CONTENTS

Introduction...................................................................................................... 3

CHAPTER 1 : Creating 3D environments, the craft..................................... 5

Inspiration and motivation................................................................................................ 6

Workflow and organization............................................................................................... 7

Time and income..................................................................................................................... 7

CHAPTER 2 : Get in touch with blender 3.2 (Lecture 1).............................. 9

Lecture 2......................................................................................................................................... 14

Lecture 4......................................................................................................................................... 43

Lecture 5......................................................................................................................................... 61

Lecture 6......................................................................................................................................... 70

Lecture 7......................................................................................................................................... 78

Lecture 8......................................................................................................................................... 108

Lecture 9......................................................................................................................................... 121

Lecture 10........................................................................................................................................ 140

Lecture 11......................................................................................................................................... 159

Lecture 12........................................................................................................................................ 174

Lecture 13........................................................................................................................................ 185

Lecture 14........................................................................................................................................ 193

Lecture 15........................................................................................................................................ 202

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INTRODUCTION

I started working on my first Blender course called ‘Creating 3D Environments’ soon after I
released my first E-book in 2013 called ‘Old Masters Unveiled’, a book based on the secrets
of the old painting masters.

The course was released in 2015 and till today is one of the most viewed 3D environment
courses out there. Over the years I worked on new versions and at the end of 2019, I
transformed the course into a 2.0 version. It was rebuilt from scratch and based on the new
Blender interface that was introduced in Blender 2.8. The course started to grow, gaining
a large audience and during the following years, I worked on two new courses based on
modular scene creation and a more personal course ‘Secrets of Creating 3D Environments’.
This latest course was a follow up to my e-book released in 2013. I also included my
personal book ‘Super Focus’ a personal story from my 15 years of experience working on
3D medieval environments.

But time was flying, and so was the development of Blender. Within two years after my
2.8 course release, Blender transformed into a very powerful piece of software including
many new features and workflow improvements. A new course update for ‘Creating 3d
Environments’ couldn’t be ignored and in February 2021 I started working on the creation
of version 3.0 of the course.

By doing research trips and intense study, I created a roadmap of what the new course
needed to look like. I collected all the feedback from users, so I was able to get the best
out of the previous versions and build a new course from scratch. At the end of 2021, I
used blender 3.0 to build the rough shapes of the course chapters and I made them look
final in Blender 3.1. I appointed Blender 3.2 to be the new course version because, in my
opinion, it has everything required to be selected as the version to record the new course.

With the new Geometry nodes workflow in Blender and the asset manager handling 3D
assets in a user-friendly way, the course gained a new approach to building the scenes.
Also, the introduction of lots of photo scans is a big game-changer. During my work on
Polyhaven, a CC0 platform that I started with Greg Zahl to offer free assets to 3D creators,

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I learned a lot about building new scenes including many of these assets. This is why all
the provided course assets are free to use.

As always, I provide course documentation for users who like to have something on paper
whilst they work on 3D scenes. For this 3.0 version, I created a handbook for the most
essential chapters that will help you in your workflow. I hope you enjoy the course and I
love to see your 3D creations with the knowledge gained from this course.

Together we work on the things we love and put our creativity into what we feel are the
most beautiful things and like to express. I hope to be part of this expression and to be a
good teacher that helps you in your development.

- Rob

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CHAPTER 1
CREATING 3D ENVIRONMENTS, THE CRAFT

Before we dive into 3d modelling, and everything related to this subject, I like to provide
some background information on why designers like me have ambition for creating large
environments and what we like to do with it.

Like any job in the world, we all do it because we feel a need to spend time on it. The
Carpenter builds a house to feel warm and dry, a doctor likes to heal patients and a
fireman extinguishes fires and saves lives. So why are people making designs? I asked
myself this question a lot, and if I wasn’t the one who asked myself this question, I received
this question from many other people.

The answer is easy but at the same time very difficult to explain. One motivation can
be earning money for a living. You make a design and sell this to a person who likes it,
and you can make more designs and make a living out of it. Or maybe you are driven
by a passion that’s hard to express by words and the only way to express yourself in this
passion is by making a design that expresses the feeling, so you feel well by having a
creation that has kept you busy for a long time.

Most of the time the explanation of both situations often goes together. In my situation, it’s
by far the second description. I try to put my imagination into the designs I create, I feel
restless if I can’t express the visuals that pop into my mind. The greatest joy is when I can
spend all my time on the 3d historical designs I love so much. Reading books and trying
new techniques to improve the looks.

Over the years I received many questions related to my work from students. Some people
wonder about how to gain all the inspiration for new work, and others wonder about the
financial part. How can you spend so much time on designs and pay the bills? All
valid questions, but funnily enough I never wondered about these questions when I
started working on my scenes.

In this chapter, I will give you some tips and tricks that are related to my work. Maybe you’ll
become inspired, or you drop off early because you don’t feel a connection to the work.
Both are fine, at least you tried. Chapter 1 is a warm-up, so here we go!

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INSPIRATION AND MOTIVATION

In every course or book, I spend some words on inspiration and motivation. To me, this is
the designer’s fuel you need to get connected to a subject and find the motivation to start
working on it.

Sometimes I schedule some free time to work out a design that’s on my list. But all too
often I start staring at my screen and nothing happens. I end up with other work but can’t
find the motivation to work on a new design. When I’m full with other work an idea can
pop into my mind, and I can’t focus on anything but the new flashing idea. The only way
to remove the impulse of the new idea is to start working on it and get the best out of it.
Of course, there is also a lot of variation in how I schedule my work, but it shows that
inspiration and motivation is hard to catch. Inspiration is a beautiful thing. You can
dream away in an imaginary world and wonder how you can turn this into a 3D design.
Motivation is harder to steer. You can easily gain lots of motivation for a project, but
keeping it is the biggest challenge. Everyone has an example of when you or a friend
started a project and never finished it. This is such a shame as all the ingredients were
there to make something beautiful.

Last year I recorded a new course that covers inspiration and motivation. I even wrote a
personal book about it called ‘Super Focus’. The book tells all my ups and downs in the
world of creating 3D environments.

If you would like to know more about this subject, I can recommend reading it. It’s
available on my website www.thesuperfocus.com.

My best tip for keeping motivated is to get prepared and don’t set the bar too high. We
all have dream scenes, but you better start with a simpler design to be able to reward
yourself with completed work. This creates so much new energy so you can work on
bigger scenes.

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WORKFLOW AND ORGANIZATION

Even with lots of inspiration and motivation, a project can fail. You can get lost in your
work. In my personal life, I am very disorganized, but my work needs to be perfect. A
project can be so intense if you just drop all your files on your drive and have bad file
naming. It’s easy to get lost in your project.

I remember my first big project; I worked at the Blender Institute and was working on the
open movie ‘Tears of Steel’. I loved the work, but one day a developer asked me for a chat,
and he said, “Rob, your work is so unstructured, even if you make lovely models if you work
on a team project you have to change this.” Till that moment I was totally unaware of my
bad organization.

From that moment I changed my work drastically, and it was a gamechanger. Correctly
naming folders, files and everything related to a 3d project, I organize everything. It really
helps to clear my mind and put all my focus on the work that I love so much. A project is
like a tree. It starts with a small branch, but before you realize it, it’s a tree with roots and
tons of branches and twigs. If you don’t know your files and locations, you get lost and
frustrated.

And that’s so unnecessary! Working on a 3D scene is so much fun, I love the moment that
I keep blending in my dreams and making node trees half awake. The creative process is
a wonderful thing, but please, make it a joy and be organized.

TIME AND INCOME

The most asked question is how do you earn money with 3D designs. When I read these
questions, I always feel a little sorry for the person who asked. In my opinion, earning
money should never be a goal to be creative. And yet, so many students wonder how to
make money from being creative.

Every person is different, to me, creativity is one of the most precious things in life. I dropped
out during my film studies, simply because my passion for historical designs was so much
more intense than the craft I was learning in film school. For years I lived frugally and only

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cared about upgrading my PC to build bigger 3D scenes. And yet I was a very happy
person because I was spending most of my time on the scenes I loved so much.

After I gained a collection of designs it got attention in a local newspaper, and this was
the moment my work was picked up. I worked on some small historical projects and
slowly expanded this into bigger ones. It just happened and I never really thought about
how to get it done.

Today I spend most of my time in study and experimenting with building design. I don’t
feel the rush of making lots of scenes. It is time consuming, and I enjoy working on writing
e-books, teaching and working on new textures.

When my work became more popular, I received a lot of work requests from big
companies, but I never found it interesting to work with them. I like to be with family and
the highest achievement in life is being able to work on your own designs.

This way, you may be a bit slower, and not have a salary of an ‘AAA’ designer, however,
the feeling that you can work independently is perhaps a much higher reward in the long
run.

So, in short, allow yourself some space to grow in your work and try to be connected to a
subject you love. Read books and become one with it. If you combine your designer work
with another non-designer job, that’s of course not a problem at all. There is always some
time left in the week to work on the projects you love, and if your work gets picked up one
day, it will only become better!

