than six minutes. So yeah, I was going to dive right into that, but fortunately I'm going on the last day, so I was able to watch some other talks and decided it would probably be good to talk just a little bit about myself. So I guess before I go by show of hands, has anyone watched my tutorials before, or are there a lot of people? Okay, so mostly people who have seen them, some who haven't. Thank you for coming. But yeah, so most of the ways people find me are through YouTube or Instagram or something like that, but that's really only about 10% of what I do. I'm not official YouTuber, but my background is in industrial design, which if you don't know is designing products, like physical products, like everything around you, water bottles, monitors, mice, things like that. It's not designing conveyor belts and stuff for industries, which I had to explain to many people in college that that's what industrial design was. I would call it product design, but the UX and UI designers in Silicon Valley have mostly claimed the title of product designer. But I really like industrial design because it's kind of like, I really liked art, but I also like practical things. Art is a little bit too big of a box. It's too open-ended for me, so one thing that's really good about industrial design and just design in general versus art is that there's kind of constraints. So there's a lot of room for creativity, but you can also have some things to kind of keep things bounded. So over my time in school, I kind of discovered furniture design and architecture, and I find those as sort of two really perfect areas for design because they have very specific constraints, but you think of it like a chair, for example, and it's got a very, very specific use. It needs to fit a person and they can sit in it, but every day people are designing chairs and that's fascinating to me. Why are we still designing chairs? Like you think we would have found one by now that was good, but it's just fun to design chairs because it's just like a really unique problem to try to solve. So anyways, the other 90% of what I'm doing that's not YouTube and Instagram is mostly doing freelance work of some sort or another, kind of working directly with clients to, because on my background in industrial design, I'm mostly doing stuff for product launches, product animation, things like that. At times we'll kind of stray away from that, but sort of continuously try to pull myself back into sort of my roots and what I still like, which is physical products and industrial design things. So yeah, and that is because I like constraints. Like I was saying, that it needs to be a box. So one thing that freelance work is really good for, of course, is having a deadline. As soon as somebody decides to pay me to do something, first of all, I immediately don't want to do it at that point, but also, I know I have a deadline. It's a good way to get a project done because if I don't have that, then it can be difficult to, I'm sure many of you have done personal projects and started them and never finished them because there's, you don't really have to ever finish it. So you really have to push yourself to do that, but freelance work is good for that. And it also allows me to keep a finger on the industry. So when I'm creating things like YouTube tutorials, I can sort of know what clients are actually asking for and what those conversations actually are so that when I'm presenting educational content, I can sort of talk about it in real world scenarios and like this is a situation that I actually went through. So most of the work ends up being product visualization stuff, but I've also had the pleasure of working on a lot of like super secret, more like abstract projects. So the company Niantic that makes Pokemon Go, I've worked directly with them a few times for developing some, should we watch the donut tutorial next? I was gonna replay that, but I'll also just switch over to, this is like a very short reel just for the top of my website, but this shows some other kind of more recent work in the, that's not the 36 days type stuff. But yeah, Niantic, you know, working with them very early on to kind of bring a 3D eye to a new app that they were developing. Also working with the architecture firm Gensler on sort of developing these digital physical scenarios for this, I don't know if some of you have heard the line in Saudi Arabia, it's like this new crazy, hit all the design magazines. It's of questionable practicality, but working with them to figure out kind of, it was mostly just for presentation, but the way Blender comes into that is that it's a very fast way for me to iterate and a lot of the work that I did for them and ended up being, using a lot of the exact same techniques and kind of looking like sort of the same style as the 36 days of type because it's a really fast way to sort of present concepts and spaces and structures without getting too bogged down by details and things like that. So, I think that's pretty much enough about me unless I'll probably go ahead and get into it, but yeah, I really like Blender and I'm gonna walk you through just sort of a little bit of how I would make something like those 36 days of type animations. So I'm just gonna minimize that. And here we are in Blender. And we can keep this, I'm gonna regret saying it, but we can keep this as casual as possible. Like, while I'm doing something, if anybody has a question about why I'm doing it, I'll try to keep talking the whole time. It's hard for me not to, but if there's something I'm doing and somebody wants me to kind of elaborate on that while I'm going, then we can do that. But here we have the default queue, as you may know. And I'm going to, usually when I'm starting off something like this, in the case of architecture, starting with sort of a little bit of a, there's no floor plan, there's no real design here, but we will delete the default queue if I'm almost positive. I'll add another one later at some point, but we'll just use it plain for now. So we're just gonna scale that up a little bit. And so there's really, and I guess kind of while I'm doing