 Okay, I think we just start. Yeah, welcome to my workshop about successfully developing an artwork in Blender. Basically, I want to inspire you a little bit in this workshop to do your own artworks and I want to present to you a workflow that I've used for my artworks and that I think that works quite well. So this is more about creating, let's say, personal projects like little animations or static images. And I think it can be applied to a lot of creative projects and also the first part about preparing this project is very, let's say, general and can be applied to many things. But I think this can help you to get your things done. So with this workflow, I want to show you here. It helps you to stay motivated from start to finish. This is one really important part. Then create an artwork that you are satisfied with and even get recognized by the community and certainly one of the most important part actually finish your artwork. And I guess a lot of people have trouble with this. Yeah, short about me. I'm Zacharias Reinhard. You can call me Zeg if you like. I'm from Germany. I'm a freelance 3D artist and also Blender Foundation Certified Trainer. Basically my company or my self-employment, I do Blender training in Germany for individuals, companies, one-on-one training, different things. And also I do customer projects, 3D animation, all kinds of 3D work. And yeah, this is basically the main thing I do, but if I have time from time to time, I create my own artworks and now a lot of people are coming. So let's wait a sec. Come in, come in. Not much space left here. So I guess I can start again. Two times now. Okay, okay, okay. In short, this way. Can you hear me? All right. I see the seat. There are some seats. I guess there too. Over there. Okay, successfully developing artwork in Blender. Basically I want to show you a little workflow I use to create my artworks in Blender from time to time. Basically in my company I do Blender training and customer projects, but sometimes if I have time, I do this little artworks and yeah, I want to show you my workflow I use, which can help you to keep motivated from start to finish to create an artwork that you are satisfied with and also maybe you get recognized by the community and certainly one of the most important part actually finish your artwork. Yeah, my name is Zeck, Zacharias Reinhardt in German. I'm freelance and Blender Foundation certified trainer and yeah, some of you may know me from the YouTube channel Agenda's Brothers. Recently I also did some English tutorials there, but this year we had some changes and Agenda's Brothers was a company I had together with my brother. It's like film production, 3D animation and also Blender training, but there were some changes and now I'm basically in my own employment, my little company and yeah, if you have any question about this, we can talk about that later. So here are my general four stages of my workflow to create an artwork. First of all, and the most important part is preparation and we will talk about this for quite a while. Then research and testing if it is needed and step three is actually creating the artwork and step four is feedback and fine tuning. So I will talk about all that in detail. Also, when I start an artwork, I set some personal goals, like learn something new, like a new tool and new workflow that I've heard of that I want to try out. Then certainly I want to improve certain techniques or workflows and yeah, I try to meet my deadline. I said to me, but this never works. Okay, my workflow in about, let's say about one minute. Okay, first of all, I find a good idea. Then I create an amazing concept art and create a pre-visualization hard word and also known as block out. So I block out my scene with very simple shapes and colors and then step by step, I replace all these objects with a high resolution objects. Then sometimes somethings does not work. You realize a little bit later then try out new things like here, little overpainting in Photoshop. Then do the modeling, shading, lighting, eventually rigging and animation. Do the rendering and compositing and then ask for feedback and fine tune your image. So really quick. So all in all, from rough to detail, this is the overall workflow. Okay, preparation. As I mentioned, one of the most important part because basically we define what we want to create in this stage. This is organization, certainly is one important part because if you don't be organized, this could block the whole process of creating an artwork. So if you don't know where to put your files, if you don't know what to store in which place, this can block you because you don't find your things you need. Then find a good idea. A good idea, this is very specific but let's talk about that later. Create the concept art and the pre-visualization. Okay, organizing the project folder. So this is for let's say a smaller project like an artwork. You can extend this for a larger projects. This also works. But this is basically my folder structure that I use for creating my artworks and I use this some years now and it works quite well. Certainly we have a main folder with a project name. Then I always create a folder called fin. I try to keep the terms short. So that stands for final artwork or your final outcome of your project. So that means if you have a bunch of projects, you can simply click into one project and see immediately where the final outcome is. Then I have a library, a lib. There store everything that will be stored like reference images or rendered files. If you have video recordings or audio, there are many things you can put in here. And then we have the production folder. There everything gets stored that will be edited. Certainly the blend files, textures or concept art, whatever. So things with versions basically. Yeah