In the next chapter, we dive into Blender. It covers all the basics so you can start building
your own 3D scenes. This book is part of the ‘Creating 3d Environments’ Blender course.
In this version Chapter 2 is fully documented and I have plans to extend it with more
chapters, but this depends on how popular this paper version will be.

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CHAPTER 2
GET IN TOUCH WITH BLENDER 3.2 (LECTURE 1)

A new fresh Blender release! Time to start downloading Blender. We go to the blender.org
website and find the download tab to install the Blender software

After you pick your operating system on the download page the software will download,
and you are ready to install the software on your computer.

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Blender is small and installs in seconds. After installation, you are ready to start the
software.

After installing Blender, you get a welcome screen where you can customize your blender
viewport settings. You can only do this once; the next time you start Blender this screen
won’t show up and you have to go to the settings in Blender to change this. I recommend
some settings that I find useful in my workflow.

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I change the spacebar function to search. This way you get a search option when hitting
the space bar. If you set it on play the timeline will start playing and for the work we do,
this is not recommended. If you like to play the timeline in Blender, you can hit CTRL +
Spacebar and you will get your timeline animation. This way we now have the use of the
search option by hitting the spacebar

For recording purposes, I change the display resolution. This makes it easier to follow in HD
resolution. This was one of the most critical feedback points in the previous course, that’s
why it’s now set on 1.44

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Because Blender now has a gradient viewport overlay, there is a visible vignette when
doing the recordings. It’s distracting to the eyes, so I change the background to a single
color.

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To optimize the recording screen, I change the interface to full screen. I never used to
use this, but you get lots of extra recording space! For HD resolution this makes a lot of
improvement.

Alright, we are ready to go. The interface is now ready to be worked on, and yes, we are
going to spend a lot of time here, so we better make ourselves comfortable. Now it’s time
to dive into the Blender fundaments, learning Blender!

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CHAPTER 2 - (LECTURE 2)

Learning a new piece of software, can be a little overwhelming. When opening Blender,
you see a cube surrounded by tabs and icons. If you already have some 3D knowledge
from other 3d software you can recognize some tabs or icons just like learning a different
language, but if you are fully new to 3D, I will guide you through all the key parts without
getting lost in the interface.

Keep in mind, this should be a nice experience, so try to enjoy it! You will learn a new craft
that allows you to create everything you want in 3D space, so this must feel comfortable.
Let’s take a look at what we see, and talk about it.

So, this is Blender. We can see a cube, a camera and a light source. Let’s focus fully on
the viewport, marked with the red square, for now. This is where you navigate in 3D space.
When holding your scroll wheel, you can move around the cube and get an idea of how
this works.

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If you select the cube by left-clicking the mouse on it and pressing delete on your
keyboard, it will be removed from the viewport. You can do the same with the light source.
The only object left in the scene is the camera.

If we want to bring the cube back into the scene, we go to the top bar and select add
→ mesh → Cube. This way the cube will be back in the scene.

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So, let’s focus a bit more on navigating in 3D space. When looking at the cube you can
scroll your mouse wheel to get closer, scrolling the other way will zoom out. A smoother
to do this is by holding CTRL + and holding scroll wheel, then moving the mouse forward
and backwards to zoom in and out. Try to play with this a little to get control of this way
of navigating.

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If we want to have a different view on the cube in the viewport, we can press Numpad 7 to
get a top view. Pressing Numpad 1 shows a front view and Numpad 3 shows a side view.
You can also use the ~ key on your keyboard to select the view you prefer. You must find
a way that works the best for you to navigate the view perspectives.

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So, we now arrive at a more technical part. We have control over the viewport navigation
but let’s take a closer look at the cube. What sort of modes do we have to control this
cube object? Let’s get started with the current mode we use now: Object mode

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The Object mode helps you move, scale and rotate your object. This can be done by
pressing the S key (Scaling), G key (moving), and R key (rotating). The object mode helps
you to place objects where they belong in a scene. For example, if you have a table, you
can move it to a location, but you won’t change the shape of the table. You can make the
table smaller because of the size of the room, or rotate it so it fits the location, but you
can’t change the size of the table legs. This is in short, the function of the object mode.

In the object mode, you can press the Z key to switch to wire mode. This makes the object
transparent.

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Then we switch to the edit mode, this is the place where you change the shape of your
object to make it the shape you prefer.

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Also, whilst in edit mode, press the Z key to switch to wire mode to make it transparent.

The edit mode allows you to not only scale, move or rotate the object, but you can also
transform the object into any shape you like. However, there are some fundamental things
you need to know before we dive deeper into object transformation.

Let’s take a closer look at the cube in edit mode, and what this consists of. All 3d objects
in 3d space are made of vertices, without vertices there is no 3D. A vertex in Blender is this
orange connection point. The Cube has 8 of these vertices.

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If you left mouse click on a vertex you can select it. If you press the A key you can select
all the vertices of the object. When you left mouse click in the 3D space the object is
deselected. When you select a single vertex, hold the Shift Key and click another vertice,
you can select multiple vertices.

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This is the way you select vertices on an object. Now let’s continue and explore some other
naming’s.

There are different ways to select vertices, and specific naming when selecting these
vertices. When you select two vertices that are connected with each other, you call this an
edge. If you press 2 on your keyboard you can go to the edge selection mode

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Sometimes working in edge mode can be a time saver, or you need it for a specific action.
If you want to go back to the vertices selection mode, press 1 on your keyboard.

Focusing on the cube, if you select 4 vertices that make a square, you select a face. It will
turn orange. This can be done with 3 vertices as well; you call this a triangle. Because the
cube only has faces, so we keep the focus on face selection.

If you press the 3 Key, you switch to face selection mode. This way you can select a face
in 1 click.

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Later in this documentation, I will show the benefit of these separated modes.

If we return to the vertices selection mode by pressing the 1 key, we try to transform the
top part of the cube. By selecting the top vertices and pressing the S key you can scale
the vertices so the cube transforms.

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Making this transformation is only possible in the edit mode, simply because you have
control over moving the vertices, this will not be possible in object mode. You can try out
some other transformations by moving the vertices. You can also do this in edge and face
mode to see how the shape changes

When returning to object mode you press the N key to open the right item Tab. This Tab
shows all the info about the selected object. There is scaling and dimensions.

Dimensions tell the size of the object in the metric system. By default, the cube is 2 by 2
meters. When you transform the object into object mode, the scaling will also change. You
must avoid this at all times. You need to have a scaling of 1,1,1. If one of these numbers is
changed, you will need to reset the scaling to have a correct working object.

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If for some reason, an object is out of scale, there is an easy way to fix this. Press CTRL +
A and select rotation and scale. This way you reset the scaling back to 1,1,1. Later in this
documentation, I will show you why it is so important to keep the scaling right.

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In short, we discussed the following in this lecture:

Object mode: Scaling, moving and rotating objects

Edit mode: Edit objects and changing shapes

Vertices: Connection points in 3D space

Edges: Two connected vertices make an edge

Faces: Four selected vertices make a face.

If you have a good understanding of the above, you just learned the core of 3D modelling.
Whatever you do in 3D space, it’s all about moving the vertices and shaping them to get
the shape you need.

In the next lecture, we take a closer look at the user interface. I won’t show all the buttons,
just the ones we need to get the work done. This way you keep the focus without getting
too much info you won’t need in this course.

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.3
We now take a closer look at the Blender interface. In the previous lecture, I showed you
the Blender viewport. In this lecture, I will explain the function of some menus and tabs. As
mentioned before, I won’t go into too much detail, just enough to keep your focus and give
the most essential info you need to navigate in the Blender interface. Later in the course, I
will provide more info about specific topics, but in this lecture, we just cover the core.

To kick-off, we start with the left menu. By pressing the T key, you can open this tab and
there are multiple icons visible. I will explain them one by one.

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The top icon is the selection mode. This is activated by default, and this is the mode we
will most of the time in Blender. I still like to explain the other modes, simply because it’s a
matter of preference whether you like to use these or not.

Selection mode allows you to select objects in your scene. By Left mouse clicking you can
select mesh objects, but also the camera and the light in your scene. The icon below the
selection tool is cursor select, this can be used to point to a location to spawn new objects.

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The cursor defines where your new object is located. I use this to grow ivy on walls, but
most of the time I keep the cursor untouched. If you want your cursor to go back to the
original location, we have to open the menu (spacebar) and type ‘Origin’ now find ‘cursor
to world origin’. When you click on this command the cursor will return to the middle of
the screen. Also, you must turn back to selection mode otherwise you will keep moving the
cursor on your screen. This still happens in my workflow, so returning to selection mode
needs to become a habit.

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There is more freedom to move your mesh in the 3D viewport. The icon below the cursor
mode is ‘move item’. This mode adds some arrows you can click and move on the X, Y
and Z axis. By holding CTRL, you can snap your model around.