this, I'll try to sort of explain why we're doing this, but I try to use as few sort of base elements as possible. That's gonna be, and modifiers. So we're gonna be using like the bevel modifier, for example, the solidify modifier, skin modifier. Those are really easy ways to sort of build geometry quickly that you can create detail with. But it's really very, you know, you have a very simple base geometry, so it's easy to sort of iterate quickly. So bevel modifier is great for that. Then the next thing I might add is a solidify modifier. Basically, yeah, just ways to sort of create detail, very easy. So I'll try to stay with this being my front view. And then, yeah, just kind of sort of building out some shapes here maybe. Just thinking about what might look interesting. So that could be our floor, for example. And then, you know, maybe to do a roof, we would just select this, bring that up. Maybe a defined increment. I loved in a midge, the mantissa talk yesterday. He loved the nice, even increments, because that's very helpful. So we'll, I did automatically add my quick favorite, auto smooth to do that. I'll try to keep the technical details to a minimum since I suppose most of you probably are relatively familiar with this software. So auto smooth is in the normal section here. But I, it's like the only quick favorite I ever use. Yeah, I just, just like this one, I'm putting on here. Oh yeah, is that true? Shade auto smooth. Yeah, so this computer's running 3.4 alpha, which kind of terrified me, because I was like, don't those ones crash or something like that? But maybe that's a new thing. I don't update my blender like super regularly because most of what I'm doing is very much not on the, the bleeding edge. You know, a lot of people have like described my style as simple and it wasn't really by choice. It's kind of just like, I don't know how to do anything else in Blender. Like I definitely haven't touched geometry nodes ever. So I'm like, your style is so simple. I'm like, great. It's cause I don't know how to do anything else. So let's just start with that for now. We'll expand this over time. I kind of want to quickly get to a point where I have sort of the building blocks, sort of the Legos of this piece. So the next Lego I might do is our beloved should have been default cube. So I'll just, I'm going to use this as kind of a, maybe like a, like a window area. Start thinking about some walls. So I'll go into my X-ray view there. And then maybe we bring this back. This can come over. And at some point it's good to start thinking about maybe like what angle you're going to be looking at this from so that you can, you know, you're not putting detail on somewhere where you don't necessarily need it. So that's something I might do once I have some very basic forms built out. But now that I'm kind of looking at this, I'm thinking like, oh, maybe this is going to be sort of a covered outdoor porch area. This could be like a second or a first story porch. Maybe this is like a living room. Again, the idea with this is to kind of be inspired by architecture and, you know, sort of creating unique shapes. It's really just for fun. You know, it's not, there's no real purpose or anything that this needs to serve. But so that we can start thinking about a little bit more like architecture, I might add in a wireframe modifier just so that we can have sort of a frame to our little house there. Now, I like to do this with, I would turn off replace original so that we still have our original and it is not replaced. And I'll add like maybe a material to this. I'll call glass. And then so that I can see, and I don't know how to turn caps lock off on. I think it's off now. On, off, okay. With this material, you know, just, because I am going to be working mostly just, you know, in the viewport display, it's a good idea to go ahead and add in some, you know, just materials, viewport materials so that you can kind of see what you're doing here. And glass is blue as we all know. And I'll add another material. So this is one thing you can do that's cool on the wireframe modifiers, add in a second slot, which I'll just call black. I never like to call materials by a color name because I always end up changing it and then it just confuses me later, but I think we'll keep it black. So in the viewport display, and you know, we will go into a rendered view and maybe even do like a little bit of animation or something. And it depends on how this is looking, what you guys are interested in. But we'll just keep moving along here. So if that's black, we can go into the wireframe modifier and then do a material offset. And I'll just do that. And you know, very quickly, we already have like basically, you know, what we would need to make a house. We've got some, you know, walls, windows. And the cool thing about working like this with the wireframe modifiers that now I can just go in, I can actually turn on this so I can see in edit mode. But, you know, I can just add in another little pane right there. And you know, I'm sort of, you know, again, why do you need a pane right there? I don't know. It just, you know, this area felt blank. So, you know, maybe we add in a little bit of detail there. Now, you know, I would like to think that maybe we can get into this room. So maybe we delete that face. That's looking cool. You know, what could we do next? Maybe thinking about some other walls. So I have this as one object now. I'm gonna duplicate it. And this is a thing that I like to do a lot. It's just steel geometry. So, you know, that's another advantage of working this way with modifiers is that once you kind of have these objects built with some of those modifiers you're gonna be reusing, it's very easy to then make new objects that have the same modifiers already on them without having to re-add them. So, once I kind of duplicate that, just kind of select the inverse, delete everything. And then I will, now I have this object, which I can make as the walls. It looks like I didn't get everything there. Delete those faces. Okay, so now I have this wall object. You know, maybe this one, I don't bevel the