and one important thing, certainly you can create a big folder structure but after all you only create that what you need. So if you just have one blend file and two textures, you only need to create the production folder and nothing else. All right, finding a good idea. First of all, you need a direction. So what is your motivation? This can be many, many different things like if you want to do something for your portfolio, you can do something if you want to enter a competition. You can do something to improve your skills for example. So there are many reasons why are you doing an artwork. So after you know why are you doing this, you can ask yourself what fits to this motivation. Like if you wanna improve a certain skill, certainly you have to do an artwork which involves this kind of technique or skill you want to learn as much as possible. If you do want to do something for your portfolio, certainly you have to do something that you want to show, that you want to get hired in. For example, if you want to be a character artist, certainly do something with characters you can present in your portfolio. Yeah and certainly if you enter a competition, for example, there are always given topics. So certainly do something with this topic. So after all, the conclusion is do something you like because this is the best way to keep motivated. So this can mean a lot of different things. And for all the people that don't have any idea what to do, we have this weekly CG challenge going on on Facebook right now. Also we will publish the webpage in next week I guess. It's running for one or an a half year now with a weekly challenge. We publish a new topic every Monday and yeah, you can participate to improve your skills and also win nice prizes from wendistrytextures.com. Just join us as sponsor. Shoko for a lot of different sponsors so you can also win great prizes every week. So just for people that don't have any idea what to do. So how did I find my ideas? To give you an inspiration how I did this. Bountyful Harvest is a little scene I created for a beginners class in Germany. So I had the motivation to create a scene that is more or less simple but also looks interesting and nicely. I had this old render I did back then when I started with beginner classes and this was this year. So I had in mind it should be something like a still life. And then I just opened Pinterest for example and searched for still life and got a ton of inspiration what to do and then I certainly saw something with vegetables and so I searched on and on and came and built up this little idea here. Then Memories of the Past. This I created together with my brother. The motivation in this image was to create a scene for video training. So this is actual video training with 25 tutorials you can buy and also watch free on YouTube. And yeah, there are many different things than that inspired us to create this. Like you can have artists that inspires you like Simon Stalin Huck in this case or movies like in this case Ghibli movies. Also our childhood we have lived in a forest for in our childhood. So this all are different components that are personal to me that I like and inspires me as much as possible to create this image. This one here was done for art station competition and won the third place. And in this case, certainly we had or I had given topic the journey and also in the category 3D transport. So it had to be something with cars. And yeah, some when I found out that I really like putting legs on certain things like cars and somehow this always works and looks quite interesting. And yeah, I really firstly had this idea putting a car together with legs. And this car is in Lada Niva, I guess. It stands somewhere in my hometown on the street and I thought, well, this is nice looking car. So and yeah, journey, someone on the journey so it has to be something a man could live in. So I added this trailer at the back and the environment was created later on. I will talk about this later. Yeah, what's the most important thing for a good idea? That's the story. So let's look at some of these images again. The story is very important because if people are watching or to your image they immediately can imagine a story. So this hasn't to be extremely clear what you want to tell. But if you give some hints, the people are longer watching on your image because it's more interesting. Like in this case, you can see the title also gives a good hint, monster in the closet. And then you can imagine a little story. Someone is looking inside a closet in the kitchen or whatever, pointing in there with a flashlight and seeing this little monster guy eating all the sweets. In this case also, we have just placed different objects to imagine a little story like the bicycles in the foreground, the bags that are lying there. So you can imagine these two guys there. It's actually my brother and I are bicycling around in the forest or whatever. And then they saw this old tank which reminds of old war. But it's always interesting if you put something that's not familiar to the real world in a real world environment, like in this case. And this little dude again, little fat alien thing. It was also for competition, for the weekly competition I just showed earlier. And the topic was cute but dangerous. And yeah, I guess the image speaks for itself. So this little alien has a hot tail and sitting on TNT. We don't know what will happen. And yeah, the journey, the main focus was the robot car. So I thought I have to add it or add some elements to imagine a little story. So like all this field or this old fence in the foreground and also this dog looking out of the door. So you can imagine, okay, there must be a master of the dog inside this car. So I didn't have to model a real human. So I made this a little bit easier. And also