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We jump to the next icon; this is the item rotation. By clicking it you get the X, Y and Z axis
handles to rotate the object in any direction you prefer.

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Then there is also the scaling item, the icon below the rotation item. By clicking it you get
three sliders to scale in the X, Y and Z axes.

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If you want full control over moving, rotating and scaling, then you can click on the
transform icon. This allows you to do everything at once. This is a little too much for me
and I never use it. But again, this is personal preference and maybe I just don’t know the
power of the tool. Feel free to use it in your workflow.

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So that’s all about the left menu. Even if I never use these item tools, I think you should
know the function and value of it.

If we take a look at the right we can see two menu tabs, these are the outliner and scene
properties. We start with a quick introduction of the outliner.

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The outliners store all the items in your scene. If it is a mesh, light or camera, everything is
stored in this tab. During the course, you will discover how useful and powerful this outliner
can be. Personally, it really helps me to organize my work. For a long time, before 2.8,
Blender had a huge limitation in scene organization. The outliner is a game changer in
scene structure. It works with collections; you can name them and add selected objects
in these collections.

For large environments, you can build a good structure where nature props, buildings,
atmosphere and characters are stored in the right collection. I spend a lot of time in this
course to help the user become organized. It’s important and if you don’t force yourself
to put everything in the right collection, you will drown in your own files and will probably
lose focus.

The scene properties tab is on the bottom right. We won’t dive into this for now, there is
simply too much happening there, and everything related to the setup of the scene is
happening here. Think about environment light, modifiers, object shading, render settings
and the particle system.

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If we look at the top of the screen, we see workspaces. These tabs configure a template
that fits the type of work you like to do on your object/scene.

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When working on a scene, you sometimes want to change the tabs in your scene. If you
do a lot of modelling work, for example, you don’t need the timeline frame at the bottom
of the interface. This is why Blender now has workspaces. When clicking on the workspace
you prefer, you get the interface that fits the workflow.

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The top image shows the modelling workspace tab. If we want to do sculpting, we click
on the sculpting tab and the interface changes so it’s optimal for the sculpting workflow.

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The mode is also changed to sculpting mode (red arrow). In practice, it means that you
sometimes adjust it manually, but I already use workspaces a lot myself.

If you like to change the frames manually, this is possible as well. When you move your
mouse to the corner of a tab, a + icon will appear. When left mouse clicking you can
merge or split the tab in the viewport.

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To get a hand on this you have to try this a couple of times, but it’s useful if you like to
have control over your own organized interface.

So far so good. This is everything you need to know before we continue to the next lecture.
It’s maybe 5% of all the functions, but enough to find your way in the viewport and put the
focus on the next lecture.

In short, we learned the following in this lecture:

• Functions of the T – Tab - Selecting item, cursor movement, object transformation

• The outliner - Storing collections to organize your work

• Scene properties - Most of the scene configuration happens here

• Workspaces - Configure your interface for the type of work

In the next lecture, we will start with modelling a table. Starting with a cube and changing
the shapes in edit mode so we can make a table out of it.

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CHAPTER 2 – (LECTURE 4)

You can start a new blender scene or just add a new cube if the current one is changed
in size. Before we start working on the table, I like to explain the function of the object or-
igin. Every mesh has an origin point, a small orange dot in the middle of the mesh. If you
move your object in object mode, the origin will stay at the middle position. However, if
you move the object in edit mode, the origin will stay at the original position, but the mesh
will move away.

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If you now go back to object mode and scale or rotate the object, you will discover that
it will rotate/scale/move around the origin and not the object. This is not good, and you
should always keep the origin in the middle of the object.

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And yes, in some circumstances you may like to put the origin elsewhere, but if there is no
need, keep it at the centre of the object. If for some reason the origin is not at the centre,
press the Space bar and type ‘origin’. You can now put it back at the centre of the object
by selecting ‘origin to geometry’.

We will now focus on making the table. Switch to the front view (NUM 1), select the cube
and switch to edit mode. Press S + Z key and hold CTRL to snap the cube to a smaller size.
In edit mode you can’t see the size of your object in the right tab, only object mode shows
the size. Use the blender units in the background to measure the size of the cube.

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From this perspective a Blender Unit has a value of 10 cm. We have two blender units, so
the table is 20 cm thick and 2 meter wide.

When switching to object mode you can see the length of the cube on the right item tab.

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I want this table to be 10 cm. If I change this in object mode, the scaling will change as
well, something we want to avoid at all times. However, we can reset the scaling by press-
ing CTRL + A in object mode and selecting ‘rotation and scale’, This way the scaling is
back to 1 ,1 ,1 and we have a 10 cm thick table.

Switch to the top view and scale the table (edit mode) on the X axis (S + X key) and hold
CTRL to snap. Use two blender grids to get a size of two meters. As you can see you have
large and small blender grids. If you zoom out the grids will merge into bigger ones, if you
zoom in, they will merge into smaller ones. This way blender grids do not have a fixed size,
it depends on how much you zoom in and out. Blender will show this in the top left corner.

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Always check the scale. Later in this course, you will find out what happens if you work with
bad scaling. It needs to be a habit to set the scaling to 1,1,1 to avoid issues with editing your
mesh.

So, we now have a 4 by 2 by 0.10-meter table, the next thing we need to do is add table
legs. If you select the bottom of the table in face mode, you can extrude the bottom face.
Presse E Key and move the mouse downward and hold the CTRL key to snap it onto the
blender grid. This is just a quick example of how to add extra vertices to a mesh.

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We need four table legs, so the current action can be deleted by pressing CTRL + Z to
remove the extruded bottom part.

We have to apply more vertices to a specific location to add the table legs. For this, we
add ‘Edge lines’. Go to the edit mode and press CTRL + R, you will see a yellow line on your
table mesh. When you move the mouse around, it will switch to the X, Y and Z axes.

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When you left mouse click it will change to an orange color. You can now move it by
moving the mouse. Hold CTRL to snap it onto the blender grids. If you left mouse click
again it will be added to the mesh. If you right mouse click, it will centre on the mesh. You
can remove the edge line by pressing the CTRL + Z key

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Press G + X, Y, Z key to move the vertices to a new location you prefer.

Adding edge lines is a powerful way of adding vertices onto a mesh. By controlling the
position and the number of edge lines, you can shape your mesh into the position you
prefer. Looking at the table legs we need to add multiple edge lines and use the blender
grids to have 4 legs that have the same size.

If you would like to remove an edge line, deselect all vertices and hold the ALT key and left
click on the area of the edge line (not on a single vertice). Now press the X key and a tab
will pop up. Select ‘edge loops’, now the edge line is removed, and if everything went well
your table now has 8 vertices.

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The next step is to add a new edge line and move this line to the left side of the table.
Keep 20 cm space between the end of the table, do the same for the right side. Snapping
on the grid is key on this. Hold CTRL key when moving the created edge line to the left and
right.

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You can also add two edge lines at once and move these to the left and right. To add two
edge lines, press CTRL + R and scroll the mouse wheel so there will be two yellow edge
lines. You can add as many as you want, but for now, we just need two edge lines. Perform
this action in the top view to see the blender grids. Left mouse click to release and right
mouse click to transform the edge lines into vertices. Now press the S + X key and hold
CTRL to move the vertices to the left and right at the same time.

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Do the same for the Y axis so you have a table face on every corner of the table.

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The final result should look like the sample shown above.

We can now continue to add the table legs. Get a view from the bottom part of the table
so we can select the vertices and extrude the legs.

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When selecting 4 vertices, a face will be selected and by pressing the E key you can
extrude this part of the table. The best way to do this is in the front view mode. By pressing
1 on the Num pad, you switch to the front view.

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To speed up this process I like to perform this action on all table legs at the same time.
Press CTRL + Z to remove the table leg so we can do this action again on all four legs.

When you are in vertice selection mode and try to select all vertices, you will discover that
not only the legs are selected, but all faces on the bottom of the table are too, we don’t
want that.

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For this type of action, it’s useful to switch to the face selection mode 3 Key. Now you can
select all 4 table legs and only the legs will be selected to perform this action. Press E key
to extrude the legs. The best way of doing this in front view mode (1 Num pad key)

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When you extruded the legs, you want them to be 1 meter in length. The tabletop is 10 cm,
you can change this value to 20 cm to match the size of the table legs. This way your ta-
ble is in the right proportion

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If you switch to object mode the table should be 1.2 meters on the Z axis, 4 meters on the
X and 2 on the Y axis. If these values are right, you successfully completed the shape of
the table!

And that’s it for this lecture. Here is what we learned in summary:

• Showing the object origin, and how to put it back at the centre position
•
• Adding edge lines, and how to remove an edge loop
•
• Extruding a face
•
• Working with blender grids and understanding the measurements of it

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CHAPTER 2 (LECTURE 5)

We completed the table; we now need to name it in the outliner and save our work so we
can move onto the next object.