vertices, but instead bevel the edges so that I can maybe bring this part down a little bit so it's not intersecting there. And then, you know, maybe this becomes a little bit of like a nook or something like that. You know, maybe this is the garage. I don't remember what's the front of the house. You know, this, okay, so we'll call that the garage area. But, you know, it's feeling a little bit big. So maybe this is like, maybe that's the garage up here. And then we're thinking about, okay, now we've got maybe more private area in the back here. So adding that, maybe extruding something out. So we've got sort of another room. And with that, and maybe we'll make the floor plan just a little bit bigger. Not sure what that area is, but looks nice. Maybe our entrance would be somewhere around there. So if that's our garage, we like close that off. Something like that. I think it looks cool. And then, you know, another thing I like to add a lot of is like little like fences and stuff. Maybe we do that as we add maybe another floor here. So we can bring that up. We start to get this sort of three story tiered structure, looking kind of cool. You know, and one of the advantages with the 36 Days of Type project, again, coming back to constraints is that, you know, you know each one each day has to have. It has to be in the form of a letter. So, you know, that alone is a good constraint. And, you know, one way I was able to do all those projects so quickly is because I was, you know, I would sort of build this base file that just had like a window piece, a floor piece, a wall piece, and then, you know, I could just jump right into Blender and, you know, just start, you know, shaping things out. So I'm gonna duplicate that. Actually, usually I like to put that as the same object in case I change things. So let's go into this object. Shift D to bring it up. And, you know, maybe so that we're not reusing too much. Let's just delete everything except one of those faces. You know, maybe this is the bedroom. So we, you know, want a little bit of visibility there, but we want some privacy up further on the wall. So we can duplicate this, bring it up. Let's feel good. You know, maybe this is another private balcony. So we can bring this down. A little bit of like a wall looking out. You know, this is the private office where you spend all day working on Blender. Wouldn't that be a dream? Does anybody have any specific areas that they love in their house that we could consider adding here? House, apartment, dwelling, a kitchen. The kitchen's in there somewhere. We're definitely not gonna be modeling any sinks, but that's another cool thing about this is it's like, you know, you can go in and, you know, continuously add more and more and more detail. You know, but the idea here is like, you know, let's just rough out some big forms, things like that. This shape is looking a little interesting. Now might be the time when I would go in and, you know, depending on if you're gonna do an animation or something, obviously you need to be considering more sides, but maybe now would be a good time to go ahead and start thinking about, you know, what angle we wanna look at this from so that we can kind of be adding details in the right places. And, you know, if this is gonna be a still image at the end of the day, you know, I wanna, I just kinda wanna create an interesting composition that like your eyes sort of drawn to the middle. You don't have any kind of weird lines lining up with each other. And you just kinda, you know, it's supposed to like feel like architecture, but really you like need to remember like there doesn't necessarily need to be a kitchen. You know, there doesn't need to be a master bedroom. You don't need to have a door to get into some particular area. So, you know, it should look upon immediately looking like at it like a house or something like that, but that's one thing that you like have to consistently kind of disconnect yourself from. It's like it's not a house. It's inspired by a house, but it's really, it's an image, like you, I know I said, I don't wanna call myself an artist, but, you know, what you're creating here really is more, it is kind of a little bit more art. But, so let's start thinking about that. So the way I usually like to set up my cameras is by adding in an empty in the center of my scene and then just making it really big so I can see it and then binding my camera to that. So I'll press Alt G to move it to the middle, Alt R to make it pointing straight down and then R X 90 and then just kind of bring it out in little ways and maybe we make that a little bit bigger so we can see it, viewport display size. Bunder 3.4 Alpha's holding it very well so far, but I have not yet saved, so let's do that. What should we call our house? Beacon home one, because there will be a Beacon home two in a few minutes probably. All right, so let's bind this to that. I don't think I did that. Control P, keep transform, and then I'll just kind of pull out another view here and then I'll go into my camera view on this one and then just sort of the reason I do that is just because I kind of want to keep things centered in my scene and like, you know, if you're a lot of times I'll just fly around to like find like what angle I want to look at, but with this, you know, I kind of want to keep it, you know, maybe isometric looking but just, you know, finding sort of a unique angle here knowing that my camera is right there in the center. So, you know, right now, I think I was kind of designing it from this angle anyways. That's looking pretty good and maybe we consider making this image a square so it doesn't really matter because we probably won't render it, but 1500 by 1500 is a great dimension. I like, I never do like 1920 by 1920 or, those numbers are just like, it's just, you know, I like square round numbers. So 1500 by 15. A lot of people also ask, how do you get the quality so high for Instagram? And I don't do anything. I literally just save it as a JPEG and upload it. I guess it just comes down to the resolution. You know, let me just move this camera up a little bit. Okay, so also