the mood of the image, like the lighting or the fork, you can imagine that somewhere in the morning they are waking up and go on, on his long journey. Yeah, creating a concept art is now the next step after we have our idea. So basically we visualize our idea. And this is very important because certainly you can just start modeling what you have in your mind. But if you paint in a little sketch or an overpainting like this, this up here was actually a photo. And I just painted on it with some basic strokes to get an idea of what we can make there. Also down here, it's a little alien on the TNT. There I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do. And this is a journey concept. I quite often changed the environment because for me it was quite clear what car I wanted to create but don't know what environment I want to put this in because there are unlimited options. And yeah, if you have this visual concept in front of your eyes, you better can imagine what you have to create later on in 3D. So if you have done your concept, this can also be a photo if you want to go a little bit more in a realistic direction. If you have your concept, you can start to create a pre-visualization or previs or a blockout also called. And this is in my opinion one of the most useful things you can create. So you block out your scene, you create basically all your objects in low resolution. So you can do it in half an hour for example. And you can play around, just put your objects in there, replace them, try other things, move your camera around and so on. And you can adjust everything as fast as possible in a short amount of time. And yeah, if you have modeled some objects in high detail and then realize, okay, this doesn't work, you have wasted a lot of time. So, okay. And there I want to show you some things. So we haven't blended 2.8 with ultra nice viewport settings, but in Blender right now we can also adjust the viewport just a little bit to get some nicer results here. Here I have a little test scene we used for the movie scene creation workshop. This was from the memories of the past image I just showed you. So you can, if we watch from the camera perspective, see how this looks like. And you see it's just basic Blender shading. So we can enable some viewport effects like, we have this ambient occlusion effect. I guess everyone knows, so you can add ambient occlusion to your viewport. We have this depth of field effect. So if you are inside your camera, you can enable depth of field, raise it down here. And then we simply have to adjust the distance and the f-stop. So the distance shows us where the focus point is like here. If we want to set the people here into focus and with f-stop you can adjust the strength of the depth of field. Also, if we want to have a little nicer lighting, we can add for example a sun lamp. Then we set the viewport shading to material. Then we have this basic idea from the sun direction where the sun is coming from. But if we are in game mode up here, we can enable shadow and also under buffer type we can enable variance. So we can have a nice smooth shadow here. And also you can see we now have this box kind of thing of shadow and we want to increase this. I just enable show shadow box. And under frustum size down here we can increase this area and also the end clipping. And now you can see we have this smooth shadow. And if I increase the quality size, we get sharper shadows. So now we have this little bit more interesting shadow in our scene. And also we can go to our world settings and increase the color of the ambient so that we get this shadows a little bit lighter. Also we can add a heavy light if we like, adjust the energy a little bit, make a little bit blue for example. Then we have, let's see, this mist passed down here. We can basically enable real time mist. So we can adjust where it starts and how deep it should be with the horizon color. We can adjust the color of it. And now we have this gray background here and we also can enable world background. So we have this color in the background here. And now if we enable only render disable this one here, we have this nice viewport. You can certainly add more lamps to it if you like. And now you can move your camera around, try different angles. For example, move this guy here, just try out different things if you like. So this gives you a lot of options and possibilities. Also you can try out animations and so on. Let me check, I have also some other for my project, some previous. Let's check the bountiful harvest, have the tier. Okay, now let's go to Fox and Alien. This is a little scene I'm working on right now. It's basically to test and improve my skills. So this is not final yet, but in this case I try to previous an animation. So this is just real time in render. So this is a little animation with a Fox and an Alien. This should be a little spaceship. And you can see that I've tried out the camera animation and here we have also the little Fox. And the movement was completely done with simple shape keys. So no winging here, just simple shape keys with some adjustment. This was done really, really quick and this is little alien. So and you can see in this wheel time of viewport preview, I can play around with the camera and try out different things. And here you can see the scene in general. Quite simple scene. This stuff back here is just ultra simple stuff with just image projection on it. But from the right perspective, it looks like there's something in the background. And the good thing is I've modeled everything in the right measurement. So everything has the right size as the final scene should have. That means I can use this scene as foundation. So I exactly know what things I have to model like the tire, this stuff in the background, the Fox, the alien, the little