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Saving your file can be done in your chapter folder. Every time you move to the next
chapter, you save your files in the chapter you are working in. This way you won’t get
confused about where to find your blend files. I call this file: table chair

Back to the scene. We must make some space to work on the next object, the chair. Se-
lect the table and move it to the right so you have some new space in the centre of the
screen. Go to add  mesh  cube to add a new cube object in the scene

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I like to flatten the cube to 10 CM and add two edge lines on the X and Y axis. Put these
edge lines in the corner so you have 10 cm left on each side.

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I am speeding up the method of how to transform your mesh a little bit because I don’t
want to repeat every step in detail. This way you get all the information you need to know,
and we can speed up the working process a little bit. I won’t skip key parts, I will introduce
every new action in detail.

We can extrude the chair legs in face selection mode (3key) and use a length of 70 cm.
Your chair will now have a total size of 80 cm.

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This went much faster than the table explanation, but it wasn’t that hard right? This is
because you now know how to use your tools. Let’s continue to add the rear of the chair!

Select the two top faces of the chair on the left and right and extrude these with a length
of 1 meter. That’s 10 blender units. After you have two top frames, you add an edge line on
both sides with a size of 10 CM.

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We also need a side frame. This takes a bit more time to align them in the right position.
Normally I add the edge line and use CTRL to move these into the right position. We also
need to hold the Shift key to have a smoother movement snap to get them onto the
location we want.

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The next step is merging these frames with each other, so we have side frames. The
easiest way to get this done is by selecting two faces that face each other. Then press the
CTRL + E key and select bridge edge loops. Now the two faces will blend into a horizontal
frame. You can do the same action for the other two faces.

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You can also press the spacebar and type ‘bridge’, the ‘bridge edge loop’ action will
appear, and you can select it to merge the two faces.

And now you have a chair. Feel free to modify the size, stay in edit mode to keep the scale
right.

Move the chair to the table and change the name in the outliner to ‘chair’. Keep in mind
that when moving the chair to a new location you do this in object mode.

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Having just one chair feels a bit empty, so why not duplicate the chair so we have 4!
Select the chair and press Shift + D to copy the chair. Move this to the left side of the table
and keep the same distance as the other chair. Duplicate the chair another time and put
it on the other side of the table. Rotate it so it fits the table. Hold CTRL to snap the rotation.
Duplicate the chair one more time so you have four of them. Put the last chair on the top
right of the table and rename all the chairs so you have chair_01, chair_02 etc.

We now have a table and 4 chairs, looking good! We will now end this lecture so we can
spend some time on the render engine types in the next lecture. We’ll take a short break
in modelling but will soon return with a new challenge. 3d modelling is not only about
shaping your models, but also adding colors and textures is a key part in the process. I will
dive into this soon, so we can make the table and chairs look even better.

In short, we learned the following in this lecture:

• We merged two faces, so we created a frame

• Duplicating the chairs and rotating on object mode

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 6)

We have spent some time learning the Blender interface and created some simple mod-
els to get in touch with 3D modelling. There are many more areas to explore, one of these
is render engines. Before we get there, I like to do some scene organization.

I mentioned the outliner on the top left corner of the interface, let’s take a closer look at
this. On top, we can see ‘Scene Collections’ followed by the name ‘collection’. These col-
lections help us to organize the scene but are also useful to link objects.

Our scene has 1 table, 4 chairs, a camera and a light. Let’s add a new collection so we can
store all objects and items in the right collection. You always start with 1 collection, now we
have to add another one.

Right mouse click on ‘scene collection’ and you can click on ‘new collection’. You will see
a new collection will pop up. Now we can name these collections and store all the items
inside.

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Call the new collection ‘Furniture ‘and the other collection ‘Camera light’. You can now click
and drag all items into the collection that fits best. All furniture objects can be dragged
into the furniture collection and the camera and light object to ‘camera light’.

If you prefer, and this is optional, you can give these collections a color. I choose a brown
color for furniture items and a yellow one for ‘camera light’.

Now we switch to a more technical part that highlights the render engines in Blender. If
you have no idea what a render engine is, let me explain this to you. In 3D space, objects
are built by connection vertices. A cube has 8 vertices, to close the cube you add faces so
light can bounce on these faces.

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The real world is full of color, which indicates how complex lighting is in 3D. This is an
essential part for me as an environment designer, that needs some explanation before
we continue with working on the scene. If you have a good understanding of how a render
engine works, and the difference between these engines, then it makes more sense
when choosing an engine. In this course, we mainly use the cycles render engine, simply
because it’s a powerful Raytracer. How does a Raytracer work? I will demonstrate it in the
following samples.

Let’s switch to the Eevee render engine. It is located here, but that’s not important for now,
this section is about explaining the engine. Eevee is a real time render engine, introduced
in 2020 when Blender 2.8 was released. With Eevee, you can see your model in real time
with bouncing light, without having render times. Let’s take a closer look at how this works

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In the top image, we can see the light source (lamp) hitting a light ray on the cube.
This ray bounces on the cube and travels directly to the camera. This way we get some
information. The ray tells us the cube is red and the floor is white. The shadow is just a
calculation but has nothing to do with the light ray. What you see right here is real time
light output. For years games worked like this. Of course, with fancy looking textures and
atmosphere light, but the light worked like this.

A Raytracer works different. Let’s take the same scene, but now with the Cycles render
engine.

This is the same scene, but we can now see a new way the light reacts in the scene. If
you look at the rays hitting the green wall, these are not going in one way to the camera,
the rays are bouncing on everything they have around them and finally hit the camera.
During the travel, the ray collects all the data from the object it has hit. So, the ray stores
data from the green wall and has some red color from the cube. Each time the ray hits an
object, they share information.

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This is a very complex travel journey, and this comes with lots of render power. A
Raytracer needs a lot of CPU (processor) or GPU (video card) calculations to get the result
as displayed in the top image. You can reduce the number of bounces or do other
optimizations, but the end result will have a price. Nowadays there are inbuilt denoise
filters that remove scene noise. This way you can reduce the render times, but denoisers
also have some limitations (blur).

During the last few years, real time render engines had a huge development and with the
latest Unreal Engine 5 Game engine it sometimes looks like Cycles quality. I can show you
how this works by showing you how Eevee can handle ‘real time’ raytracing.

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Above you can see the same scene but now with reflection boxes that bake the light. In
short, these boxes do a bake calculation that can take seconds, minutes and even hours.
And bake the ray tracing light in the scene. After the calculation, you can scroll around
your object with ray traces quality light without any render time.

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For simple/limited size scenes, this way of real time lighting is very powerful. When Eevee
was released, I was hoping to make some environment scenes in this engine. However,
Eevee has limitations for large environments. Baking light can take a lot of time and there
is a payoff in light. It never gets the fine quality Cycles can produce. This is why I use Eevee
for object modelling, but as soon I start building my scenes, I switch to cycles to enjoy the
full power.

Then there is also the blender workbench. Not created to process nice looking renders, but
this engine works perfectly for modelling work where you want to have a good overview of
the geometry. I use this engine when I start building buildings or plants, but as soon I start
adding textures and shading, I switch to Eevee/cycles.

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So, Blender has 3 Render engines, all have their own function. In the next lecture, I will add
a texture to the table and work on the material shader to display this texture in the right
way. I will demonstrate this in Eevee and Cycles.

In short, we learned the following in this lecture:

• Realtime light VS Raytracing light

• Eevee render engine

• Cycles render engine

• Baking ray traced light

• Workbench

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 7)

The previous lecture was all about the render engines in Blender and how to use them
for the right job. What they all share together, are material shaders. A material shader in
Blender lets you connect nodes to display the material on your object and let you tweak it
to show it matches the surface you want to create. This lecture will dive into the material
shader and will explain the most essential parts to have a good understanding of shading.

We go back to the table object and click on the material tab in the scene properties.

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The first thing I like to do is change the base color into a brown color, not because we
need this, but I like to show the difference between viewport and shader color. Select the
color that displays ‘base color ’and add brown color to the table.

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The color we just changed is a shading color, only visible when you switch to material or
shading mode. If we want to see a color in the viewport, we need to scroll down the shad-
er tab and open viewport display. Now you can add a brown color, and this will change
the color in the viewport.

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Don’t forget to name the material so you can easily find it when you want to copy or use
it again.

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We can repeat this process on the chair. Click on the chair object and change the shader
color to a lighter brown color. Also, add a viewport color. After you add this color, you can
change the material name to ‘Chair’.

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A quick way of copy the materials is selecting all the chairs by first clicking on a chair
without a material, then select the other two chairs that also don’t have a material. Hold
the shift key to make multiple selections. Only at the last selection do you select the chair
with the applied shader.

Now press CTRL + L key and select ‘Link Material’ to apply the chair shader on all chairs.

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If everything went right, you now have 4 chairs sharing the same material and 1 table. If
you would like to see the shader in the material mode, press the Z key and select ‘Material
Preview’.

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The materials will look brighter and shine, this is because there is some standard
environment light.