thinking about the shapes, not just the shapes of the object, we will be rendering this eventually. So not a bad idea to already start thinking maybe a little bit about lighting. Now you could put this in a little bit of an environment. You know, maybe we put it like on a hill or something like that. I'm gonna kind of working ahead here so that our hill isn't too, so the house stays on hill. I'm gonna add a subdivision surface to that shaded smooth. And then maybe we should actually add in a, a little bit of a backdrop there so it's not, can't see anything. We would typically light this with a beautiful HDRI from our friends at Polyhaven we heard from last night. And we might also do that, but I'm just gonna bring that down a little bit. Now this computer doesn't have a GPU, so we're seeing what Midge did yesterday. Well, he was using his laptop, but we're not getting anywhere near that complex, so I think we should be good. So for lighting, I don't know when it came out, maybe 2.8-ish, but the sky texture is just absolutely phenomenal. It looks really good. We do need to rid ourselves of the void looming behind our home, though. And that is going to be in the clip end. I don't tend to work in real scale, which is funny for someone who does a lot of product animation, but it's probably better if I did. Sun size, we can bring up a little bit. And now might be a good time to be thinking about the actual materials, not just the viewport materials. Let's spin our sun around until we've got a little bit of a better angle there. Now, I've been watching some videos on this, but the sun's strength always seems super high, but I like to keep the sun intensity a little high, and then I think exposures, maybe what you're supposed to be working with there, but again, we're not gonna necessarily talk about what you're supposed to do. We're gonna talk about what Derek does. I'm going to add a little bit of material to this just so that we can, again, the reason I'm kind of moving into render view now, I don't feel done with the house, it doesn't look good, we're gonna do more to it, but before you get too hung up, that's kind of the whole point of this, is designed to delight yourself. You don't wanna get zoomed in creating a little tiny doorknob or something if it's gonna be on the back of your house. So keeping things big and in that essence, like I said, because we are gonna be rendering this, going ahead and adding in some lighting, because the shadows and stuff are obviously gonna be part of the image here, so we wanna have something that feels compositionally good with shadows too. So let's add in a, let's drop the roughness, and let's add in some solidity. We will need to add in solidity, but I'll turn the transmission up, and just this is not a realistic way to do things, but I'm gonna just turn the alpha down a tad, and maybe we could tint the windows just a tad. Actually, so there's one, actually I did it here. One thing I like to do, I did it on the project that was in the talk here, but if you guys wanna see it, I'll do like, this is like a really cool thing, like another sort of detail, it's just a procedural gradient texture, but just kind of another very simple thing that you can add to just add in visual interest, and then lastly would be, yeah, something like text. So I'm gonna go back into my file here, let's, you know, a lot of times I'll do these panes with skin modifiers so that I can work more with bevels and things like that, and get a more rounded frame, and so that I can add a solidify. I haven't found a good way to have these windows be solid, but also have the wireframe not create like duplicates and stuff, but I don't like to do that until, cause at that point you have two separate objects, I don't like to do that until my shape is sort of more finalized, but maybe I did mention adding a railing, maybe I add that using the skin modifier, so I'll do that, but there's our basic window frame there, let's add in maybe a shader here, black, maybe make it tad bigger, cause that's looking cool, looking nice, maybe we should go ahead and add a material for this too, even though we'll probably just leave it white for now, I'll just call that like base material. Now I'm not loving my hilltop background here, maybe it's cause, so the traditional style for something like this I feel like would be more so isometric view, but you can also just use a super long focal length, but maybe we do orthographic view and just change our scale, and that would be so that I can delete this hill, cause I don't think I like it anymore, maybe I do like it, but we'll get rid of this. Delete those vertices, and then we'll just scale this out, give ourselves some viewport. So now we have our little house on the hill, our shadow being cast there is very long, so it might be a good idea to kind of bring this sun elevation up a little bit, which would, oh no, go in dark. Maybe the sun intensity needs to come down. Could bring the size of the sun up a tad, and I think part of the reason, okay so I'm getting light going through the windows, but a little bit too blocked out with the floor I have there, so maybe so that we don't have that coming out so much, we could sort of bring that in a little bit, and yeah, so maybe now I'll add that little railing I was talking about. Now I might do that the same way, kind of stealing some geometry here, so let's press shift D to duplicate this, and I'll just bring it up a little bit, P to separate it by selection, and instead of beveling the, oh this one already has the vertices being beveled, which is great, so I'll turn off the solidify modifier here, and then I'm going to add in a skin modifier, usually a good idea to save when you're working with a skin modifier a lot, but skin modifier is nice because, yeah it's like a super easy way to add detail that is you're just working with one vertex, you can just move it around, and you can add poles and pillars and things like that, railings, so love the skin modifier for that, it's great too because you can create different like size detail, you know in this case I think I want to match it to what I have on the window