spaceship. And I have a good overview of what needs to be done and I can estimate how long this would be. So this gives me a good preview also. It's like watching your final animation before it's actually finished. So the next step would be, I'm not there now to replace all these objects and create the final scene. Certainly over the time it will develop and here and there I will add some things. But in this case, I already, this is, by the way, the concept art I did. The Fox is already finished so far and also the little alien dude. And, where was it? Sorry. I have stored it here. Well, it just was because I was nervous. So here it is. I did this just five minutes before the workshop. So in this case, I actually used this previous Fox model to create the sculpting from it. So this is not the final sculpting, but you can imagine this was the basic Fox model I used. So sometimes, or in most cases, you certainly don't use the lowest object as foundation and just create something new and replace the old one. But in this case, the proportion was okay because I took care that this is this way. Okay. This about previous, so I think you can imagine that this pre-visualization is extremely useful to have an idea of your final scene and this also helps you to keep motivated because you can, from time to time, replace the objects and make some test renders to see what in your scene is going on. Okay. Research and testing this just quickly because it depends on your project and your skills. Like for example, I show you the video if this works. So the memories of the past was actually an animation and our idea was to challenge ourselves to create a realistic looking environment with nature, so moving nature and blender and I guess everyone who tried this is, this is not easy. And we didn't know how to do it so we need to test and research, certainly. So in this case, just to show you some quick examples. So for example here, I just some, this was from the real production, some tree tests how we can do the animations. Also here, also the grass and in this case, for example, I also tested how to do the bark of the tree in a more realistic way. So we tried on many, many different things and a lot of those things didn't go in the final animation but certainly we found out quite some useful and fast workflows that we used in the final animation. So research and testing, if you aren't a skilled 3D artist, this is a really important step. Try everything on a small environment like here and if this works, then you can apply it to your bigger scene, so just this few words. Yeah, now creating the actual artwork, let the fun begin. As you saw before, the pre-visualization we use as foundation, we place all the lowest objects with the highest objects and yeah, we only create what we need and certainly we can cheat a lot. So let me show you some things for this to only create what you need. So I show you this little animation, it has also some sound but I'm not sure about music rights here so I let the sound away. So you see this little scene and basically it's just in box with vegetables but you can, if you took a closer look, we have the shadows from a tree moving, we have these little particles flying around and also we have this sun effects, sun blend effects and all these little details have to make this image alive. So now if we zoom back, you can see this is actually super simple. So but if we in this position here, this looks as it is a part of a big scene. So we can imagine from this little scene with some tricks like the shadows that this is part of a bigger scene. The particles are also super simple, just a particle system with some particles with volume metrics, fears flying around and this helps to sell it. So I can show you in the plan file so you can see the whole thing. Basically I modeled one box, copied it to here, then these two things are basically just planes with displacement back then, we didn't have this micro displacement awesomeness. Also this here, simple displacement stuff. So if we bring this down, you see super simple. Yeah, this is also just, this is, can I winder this here, check this out. But I don't break anything. Yeah, there's a close kind of thing and basically the details I did with the texture and some transparency between all these little holes here. So this was basically also a plane projected with shrink web modifier onto the surface. Yeah, this is the water. So if we have check this, enable this one, just a plane with some shaders on it. Particle system, also just a box with some particles, just some spheres as you can see here, super simple. And we have this tree and the tree motion I adjusted with a simple wave modifier. So yeah, and certainly for lighting in this case I used an HDI map from hdihaven.com for the wave modifier. Basically I just try around. So in this case, we have a very low speed. This is important because it makes this wave strong wave movements. And also the amplitude is not too high. As you can see, I use very, very low values here. And basically this is enough to have this little shadows on the ground. So yeah, also in terms of modeling, there are also ways to keep it extremely simple. So like in this case, it's just a texture with a height map and also nothing fancy. I just downloaded an image from Pixar Bay. So like this was this one here. And then I used the tool called Pixplanned to make a tileable texture out of it and also a simple displacement map. And the ground is not the main focus in the scene so it doesn't have to be perfect but I guess this looks more than okay. So also the same thing on this image here. One important thing to go a little bit back by testing and researching, it's very useful to try out other tools that can support you to create your artwork. Like for the forest scene with the two guys, we didn't