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The only thing we did so far was to add a base color to understand how to apply a color
on a material and how to display this in the viewport. In the next part we dive into more
advance shading by adding a texture and shading maps.

When we work on the shading, the best way of doing this is switching from workspace.
Right now, we are in the layout workspace, let’s switch to shading to split the window and
open the shader editor.

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I will take some time to explain the function of the shader editor. It’s almost like a separate
program inside Blender to tweak your material shaders. The great thing about shaders is,
you don’t need to make complex node trees to get a good-looking result, but there is lots
of freedom to make your material look more advanced by adding nodes and combining.
In this lecture we keep to the basics, and build a node setup for the table model.

Let’s take a closer look at the node editor and explain what we see.

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This principled BSDF shader is where everything happens to produce a realistic looking
material. The name can be a little distracting. What is BSDF and why are there so many
inputs? For new users this can be overwhelming, but I will guide you through, so you will
have a good understanding of how this shader works and what you can do with it.

Before I explain the nodes and functions, take a look around you in real life and observe
some objects and materials. A table, a cup or your bag. All these materials have their own
way of reflecting the light, so they look how they look. Wood is not as reflective as a cup
can be. A bag is made from fabric and most of the time is less reflective than a wooden
table. It all seems so normal, but the logic needs to be transformed into 3D logic, and here
starts the fun.

The best way to show shading in 3D is by demonstrating it. The table is made of wood,
and we all know how wood looks. In Blender you can import an image of wood and add
this to the color input of the BSDF/Master shader. This is the color we made brown, but we
are now adding a real texture to this input. Let’s see what happens.

In the shader tab go to Add → Texture → Image texture, you can now search for the
texture in our folder. We need the Wood_table_001_diffuse texture. When we click it the
shader editor will add a new node, this is your color texture.

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Why is it called diffuse? The name defines it as a color texture without any other data. It
does not store if there is reflection, depth data or transparency, it’s just the color. A diffuse
texture can store shadow data, this is why there are also Albedo textures. These textures
are shadeless and can look a little weird and unnatural. However, an Albedo is the best
you can have when building a realistic looking shader. The shader we use is Albedo, but
because we do not have standard, our naming on our Polyhaven platform it is still called
diffuse. Maybe a little unclear, but now you know the difference.

Let’s put the color texture inside the color input of the principled shader.

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Because we are in the solid viewport, nothing will happen. When we switch to the material
preview the texture will appear on the table.

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As we can see, the texture appears on the table! From this point, it will only get better. If
we scroll around the table, we see that some areas look stretched or not mapped right.
This has everything to do with how the texture was mapped on the table. Wondering why?
This is to do with the UV Coordinates. Let me explain what these are and what we can do
to fix the mapping issue.

UV mapping is the way you can define how a texture will be mapped on your object.
Blender has a specific workspace to work on your UV map, let’s go there.

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The top image shows the mapping result of the table. Because we started with the cube,
the table still has the cube coordinates, now with extra vertices. What we need to do is
change the UV coordinates, so we have a correct mapping of the table. If your object
scaling is wrong, UV mapping will also be incorrect. Always check if the scaling is right.

In this lecture, we use a different way of mapping the table texture on the table. But before
we do this, I would like to show how you can generate a working UV map on this table.

When you move your mouse to the right screen and press the U key a new tab will pop
up. In this tab, you can select how the table will be mapped. For this table model, we use
‘Smart UV Project’ Blender will now auto-generate new coordinates, so the coordinates
are now in line with the table.

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A box will pop up, select OK to apply the new coordinates.

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When switching back to the shading workspace we can see the table now has a more
accurate mapping of the wood texture.

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I like to have more control over the mapping process, so for the table, I like to add some
more nodes so we can control the way the wood is displayed.

In the shader editor go to Add → input → Texture coordinates and also Add → Vector
→ Mapping. These two nodes will help you control the wood texture. We won’t use the UV
coordinates, instead, we are going to let it generate the coordinates with these two new
nodes.

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The ‘texture coordinates’ node contains all the data related to mapping the object. The
mapping node provides us with values so we can define the size and rotation of the
texture. Looking at the ‘TC’ node we see all kinds of blue outputs. These blue dots are
‘vectors’. I like to use the generated output and put this node inside the top vector of the
mapping node. We also put the output from the mapping inside the vector input of the
diffuse texture.

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As you can see it does not generate the result we expected with the UV coordinates
mapping. So, how do we solve these stretching areas on the table? Right now, the way the
map is projected onto the table is set on ‘Flat’ in the color texture. Click on flat and change
this to box so the mapping is correct.

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If you scroll around your table model the diffuse texture will be correct on all sides.

But only applying a diffuse texture will not make the table look realistic. The reflection is
casting on the table in a very unnatural way. To understand the shading of the wooden
table we need to take a closer look at the BSDF shader.

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Looking at the top image, you can see I added an arrow on the specular, roughness and
normal input. We can add extra texture maps to improve the looks of the table. But before
we do this, I would like to explain the function of the maps. Let’s start with the specular.

The specular value defines how intense the reflection on the surface is. The roughness
map shows what area is reflective and how intense each area is.

The black areas are reflective, and the white are not reflective. You can define this by 1
and 0 and everything in between. So grey has a value of 0.5, black 1 and white 0

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The specular value and roughness map work together. We do not use a map for specular,
just keep it on .5, this way you have full control of the shader reflections.

There is also a normal map, this is a depth calculation map. You can fake bumpy areas
by just adding a normal map. This way it looks like the surface is full of detail without add-
ing lots of vertices to realise this effect.

Then there is also a displacement map, we won’t use this for the table. But when working
on muddy terrain, for example, a displacement is a must have. The downside is the render
cost. A displacement map adds real depth to the surface and needs lots of vertices to get
this done. The more vertices you add, the more detailed your terrain gets. A normal map
can’t get this done; this only works to fake the depth.

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Then there is also a displacement map, we won’t use this for the table. But when working
on muddy terrain, for example, a displacement is a must have. The downside is the render
cost. A displacement map adds real depth to the surface and needs lots of vertices to get
this done. The more vertices you add, the more detailed your terrain gets. A normal map
can’t get this done; this only works to fake the depth.

The displacement map looks like the roughness map, but when looking in detail there are
differences. How does it work? You define this by 1 and 0, 1 is high geometry and 0 is low
geometry

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on the z axis. We use two modifiers to get the displacement to work, later in thi
documentation we work this out in detail.

Now it’s time to connect the maps! Import the roughness and import the output inside the
roughness input of the BSDF shader.

The roughness map needs some tweaking to get it to work in the right way. First, we switch
from flat to box, the same as we did with the diffuse texture. We also need the Vector input
from the mapping node to have the same coordinates and they match. The final tweak is
changing the sRGB color data to non color data. This is because the roughness map is a
black and white image and needs to act as a black and black and white image.

We can now import the normal map. It all works the same as the roughness. We need
the vector mapping data and to change sRGB to non color data and change flat to box.
There is one extra step before we get the normal map working. This depth map needs a
translation node. The BSDF node has a vector input for the normal map. We have a color
texture that won’t match each other. This is why we need a normal map node to work as
a translation node.

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Go to Add → vector → normal map. A new node appears, and we can input the normal
texture in this normal map node. Be aware, not to add the texture in the strength input, add
the texture inside the color input. You can now add the normal output inside the normal
input of the BSDF shader.

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If we now switch to render mode (Z key and select rendered) we can see the new shading
of the table.

We can see the light from the point light bouncing on the table and reflecting it in the right
way. If your point light is not close to the table, select the point light and move this to a
position where you can see the table reflections.

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If you want to have more control over the way the roughness map affects the table, you
can add a color ramp node. Go to Add → Converter → Color ramp. A black and white
gradient node will appear. You can drag this between the roughness map output and the
BSDF shader.

I would recommend not going too wild with the Colorramp slider, just to fine tune it if you
want extra or less roughness.

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And that’s it for this lecture. It is important you understand the logic behind the use of
texture maps to get the right shading. I run a texture platform called Polyhaven where we
offer free CC0 texture scans. You can download all types of textures without the need to
register. This course uses all the texture maps of Polyhaven, all with diffuse, roughness,
normal and displacement maps.

In short, we learned the following in this lecture:

• Adding a shader color and name the material

• Adding a UV map by using Smart UV project

• Adding generated texture coordinates

• Explanation of the BSDF shader

• What a diffuse, roughness, normal and displacement map is

• Connecting the maps with the BSDF shader

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 8)

Before we add a chair texture, I would like to show how you can scale the texture on the
table by changing the scale value in the Mapping node. By default, the value is set by 1. I
like to change this to 2. You have to change the value on all axes. To do this at the same
time select the top value by left clicking the 1 value and dragging your mouse downwards.
If you release your left mouse button you can change the value on all three axes at the
same time, this will speed up the process.

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You can also do this the opposite way, if you bring the value back to .1 on all three axes
you will see the texture will be very large. This is a nice way to demonstrate the Normal
map.