panes there, but like you know we can move this down, and then we sort of have a little bit of a railing here, you can add some glass to that as well, maybe we don't want it over here, so we can edge slide that back a little bit, hopefully nobody goes on that part of the balcony and falls off, that looks nice, and that could even get a white material, or leave the black, again starting to think about sort of the whole visual composition of that, I'm not loving like this little intersection here, I could be changing my camera angle, but you know maybe we pull that back, and that becomes like a little sitting area, and you know while we're at it I was gonna keep it mostly to architecture, but since I love chairs so much, maybe we make a little chair for this guy, and I'm gonna bring that in just, so one hot key that I use a ton is like frame selected, which I actually also balance to a button on this mouse, so when I have a big object in the background like that, if I frame selected it's gonna frame the big object as well, but this is looking good, I think what did I say, I wanted to add a little chair, so let's press, let's add in a cube, and once again could have been our default cube, make it roughly chair size here, let's scale it down a little bit, and very simple chair, again just little tiny details so that we have some fun here, trying to tell a little bit of a story with our object here, let's add in a bevel modifier, bevel modifiers were great for basically adding procedural edge loops if you're gonna do like a subdivision for example, afterwards, so love to use those, and then, okay so here's our little chair, so now thinking about our story, let's put this on a second story, this is where the adults go to relax in the afternoon, so that that's in the right place, okay so we have a little chair there, okay so that's our nice little balcony area, the shape of this is kind of disturbing me, so maybe we pull this in a little bit, maybe close that off, maybe think a little bit more about our driveway here, maybe that's our driveway, this could be our, maybe we pull that out a little bit, maybe make this like a separate pad, and this could be like a second portion of the house or something like that, pull that in a little bit, I think I'm getting over my edge here of my ground plane, it might be good, oh I think I moved it up a little bit, put that back down, so maybe that's another area, now if we were feeling good about the shapes of some of these objects on top, that might be where I go in and actually make this like a separate, maybe if we wanted this window to be rounded for example, we could go in and add in a bevel modifier to this, and then bring the size on that up a little bit, probably wanna put that before the wireframe, so that now we have, so this is where it gets a little bit nasty with the wireframe modifier, so we've got a little bit too many segments there, but let's say we still want the windows to look like that, so that's where I would probably go in and switch those over to a skin modifier to add some of those details, so maybe we ditch the wireframe there, duplicate this, and then just add in a skin modifier, but with the skin modifier, just delete everything, except for the only faces I think, and then we'll change the material on that to our little black material by removing the other one, and then let's mark our roots, let's scale this down, so that now the skin modifier, and actually, so this works a little different with the panes, I think I wanna delete the ones that aren't the sides, so that I still get the, so I get the bevel on the top and the bottom, so let's delete these edges, let's remark our roots, okay, cool, make that a little bit bigger so you can see it, I guess you can't see that one up top anyways, but, and then you know, you could add back in your details there on ends or something where you wanted to create more detail, so that's kinda cool, like in that, connect these back up, I think I'm ruining my bevel there, maybe the wireframe is a better way to go, okay, so maybe adding a little bit of color to this, I could show you how we add in that gradient texture, for example, so going into the shader editor, very simple here, let's just do a control T, so one of the reasons that I would want the bevel modifier, or sorry, I want this to be separate geometry, is so that I can add in a solidify this so that the glass looks a little bit better, so let's add in a solidify to that, just bring it up a little bit, and then for the texture, I would use a gradient texture, like I mentioned, so change that to a gradient texture, and then you always have to figure out which way it needs to go, but let's use our node wrangler add on and check that out, so it happens to be going the right way, that's beautiful, it never is going the right way, it's going the right way though, okay so connecting that back up, so now I have sort of this tinted window effect, now when you're doing like transparency materials, I always, you know, you want the color to be not too saturated but super bright, so, and I think this is working, oh this is working on the UVs now, so that's why it was working properly, which is pretty good, let's unwrap that, probably shouldn't have done it, so I want to do it on generated, oh that's going to be, so this is where it's always gets very confusing, okay maybe we should leave it on UV, and then let's actually look at our UVs and just make them all, oh gosh, make them all facing the same way, so, or actually let's, if we do generate it, but then make these separate objects, then we can separate by loose parts, then it should be working individually and I can do my rotation the way that I want to do it, 90 degrees, now for glass if you want to make it like super bright looking, one thing that you can do is add in, like bump this value up to like a two or something, and I'll give it a lot more pop, I guess would be the technical term for that, but getting back to our, let's see the design of our house is feeling a little lacking, maybe we could add in some more railings and things like that, I mean I might add that just right there, and