animate anything by hand. This was motion capture with a cheap software and a cheap tool like Xbox Kinect sensor. So we did this simple motion capture animation there. Down here we also have this displacement and you can see, as I mentioned, only create what is needed. I deleted everything that is outside the camera. And if I delete or disable the modifier, it's just a subdivided plane in this case. Also the TNT is just a multi-web object. So quite simple and these are all instances. So duplicated with all D. So this is basically all the same object here. If I change anything, you can see it will change on all the other objects. And this way we save some memory in the end. And for this little alien dude, I certainly used dynamic topology sculpting and then there's a free tool called instant mesh. You can do a really, really quick wee mesh or wee topology. And then we projected it on the other object with a shrink web modifier and then you can store this information in a multi-web modifier. So quite simple. Also you can see the scene in general is quite simple. Also in terms of modeling, let's, so I have this stones for example. And we try to find a simple and fast way to create a simple stone or walk in this case. And basically this is super simple object with some displacement modifiers in this case. We also didn't have this nice micro displacement features back there. It was from last year, I guess. And if you use modifiers, the cool thing about this, you simply can change something. You also have another stone or rotate this and apply for example the rotation. And you also have another kind of stone. So we extremely fast can create different kind of stones in our scene. So I guess a lot of you know if you just put in procedural texture on it, you have this clipping errors. So I try to find a simple and fast way to avoid this and basically I project the same displacement map from different directions. So after this we'll calculate it one after another and so you have way less of these errors in this case. Yeah, and also this was quite beneficial that this object is a high resolution because when I come to shading in a moment, this will be a lot beneficial for shading. So let me just take a look if I have everything. Yeah, okay, let me show you one thing, animation. Animation is a big topic and it's always hard to do and in our forest scene we had these trees with this motion and so on. And we try to figure out a way to do the leaf motion in a very quick way so that we don't have to do all this simulation because this is not really possible right now and let me check this. Simon animation, we have this tree. So this was quite fun because basically I have these branches here with these leaves. The leaves have an own vertex map. Let's see here, so everything selected except the branch. And then we can put in some wave modifier and displacement modifier and in the displacement settings you can set an object for as a center point basically. And if I move this, you can see the leaves are moving. So and also I didn't want to animate this empty object all the time so I simply added one keyframe and the graph editor I add n, c, modifiers and noise modifier. So to all the different axes and now this thing is automatically moving and you can see that leaves are naturally moving as well. So and then this different branches I used as particle, as hair particle on my actual tree. This looks like this and on these particles I used hair dynamics so the branches are also moving a little bit with a turbulence force field and all this combined ends in this nice motion we have for our trees here. Yeah, also we did some research for the plant movement and there aren't perfect ways in blender. But yeah, we find out that you just have to enable this larger or grass, no, they also have it. So there's this problem if they move over the center point they just make this rotation and if you put the wind in one direction so they never reaches the center point then you have this little motion of the plants this case. So you can see this is moving. Did I bake this? Yes, right, so let me see this. Yeah, it's baked in this case. So but yeah, this works for the scene so we had this different class and also what we did, we didn't want to animate all this class. So for example, the taller class, this is also simulated. Okay, now you can see it is really strong with the wind and can see if I move the wind, the grass will rotate and we try to avoid this point that the grass is rotating so we just set up a wind force field and that is blowing a little bit in one direction so they always have this angle in there. So and also to add more motion to the grass you can see we have a lot of particle systems so if you enable everything you have this big meadow but for the smaller grass like I think in this case here is it enabled? Here we use the same trick as we did for the leaves just add a displacement modifier and this empty object is moving and so we have this little movement in here as well. It's not super realistic but if you look from far away, this looks absolutely okay. So there are many tricks to cheat and don't need to animate or simulate everything by hand. And yeah, also here you can see the motion capture we did. This is two guys. So we actually 3D scanned ourselves and put in the environment. You can see the texture is really bad so this is just for persons you put somewhere in the background so if you look from far away, this looks okay but from close this really looks kind of weird. But yeah, this was a cheap and simple way we tried to find a cheaper simple way to create character motion. And let's shortly, I don't know if we have still time. Galab, let's check the stones. So back to the stones. So when it comes to shading, I also try to keep things as simple as possible. So if we take a