Because it’s hard to see the details of the normal map when the details are so small, we
now have full focus on the map to demonstrate. If you click on the Normal map node and
you change the value to 0, you will see the table looks way flatter. If you bring the value
back to 1 it’s clearly visible how effective this map is.

A value of 1.5 on the mapping node is in my opinion the most natural size on this table
size. Always keep the normal value on 1 if there is no need for it to change

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Now we switch to the chair models. We pick a different texture type to have some
difference in color. The name of the texture is plywood, a bright looking wooden texture.
We already added a simple color to the chair and named the material chair. We only
have to add the textures and put these in the right BSDF inputs. To save some time I will
copy all the nodes from the table and paste these into the chair material. Don’t copy the
BSDF shader, just the texture maps and transfer nodes.

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You can now paste the nodes and replace the table texture with plywood. All these
textures are available on polyhaven.com

Don’t forget to switch to non color data when changing the texture maps. Blender will
switch back to sRGB when changing a texture.

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For the chair mapping, I like to switch from generated to Object. You can change this
value in the ‘texture coordinates’ node. This will change the look a little, but not much. In my
opinion, the object output sometimes works better for some specific objects. Later in this
documentation, we will play with this a bit more and you will see the benefit from both
outputs.

Feel free to play around with the scale values to see what happens when you change
them. It is important that you get an idea of how this way of scaling works and how you
can control it.

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Now we move to the world lighting. Till now the environment light was a default grey color
when switching to the rendered mode in Eevee. Let’s play with the world settings and view
the table in Cycles to see the difference in rendering.

Feel free to play around with the scale values to see what happens when you change
them. It is important that you get an idea of how this way of scaling works and how you
can control it.

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The world setting is the environment in the scene. For exteriors this can be a blue sky
or cloudy weather, for interiors it works in a different way. Let’s keep the focus on the
environment light. By default, the color is grey, look at the color around the table, the
background is grey. This also casts a grey color on your table and chairs.

If we change this color to pink or purple, or another contrasting color, you can see what
effect this has on the scene. Everything is affected by this purple color. Because we
added a material with roughness values it’s not reflecting all the purple light, but it has an
influence on the objects. Blender has multiple inbuilt sky color systems. The newest sys-
tem, Nishita is not available in Eevee, but in cycles it works correct. For this test, we will use
the Hosek/wilkie sky system.

We will need to activate this first. In the world setting, you can see the color with a yellow
dot. If you click this dot a new tab will open. Now select ‘Sky Texture’’

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Because we work in the Eevee render engine, Nishita won’t work. However, this sky system
is enabled by default as mentioned before. You can switch by clicking on Nishita (under
color tab) and change to Hosek/Wilkie. If you are wondering why it has this name, this sky
system was named by Lukas Hosek and Alexander Wilkie who did research in sky lighting.

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To see the difference in lighting you can switch to material and rendered mode to see the
sky light casting a blue tint on the objects. By selecting the point light in the scene, you
can play with the light source intensity. The closer you drag this light to the table, the more
intense and reflective the light will be and be.

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We now have an impression of how the lighting works in Eevee. Let’s switch to cycles to
see the Raytracer in action.

When you arrive in Cycles, you don’t need to change the light, it will copy the settings
and continue working. In the opposite way, when you have a good-looking scene in cy-
cles, you need to make changes in Eevee to have good working light. Think about baked
probes etc.

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In cycles go to the render mode (same as Eevee) and see how the light reacts on the
table.

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If you compare the render on top, we can see the table is more reflective than the Ee-
vee render. The reason for this is how the light reacts with the shader. The default set-
tings should be fine, but the same as Eevee, feel free to play with the Colorramp node to
change the roughness value and have more or less roughness.

This is the end of lecture 8. We created a table and chairs and applied a material to it.
By adding a sky texture, we have more natural light. Keep in mind, that these lectures are
designed to get in touch with Blender, not to create a good-looking table and chair. It is all
about understanding how things work and feeling comfortable with the program. As soon
you get the flow of blending, things will rapidly improve, and you will be able to create
things you had no idea you were able to create. This is why I don’t feel in a hurry to push
the level of detail.

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The next lecture will cover the creation of a dice. We will model this the same way we
modelled the table and chair, but also make a version in the new geometry nodes system.
By doing this twice you get in touch with a new way of modelling and object creation. This
course will use both methods, it just depends on what type of work we need to do. But
first, we need to have a good understanding of how this all works, and therefore we will do
some more exercises before switching to the environment work.

We learned the following in this lecture:

• Changing the mapping node scale to scale up the texture size

• Changing normal node value to see the strength on the table

• Changing the environment color to see the influence in the scene

• Activating a sky texture for natural sky light

• Rendering in Eevee and Cycles to see the render difference

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 9)

In this lecture, we are going to model some dice. To start, add a new cube into the current
scene.

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The dice is way too big for this scene, so we need to make it smaller, so it fits the scene
size. Select the cube and press the S key and divide (/) this by 50, now you have a cube
with a size of 4 cm. Still a little too big in size, but if we make it 1.5 cm it’s too small and we
will get some issues later in the workflow. We keep at a size of 4 cm, and we continue to
work on the dice. Don’t forget to scale the dice back to 1.

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Now we switch to the front view and move the dice so it’s laying on the table.

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Hold the CTRL + G key and move the dice upwards so it levels the tabletop.

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When moving to the perspective view, we can see the dice is in scale with the table,
exactly what we want. This time I like to work on the workbench to change the cube into a
dice. For this, I switch the render engine.

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I pick the red MatCap and change the color to object. You can enable shadow, cavity and
outline (change color the white)

If we hit the . key on the numpad we centre the object, and we can start editing the cube
and transform this into a dice object.

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To start with, switch to edit mode and add 4 edge lines on all sides of the cube. Press CTRL
+ R to add the lines and mouse scroll to increase the number of lines.

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If everything went right, you should have the result as displayed above. The next step we
need to make is switching to the face selection mode and select the middle top face
of the cube. Then press I key so you scale new vertices inwards. Release this action by
pressing left mouse.

Open the left bottom tab and change the value to .04. If you keep it at the random value,
you will generate random sized holes when you go to the next step. A value of .04 works
the best for the current dice scale.

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We continue to perform this action on the other sides of the dice. Now add number two.

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When we arrive at number 6, we need to split this into two separate actions. Start with
making number 4 and later add two more in the middle.

I pick the sides at random. Feel free to stay at the right numbering of the dice if you prefer.

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We continue with the next step. Because there are now new faces, we can poke these
inwards. To perform this action, start with a number and select the inner face. Now press
CTRL + F and select ‘Poke Face’.

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When performing this action new geometry will appear. Without doing anything, select
the tab that appears on the left side of the viewport. You can add a value to add the poke
effect. A value of .2 will push the geometry outwards, we need a value of -.02 to push them
inwards. If you can’t see the tab, you probably selected something else in the scene and
you have to poke it again.

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You can select all the other faces at once and poke them, they will automatically use the
value of -.02 so you won’t need to do this action for each individual face.

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It slowly starts to look like a dice! But we need to do some more work to make it look
smooth and detailed. The next thing I like to do is to add a modifier to smooth the dice
and holes. A modifier is a quick action that changes the mesh you are working on. I like to
smooth the cube and we can perform this action by using a subdivision surface modifier.

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First, select the wrench icon and click on select modifier on the top of the tab. This will
open the list of modifiers you can add.

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This modifier adds extra vertices to the mesh and smooths it at the same time. This way
you get a more natural look on your objects. The key to this process is good geometry. If
you have broken geometry the modifier won’t do a good job.

When applying this modifier on the dice we can see the geometry changing. We have
two value options we can change. We have ‘Levels viewport’ and ‘render’. The difference
between this option is the way it’s displayed. ‘Levels viewport’ is what you are seeing right
now in your viewport. Changing the value to 3 will smooth the dice in the way we want to
see the dice. The problem with increasing this value in the viewport is it will slow down if
you add too much detail. With just having 1 dice in the scene, it’s not a big deal, but if you
have 1000’s of objects like rocks, it will be a problem.

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This is why you also have Render. If you add a value of 3 in render, nothing will happen
in the viewport. But when rendering the scene, it will use this value and add the detailed
geometry. It’s a smart way of optimizing the scene.

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When you look at the dice, we still see some rough faces, this is because the dice needs to
be a smooth object. To add the smooth effect, go to object (top menu) and select ‘shade
smooth’

Now all the geometry will be displayed smooth. The final action we need to do is to press
the ALT + H key to merge the dice with the table and chairs.

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We can duplicate the object and add a shader so we can render a scene out of it.

We learned the following in this lecture:

• Working in the workbench engine

• Adding an ‘insert’ effect for adding a new face inside a face

• Poking the face so it moves inwards the geometry

• Adding a subdivision surface modifier to smooth the dice

• Smoothing the object by selecting shade smooth in the top menu

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 10)

In this lecture, we will add a dice material. For this, I like to switch to the Eevee render
engine.