then because we're working procedurally, you know it's obviously very easy to, I'm just sort of take pieces that you already have, kind of move them into the right area, oops, so there's another little railing, and this would be, if you wanted to add like glass around that one, for example, copying the same parts here, shift D, separate by selection, and then just removing your skin modifier, adding in, you could copy the materials and modifiers from this one, so link, or I want to at least link the materials, and we'll link the modifiers too actually, and then this one, instead of being on the edges is what we want, so we'll just bring this down. So we have another little glass detail there. I could go into adding some texture details into the actual glass like I did in that one project, but that's just another way to add more detail that's not necessarily needed. Of course we always like to turn on our high contrast too, so that it looks even better, and we can move this back up so we can see a little better. Maybe our house would look better if it wasn't all white, we could think about adding in, maybe the house is gray, or maybe the world is gray, I don't know, maybe the house stays white, and the world goes gray. Just to kind of help it pop a little bit more off the background, again, thinking about creating sort of a little bit more of an interesting composition there. So maybe moving our camera around, thinking about is that the best angle to be looking at it? I think the lighting maybe could come around a little bit of a different direction, something like that looking maybe a little bit more exciting, keeping that shadow sort of centered. Let's get rid of the roughness on this, so I know Andrew Price said you should never turn the speculator value down, but I don't think he's in here. So turn the speculator value all the way down so we have a nice flat background, if that's acceptable with you all, and then roughness up. That's kind of like my favorite material for a background would be just, I usually in something like this, I want the background to be very much the background, like I don't want it catching any light, anything like that, so making it low specular, sorry Andrew, can't see it anymore, which I like. Connecting that back up. What are we missing here? Definitely the kitchen, whoever mentioned that, that would be a good one to add. You could start thinking about adding in some lights here, I know we don't have a ton of time left, so I guess looking at the 36 days of type project that I did and some of the other ones, are there other things, this used to always crash blender, is editing these aerial lights in the viewport, which before I forget, I did want to say a big huge thank you to any developers that are here for making this beautiful piece of software that I have pretty much made my whole life out of. As I, I had to say that after I said something bad about blender, so we've got a little light in the garage there, maybe that gets the little black, the black body also that Andrew mentioned, but you can go really quick and cheat with something like that. And I've done animations too like this where one of the great things about the sky texture is that you can really create, you can create daytime rotation animations super easily changing things like the rotation obviously, or you can make a nighttime render if you wanted to just pull that sun all the way down, and then you had some lights in your scene. The one danger of, like I did to make the glass really bright is that it will sort of multiply any light so it gets a little bit unrealistic if you're not, if it is dark, that's gonna sort of multiply the light that's coming through it. So if you're gonna do a nighttime render, you might wanna drop that back down to like a one, but we'll leave it at two. That's a very cool trick in blender for making glowy stuff, is just to completely obliterate the value. You can't slide it past one, but you can type in values past one. That's one thing that I've started to and a lot of my work is like play with the value there. Okay, so maybe we add just like one little, one more little light up here. But I asked and then I didn't give anyone a chance to say anything, but what else are we missing here? What should we add to our little home? Wood? Oh, a pool, yes, yes. A pool would be very nice. Maybe we make that on the, I actually, I forgot about the pool. I was like, I should add a pool to my house today. Maybe we put it out here, somewhere like that. Maybe we go ahead and add in a loop there so it's not coming into our room we designed. Now this gets a little dangerous with the bell modifier. I don't know if this is gonna work the way I want it to. Maybe if I turn these segments down a little bit or the size up. No, that gets, that gets not good. So we could do that with a boolean. So let's like duplicate this. Now when I'm, and I actually do this a lot, you know, if you want to cut like a round hole, but I'm gonna separate that by selection and then just move this up and then use the solidify we already have on here. And you can do this for windows and stuff, but this could, you know, very quickly become our boolean object. We can move it to a new collection called bool, which is in all caps. And then we could add a boolean to this. And we would select our object and then let's just assume it's working properly, which it must be, but it always works very good. It's working, which is great. But maybe I want to actually use that boolean object as the pool also. Again, saving yourself as much work as possible by just like duplicating things. I'm gonna move that back into my main collection and then hide the boolean. The bool is the pool collection. That's an interesting how that runs. So changing our thickness down, like let's just make this our, even make it our glass material. But like, okay, let's try copying that material. I'll link materials. Okay, okay, that's looking decent. Maybe the pool needs to be like underlit or something like that. But anyways, I'm gonna keep kind of messing with this. Does anybody have any questions or like want to talk about anything else? Doesn't