look back to the bountiful harvest seen here, this one, all the vegetables are 100% procedural. So no textures used, just a blender internal generated textures. I can show you. So this is just combining different things. One can use a blender like on the, let's see this one here. So like you can see here. So we use the geometry of this object because we have this harder edges right here. So there in this case I use the pointiness feature. Certainly everyone knows. So down here, you can see we have this black and white mask we can put into a mix shader and then we have this kind of effect then the simple noise texture. So we color them, we have also this black and white mask and use another color, mix this in. Now we have basically the basic color and also with a gradient texture, I add this lighter part. Yeah, and then basically just some changes for glossiness and so on. And you got this nice looking effect. This is 100% procedural. So you can put it on every other object basically. And also I did it for every other stuff here. So does not look super realistic but for beginners class scene, this was more than okay. Same thing here, we have this different procedural textures mixed together, same way, it's just different noise textures mixed together with also pointiness feature up here so that we get this colored parts. This works quite well in some cases, not every case. Then if I realize that procedural does not work then I try to do it with a seamless workflow that I used for, oh my God, stones. Let me disable the background. So this is basically nearly procedural. So just I used seamless textures for the moss and the stone texture basically. And the cool thing about this is that I can change the shape of this object and always the texture will work. So if I like do some crazy things here, this also works. You can see the moss is now growing still on the upper side. And down here we have this gradient and where all these hard edges are, we have this, yeah, wider parts. And this is basically also same things. So we have basically our stone texture and I used the box mapping. I think everyone knows what the box mapping is. Super simple, back here, oh gee. So basically this projects and textures, seamless texture from all, from six directions like a box on our object. And with this, if you set this from flat to box, you have this blend value and you can see here we have the seams and so we can blend the seams a little bit. So you don't need to care about the seams and you simply can drag and drop your material on all your objects and it just works. So and then the same thing I used as for the vegetable, I don't know the English word for this. To create this moss, basically this is a vector that it just uses top information. And down here this is simply a gradient texture, also uses a moss texture. And yeah, with a pointiness feature again, I separated all these hard edges so I got this information. So and also what I try to do if we take a look back at this animation is to unify my shaders. So basically for everything what's green, every grass, plants, leaves and so on, we just used one material. So it was super easy if I wanted to do a change so I just need to change some colors and the whole scene is on fall for example. And also the concrete and the stones, you can probably see the stones here but the concrete and stone also uses this technique I used for the stones as you saw before, the same thing for the whole tank. So this is just seamless workflow, just the texture, some procedural stuff put on that. Also for the bicycles, the rubber, also for the bark and yeah, certainly this thing here was scanned by another software and the texture was also generated from this other software. So yeah, this was quite simple. Also you see this little butterflies and flies flying around. This was also super easy because we just had to animate one wing movement up and down. Then we repeated this with a cycle modifier in the graph editor and then we simply put it on a spline flying around and with this noise modifier we had this up and down movement so that the butterfly makes this little movement. So basically I need to set two keyframes for the whole thing and the rest is blended generated. Yeah, just to finish this up, we have one thing left. Yeah, you can watch the whole movie scene creation series on the YouTube channel against us brothers, if you like. And yeah, if you have created your first version of your artwork, then you, it's recommended to get some constructive criticism and personally I like to ask my wife because she has absolutely no idea from 3D and animation and she just looked at my images and said, this looks bad or change this and certainly I think I have no idea how much time I put into this, so yeah. But this really helps because she has a few, like everyone else who's watching this image and probably think the same thing. Certainly it's always good to ask, experience artist what you can do better, but yeah, this also helps. Let me just show you one thing. I just show you my first version of this monster and the closet thing. So this was really not so good. So this was the first version where I saw, okay, yeah, nice image. But if you look the whole time on one image you can't see all the mistakes. So and after some feedback cycles, suddenly step by step, the final image was created. So you can see a huge difference between this and this just by asking for feedback and certainly fine tune. This is what I call it, your image. And yeah, you can see also the skin, no details here and here you can zoom in, I can't open this. It's always weird when I plug in a beamer. This acts crazy. So we have all this little details and hairs and bumps and so on to make this more interesting and realistic. Yeah, I guess I can talk on and on and on but time is over guys. So.