I like to isolate the dice again, so we won’t be distracted by the table and chair. I just
wanted to see the dice in combination with the furniture, but now we focus back on the
cube and isolate it by pressing the SHIFT + H key. If we switch to the rendered mode, you
will see a white dice with the blue-sky texture casting light on the dice.

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We start by switching to the material tab and adding new material. Call this material Dice
red. Be aware you must be in the shading workspace to have the material node editor at
the bottom of the screen. This way you can work on nodes and see the color changing in
the viewport.

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To me, the light is a bit dark. I like to switch to the material mode to have some better
light casting on the cube. This sounds a bit weird, as rendered mode should cast better
light. But because we haven’t isolated the sunlight from the main scene, we only have
environment light without an external light source. So, the material node is the best mode
to change the material for now.

Looking at the dice I like to put a white color on the holes we created. This is where we
have to understand how geometry and shading work together. The way material works in
combination with geometry, you can link a material to a separated vertice. If we select the
holes and add a new white color, we can fill the holes with this new white color.

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Looking at this dice, the best way to do this is to disable the modifier and switch to edit
mode.

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Now switch to face selection mode and select the triangle shaped faces to select the
holes. You can select them all at once, there is no need to do this for every individual
number.

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If you have selected all the hole faces, switch back to the object mode and add a new
material. Call this ‘white’ you can also turn the ‘Subdivision surface’ modifier back on.

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Switch back to the material editor and select the white material. Click ‘assign’ to link the
white color on the selected vertices

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If everything turns out well, you should now have a dice with all holes filled with white in
color. Be aware that it’s important that you only select the triangle shaped faces. If you
also select the inner faces, you may have a different result.

We can now to continue working on the shading. We have to add some more specular
color and also play around with the density of the dice.

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To get a good impression of how the shader looks, I add sunlight and rotate it a bit, so it
cast light on the dice.

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I Increase the strength of the sunlight to have a bright surface and have a good view of
the dice color change.

You can now switch to the rendered mode so we can start working on the shading of the
dice. You have to select the red material to make the changes.

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The first thing we change is the roughness value. This roughness has a standard value of
.5, we will reduce this to .2 so the dice will be more specular.

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The next part is changing the density of the object, also called the SSS (Subsurface
scattering). First, we change the subsurface value to .5, you have to select all three inputs
and change the value. This way you remove the default red tint in the subsurface.

Make the subsurface color the same as the base color and change the subsurface value
to .2

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When looking at the dice we now have a shiny dice with some subsurface color. Because
the dice looks a little clean, I also like to add a surface imperfection map. This works by
adding a texture in the roughness input.

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A surface imperfection map can be any type of dirt. I mainly use this to add some more
realism to an object.

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This is how the imperfection maps look.

When you add the imperfection map, the roughness value changes. You have to add
some nodes to restore the reflection value. I also add texture coordinates and mapping
nodes to have more control over the size of the imperfections. By adding a Colorramp
and a mix node, we can restore the reflection values.

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By moving the slider on the Colorramp node you can increase or decrease the intensity
of the reflection map. The mix node controls the intensity of the specular color and the
influence of the reflection map.

I like to make some duplications of the dice. Select the model and press Shift + D to move
the new dice model to the right and rotate the model 90 degrees.

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Make the color of the new dice unique and change the color to blue. You also need to
change the subsurface color to blue, otherwise the dice will have a purple tint. Do not
forget to rename the material to ‘Dice blue’.

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Repeat this process to duplicate a third dice model. Make it green and rotate it again so
the dice shows a different number.

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If everything worked out well, return to the main scene by pressing ALT + H. This way the
dice merge with the table and chair scene. In the next lecture, we will make a nice-looking
render.

We learned the following in this lecture:

- Adding a white-collar by assigning vertices to a new material

- Adding a subsurface color
- Adding a surface imperfection map

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 11)

We now have a table with chairs and some dice on the table. To finish the scene, we will
move the camera so we can render a nice-looking image from the scene we created.

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Left click on the camera and move it on top of the table. Now press 0 on the Num pad so
you switch to the camera view.

In the camera viewport, you need to press Shift + ~ to move the camera with W, A, S, D.
Press the left mouse button to lock the new view of the camera. You can also press g to
move the position of the camera.

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Now switch to the top view (Num 7) and move the dice closer to the camera. Try to rotate
the dice a little bit to make it look more random.

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You can now switch back to the camera view and move closer to the dice. Try to find a
nice angle so we can prepare for rendering.

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From this point, move the dice so they fill the screen, and you have a nice composition.
You want to fill the left and right side, so it won’t feel empty.

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The next step is changing the light source position. Switch to the top view and rotate the
sunlight so it adds the light from the right side on the dice.

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For now, this is just a preview setup, later we will fine tune the light position.

At this point, I also like to give more value to the chairs and I like to have some shadow
projection from the chairs on the table. I move two chairs more to the right so the sun can
project some shadow.

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Let’s switch to render mode (cycles) and see how the scene looks with the current setup.
Switch back to the camera view and press CTRL + B to make a viewport selection for ren-
dering. This way only the viewport will be rendered, not the space around it.

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My first impression of the render is good. But there is too much reflection, so we need to
add more roughness, so it looks softer. I will change the mix value of the shader to .7. This
has to be applied to all dice. If you have a different setup, you may have to use a different
value, it also depends on what color you use in the mix node.

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As you can see, there is no shadow in the background from the chairs. Go back to the top
view and move the chairs more to the right and change the direction of the light source.
You can also select the camera + Dice and move the scene to the shadow overlap posi-
tion.

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I added a red circle in the top image, this shows where you want the shadow transition to
be visible.

When we switch back to the camera view, we go to the rendered mode to see how the
shadows affect the scene.

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This looks way better now. By adding these shadows, you play with the depth in your
scene. It’s a powerful method that I often use in my environments. Without shadows to
render, the scene looks flatter and more boring.

Feel free to play with the rotation of the dice to fine-tune the composition. An option is to
also change the 4K texture to a 16K resolution texture. We provide these textures on Poly-
haven, also for free in cc0. The 16K map will add ultra-fine detail to your render. Be aware
that 16K textures are large and can slow down your system if you do not have high-end
specs. I recommend using an 8K if you can’t handle the 16K.

For my environment work, I still use 4K textures, even with the availability of 8k/16K. I have
high-end specs, but the textures are simply too heavy to build a large scene. So don’t feel
bad when you stick to 4k/2k, it’s normal when you build something big. All textures in this
course are 4k / JPG just to increase the work speed. If you want a higher resolution, just go
to the Polyhaven platform and pick your own resolution.

A final tweak to end this lecture, we add some depth of field effect on the camera. Switch
to the camera view and select ‘depth of field’

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The viewport will blur, this is because we need to define what point we need to focus on.
Open the viewport display tab in the camera settings and enable ‘limits’.

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By enabling limits, you can see an orange line appearing in the camera with a yellow line
to define the focus point. If you now lower the distance, you can drag the yellow line, so it
reaches the dice models.

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I use an F-Stop of 10 to reduce the blurry effect. Switch back to the camera view and make
a render of the scene by hitting F12.

At this point, you can make some changes to the dice to improve the looks further. Maybe
you want more or less DOF effect. Just change the values to find the effect you prefer.

This way of modelling was my traditional approach. In the next lecture, we will recreate
the dice, but this time in Geometry nodes. The way this works cannot be compared with
the way we did it now. I will give a full in-depth explanation of how this Geometry nodes
system works and how we can use it to improve the scene we work in.

We learned the following in this lecture:

- Using chairs to add shadows on the table

- Move camera in viewport
- Add DOF effect

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 12)

A new feature in Blender 3.0 is the geometry nodes workflow. With geo nodes, you can
change geometry by adding nodes and changing values. You can create complex shapes
without touching any vertices. You need to think differently when you are so used to work-
ing with the traditional workflow. If you are new to blender, this is the perfect moment to
start.

In this environment course I use the best of both methods. I use the traditional way of
modelling for the type of work that is hard to achieve with geo nodes, on the other hand,
some tasks can be done way faster in geo nodes.

As an exercise, I like to recreate the dice model and show the difference in the working
method.

As with the previous dice we start with adding a new cube.

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This time we won’t scale the dice, the only thing we do is isolate the cube by pressing Shift
+ H so we have the cube in an empty viewport. From this point, we switch to the geom-
etry nodes workspace. This opens an interface with 3 tabs. On the top right, we have the
viewport, on the top left we have the editor and at the bottom, we have the ‘geo nodes’
node editor.

Before we do anything, I like to close the editor tab on the top left. I never use this in my
workflow, and it takes up lots of space. Use the drag tool to merge it with the viewport.

From this point, we can start working on the dice. In the node editor click on ‘new’, this will
spawn two nodes to start with. Of course, you need to select the cube before you click on
new.

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You can now start working on your node tree.