necessarily have to be related to this. Okay, I saw a hand go up, I told you so. I told you I couldn't stop talking. So to get rid of this where you can see through that, you can disable multiple importance and then we can kind of get the brightness of that lamp without it affecting the actual pool. Now I don't know if any of you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm but there was an episode where somebody fell in the pool because there wasn't a fence there. It's an American TV show so I'll stop talking about that but I should probably put a fence around the pool. But did you have a question? Or somebody raised their hand, anybody? Oh no, no questions. I thought somebody was stretching them. So yeah, this is our little house object. You know, this is kind of a fun thing I do regularly. Again, thinking back to sort of the purpose of doing something like this is just a way to sort of quickly build a composition that it's kind of fun. If you have a little bit more subject matter like for example in the 36 Days of Tight project, each one has to be a letter so you can kind of sort of challenge yourself to use these tools to sort of build out those more general shapes. But it's also fun for just creating little areas, objects. Just kind of fun little places you can imagine. Living little people living there or something like that. So yeah, love doing this stuff. It's really fun. Brent, do you have a question? Yeah, great question. And yeah, I mean, I still sketch regularly. I have a sketchbook. It's full. It's very ceremonious when I can close one, put the little label on it, put it on the shelf, and open a fresh one. I'll use that sketchbook for client calls, just writing down notes, but also sketching. But really, I do tend to like to jump pretty much straight into 3D with a lot of projects because there are tools like this with solidify modifiers and skin modifiers and you can build out forms incredibly quickly without really needing to, in school we use CAD software and you would never jump straight into CAD software because it's very cumbersome and there's so many bevels and fillets and things like that and dimensions. All that just really kind of slows you down so you would not want to iterate in CAD software. But that's one thing that I really love about Blender is that it is very lightweight. It's very flexible. There's all these kind of tools at your disposal for quickly building out shapes and forms and things like that. So for me, yeah, I would jump straight into Blender quite a bit. And that also, I kind of use that to sort of drive my design processes. If a tool isn't working, then maybe that doesn't need to be part of the design. So if I can't get the modifier working the way I want, then just like go with it, kind of use kind of like letting happy accidents happen is what one of my old professors said about, you know, when things like aren't working or something, just kind of lean into that and use that as a way to sort of push something forward. So yeah, I jump straight into Blender a lot much to some people's dismay probably because I could probably plan out designs and things better if I sketch them. But I do still sketch a lot, but a lot of times I do jump straight into Blender. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that I agree with you there that that's kind of the whole point of a workflow like this is to just kind of constantly be like looking at what you're creating and sort of looking at the image on screen and not thinking so much about, you know, what is this wall made of? You know, what should this texture be? And things like that, but being able to just use it as a tool to communicate basically, that's one of my big things I didn't really talk about earlier, but you know, for me, Blender is really just a good tool for communication. And I think that one of the more, one of the powerful things about Blender is that you can basically, there's 3D software in general, it doesn't even have to be Blender, though we all love Blender. You know, one of the fascinating things about it is that there's really no other tool that allows you to take an idea you have in your head and most accurately represent it to someone else than having a powerful understanding of 3D software. So that is one thing that I think is really great about. Blender in 3D in general is that it can just be a really powerful tool for, you know, taking something that's in your head and getting it out into the world for other people to see. So there's the sunrise on our little house with a pole on top of it because the top roof was feeling a little bit empty. Yeah, but with the design moves that are somewhere, I had yourself from that and then just be like, all right, that looks good and then something. I don't know, but this needs to be a third of that and these angles need to be precisely the same. Yeah. Like I was watching you just like, all right, I'll move this over here, all right, that looks good, you're going, oh. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just, you know, teaching yourself to purposefully be like that. I don't know what background you come from, but you know, for me coming from a CAD background, everything was dimensioned, everything was this. You know, this needs to be this radius and when I got in Blender, I was like, well, how long is that edge? Like it needs to be an even increment and the fill it needs to be 0.25, not 0.24136, but you know, I think the way to succeed with that is to just completely disconnect yourself from the model itself and the fact that what you're creating at the end of the day is just a bunch of pixels. Like no one's going to go in, well, in some cases, but no one's going to go in and measure those things and that was one thing that took me a really long time to get over coming from, you know, CAD background in particular was like, how do I let go of all that and realize that what I'm creating is really just an image or at the end of the day it's going to be a video or something like that. So yeah, just kind of purposefully just let go and like move on if you're not liking something. I'm like with projects like this all the time, I'll get to this point and then just, you know, never save, just delete the file and just do it again because that's kind of the purpose with something like this that should not be, you don't want to feel invested in it. You don't want it to be something that becomes your baby. It's just like you need to just do it and do it again and do it again and that's kind of, I guess the theme I was trying to get out with this presentation was basically that just like, you know, it's just a thing to get your brain moving and at the end of the day, you know, you might have a cool image. If you don't, it doesn't matter but we're not really making anything for anyone here. It's just, you know, a fun way to use the tools that Blender has and, you know, create in a different way just like you would with sketching or anything else. It's just another tool. It's another way to just get kind of stuff in your head out into something that you and other people can look at and you can really quickly build large volumes of work doing things like this and, you know, you're not too attached to any one thing but at the end of the day, it's really fun to look and see like, you know, maybe this house isn't a masterpiece. I don't think anyone's gonna go build that house but if you do this 100 times or like in the case of the 36 days of type project, you know, when you do all those then you have this body of like small experiments and that in itself is a substantial project that you can be proud of. So, you know, the consistency playing around all that kind of contributes to just, yeah, Blender being sort of a fun tool. Yeah. It kind of depends. Like so sometimes, you know, something like this might be used in a more of like a background animation. You know, really like I did a project recently. I can, I think let it play here on Vimeo. This was actually from my sister-in-law. She has like a virtual gallery but, you know, a lot of times using the same like solidify modifier and stuff like that to create like these, all these buildings in this little presentation are, it's just like, it literally made the exact same way. Just get inside the space and add some nice textures on top of it. But it, I mean, so using it for like a background in a product presentation, you know, a lot of times when I'm kind of art directing a product image, you know, I want shadows to fall a certain way or like hit one part of a product not the other part. And the way I do that is just by building like this crazy looking structure around it. You know, there's a lot of product animation I've done. The background is just like this crazy world with like walls going everywhere. And it's because I'm just kind of tweaking things to let the light fall certain ways because no one's going to see that. But other cases like in the case of Gensler, which is a architecture firm, in that case it was a more practical application of like, you know, we needed to sort of represent spaces but the spaces were not designed. They literally gave me a spreadsheet of like, we need a place where someone scans their avatar into the metaverse. We need a hologram. This is where people get their VR headset. Complete just spreadsheet and they're like, turn that into a space. And you know, the only way to do that is to just have, you know, no idea of like, you know, what you want to do. So that would be another more practical example. But this, you know, it's something like this is built the exact same way. Well, thank you all. I think we're about, one last question? Yeah. So I was wondering when you do the realistic product design, so it needs to be real-world skill, it needs to be structurally sound and stuff. Do you feel like Blender is the right tool for that? Would you just say I'd rather do the design of Blender but when it comes to actually creating something that we can't produce, physically, I would hop on over to like an AutoCAD or whatever, solid work. Yes, so the one area, I love Blender with the bottom of my heart but the one area that would not advise you as Blender is if you are going to be creating a physical product with the exception of like 3D printing. So you can 3D print from Blender and I suppose get relative accuracy. But if you're going to be like, oh my God. This is like another example of like more product work for a Kickstarter with a guy I worked on. But yeah, if it's going to be a physical product that needs to be cut by a CNC machine or something like that, Blender's just not the, I can't wait till Blender CAD comes out but yeah, when you really need to be super dimensionally accurate building another software. But again, thinking about the fact that then the day you're creating pixels on a screen, a JPEG image, I work with industrial design studios, they send me CAD files all the time. So for something like that, then they can send me stuff that was built in CAD, I can bring it into Blender, know that everything's dimensionally accurate and that works fine for creating renderings and things like that but you wouldn't want to start in Blender necessarily and then try to, I had a nightmare project like that one time, I told this designer from the get go, I was like, now these cannot be the final design files, we're prototyping in Blender and then sure enough, a couple months later, they're like, can you send us the step files? And I'm like, there is no step files. I said, this is like, you have the JPEG image and that is it. I can send you a front view but they need to be rebuilt. So that is an area that Blender lacks. This is another similar project. I set up a file with a base lighting environment textures and created a bunch of chairs in the shapes of A's, B's, C's. I didn't get all the way through the 36 here but yeah, this was another one, following the same process, just fun individually, they're not huge projects but when you create a lot of them, it becomes something that you can be proud of. So it's a good way to get something you're proud of while creating a lot of things that you're not proud of. This was a downloaded texture for the velvet texture and the wood. Thanks everyone for coming. It was nice to.