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Geo nodes always start with two nodes, a group in and output. In short, the input is your
cube, the output is what you create. What we see is a connection between the in and out-
put, so we get the same result, and it displays as a cube in the viewport.

So, from this point, we need to add new nodes so we can transform this cube into a dice,
without touching it in the viewport. So how do we approach this? The first node I like to
add is a subdivision mesh node (press the space bar to open the search tab). This node
adds extra geometry/vertices onto the mesh. It’s the same as adding subdivision levels
in the viewport, now we do this with a node. At the same time, I also add a subdivision
surface. This node also adds new geometry, but it smooths the cube at the same time. If
we did not add the subdivision mesh node we should get a sphere-shaped dice, so these
two nodes in combination work the best.

Both nodes show a level you can increase. This adds more resolution to the dice, let’s add
a level of 2 to start with on both nodes.

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Because we can’t set the shading to smooth with a button, we must add a separated
node for this. Find the set shade smooth node and put this node after the subdivision
surface node. This will result in a smooth cube.

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At the same time, I start organizing the nodes and put them on top of each other. This way
we create some space for new nodes.

We now have a smooth cube prepared for the next step, adding the holes. This step is
not complex, but adding the holes takes some time because we need to make a lot of
combinations.

The first new node we add is a ‘Mesh Boolean’. Add this node after the set smooth node
in ‘mesh 1’. We also import a UVsphere object, you can put this node inside the ‘mesh 2’ of
the mesh Boolean node.

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So far nothing new happens, but if the cube was transparent, you could see a sphere in-
side. Because we also added a Boolean node, the sphere will cut holes in the cube when
it touches the mesh.
So, the next step is transforming the sphere so we can cut small holes in the dice. To move
the sphere, we need a transform node. You can add this new node between the sphere
and mesh Boolean node. We need a translation Z value of 1.1, this moves the node to the
right position. As you can see the hole is way too big, this is because of the size of the
sphere. We need to lower the radius value of the sphere to .19 so it fits the dice hole scale.

So why .19 and 1.1 and not .20 and 1? It seems that when we use the rounded number val-
ues, the dice won’t match well with the cube. I tried, but the result wasn’t that great. So, we
must stick with these numbers.

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When looking at the hole it looks low poly, so we need to smooth it. To get a smooth hole
we need to add a subdivide mesh and set shade smooth node. This adds some extra ver-
tices to the sphere so we can smooth a nice hole out of it.

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From this point, we continue to add more dice holes. This will be a process of making lots
of duplications and connecting them right. The main nodes are transform and the ‘mesh
Boolean’. Put these nodes close to each other and change the color. You have to open
the right tab and click the color icon. I used a grey color, but feel free to pick a color that
works best for you.

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Select the mesh Boolean and transform node and duplicate these two nodes (Shift +
D). Change the color to red (optional) and change the Z translation to -1.1. Now copy the
nodes again.

As with the grey nodes, add the set shade output inside the geometry input of the red
transform node, you have to do this for both nodes. Next, you need to put the mesh
Boolean inside the other mesh Boolean, they all need to be connected. To finish, put the
mesh Boolean output in the group output.

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This new setup will result in a new hole at the bottom of the cube/dice. Why not two? Right
now, the holes share the same position data, we changed the 1.1 Z value to -1.1, but we
haven’t changed the X and Y axis. We need to change these values for both dice holes.

Use a value of X translation 0.5 and Y 0.5 for this first hole and for the second hole a value
of X -.05 and Y -0.5 to put the holes at the right position.

In the next lecture, we will continue adding new holes in the exact same way as we did
with the previous ones. We duplicate the mesh Boolean and transform nodes and keep
changing the values till we fill all holes.

There is some mesh deformation visible, we will change this soon, don’t worry about this.

We learned the following in this lecture:

- Using the geometry nodes workspace

- Adding new geometry nodes setup
- Subdivide and smooth a cube
- Adding dice holes

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 13)

We continue in this lecture by adding new holes into the cube to transform it into dice. So
far, we added numbers 1 and 2, now it’s time for number 3.

We start with duplicating a new row of a mesh Boolean and transform node. Start with
one row, change the color and the Z value, before duplicating them again. This saves you
some time. The previous holes used a Z value of 1.1 and -1.1. We filled the top and bottom,
now we change to the sides. We need to put value 1.1 on the X axis now. If you changed
the X value and color, you can make two more copies so you end up with a total of three
rows. Connect the nodes in the same way as the previous ones and finish by adding the
mesh Boolean in the group output.

What is left is changing to Z and Y values to put the holes in the right position. The X uses
a value of 1.1 for all these translation nodes. The only things we need to change are the
Z and y values. The first translation nodes need a value of 0.5 for the X and Z axes, the
middle translation nodes stay at 0 for both Y and Z and the third translation nodes uses a
value of -0.5 on the Z and Y axes.

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We continue with this process of adding holes by adding four more rows, using a blue
color and changing the values so we end up with 4 holes on the other side of the dice.

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And the same for 5

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And number 6

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After combining all these nodes with each other and picking the right translation values
to put the holes in the right position, we need to make a small fix before we continue to
the next step. As you can see the dice has some broken faces, we need to fix this before
we continue.

We need a modifier ‘Edge Split’ to solve this face problem. When adding this modifier, it
will end up with a clean and smooth surface.

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But there is something else we need to fix as well before we continue to work on the dice.
When taking a close look at some of the holes, these do not look good. This has to do with
the rotation of the sphere. If we look at number 6, we need to rotate these holes to merge
them better with the dice. Lower the level of the subdivision mesh node to have a better
view

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By using a rotation X value of 90 we put these sphere holes in the right direction. We need
to apply this on all 6 holes.

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The work on the geometry is now finished. If we press the Tab key in the viewport, we can
see we still have an untouched cube with 4 vertices, but after adding all these nodes we
now have a completely different shape that looks like dice!

In the next lecture, we cover materials. Because we do not have vertices to work on, we
need a new approach to add white color to the holes. There is a method in Geo nodes to
apply this, so we are not finished with the node tree. Looking at the Geo nodes tree, it looks
impressive right! And we have just started.

We learned the following in this lecture:

- Extending the node tree for more dice holes

- Using edge split to remove the broken faces
- Rotating some holes for a better Boolean cut

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CHAPTER 2 (LECTURE 14)

We now have a dice with holes on all sides. At this point, we can start looking at the color
of the dice. Adding red and white works different because we do not have vertices to
select and assign. We need to find a different way to get the same result as the traditional
method.

We can still add a new material. We call this material ‘Red_dice_Geo’. Switch to the
shader editor so we can build a node tree for this red dice.

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Because we can’t select vertices, we have to apply the white color in a different way. We
need to prepare the shader so we can combine a second BSDF shader. You can copy the
one with the red color and change the red color to white. Add a mix shader node and
combine these with each other.

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Now there is a 50 by 50 % blend mix. We need to add a value in the ‘Fac’ input of the mix
node to define where we want to apply the white color.

To get a better understanding on this new process we need to find out where the vertices
of the dice holes are stored in the geometry nodes tree.

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The data for these holes is stored somewhere in this tree. If we can extract the data and
copy it to the shader, we can apply the color.

We must ask ourselves the question, how did these holes appear on the dice? Well, by the
spheres. If we can copy the data of the spheres, we can attach a color to it.

I like to start with number 6. We add a join geometry node and add the transform data
from all holes in the join node.

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All hole’s data from number 6 is now stored in the join node, from this point we can
continue extracting the data.

I like to add a new node called ‘Geometry proximity’. This node can translate the
geometry data into distance data. We can put the distance output in the group output.
This way we now store the data from the holes so we can use it in the shader.

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We linked the vertex group, but still, nothing happens. This is because the ‘holes’ vertex
group is not linked to the ‘distance’ data from the geo nodes setup.

We need to switch back to the geo nodes and change the distance group type from ‘float’
to ‘color’, this way the data will be linked in the right way.

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The sample above shows a flipped color, you can fix this as described in the shader editor.
The dice almost looks correct in color, we only need to fix the color artefact. The reason it’s
not looking smooth is because the color is added to the dice on the faces. The ‘geometry
proximity’ node shows the faces value. If you click on faces you can switch to ‘points’, this
will fix the color artefact and if everything went right, you should now have a correct
looking dice with white holes.

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We can now drag all transform outputs inside the join geometry node. This will add white
color to all the holes.

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And this is how we create the dice in geometry nodes. The workflow is more advanced,
but it shows us how the geometry nodes work and how we can send data from the geo
nodes to the shader editor.

Geometry nodes are a powerful tool to edit your mesh. I use it most of the time to scatter
objects on the terrain, add twigs, make grass and construct a ruin with broken bricks.

Because this node system is brand new, it takes time to find its way in a more advanced
workflow. The possibilities are endless. However, I like to use the best of both methods
to build my scenes. Even if the geonodes are able to do lots of amazing things, the
traditional way is still essential to shape the worlds we work on. How this will develop in
the future is hard to say, I think these methods will merge into a new workflow we have to
discover over the years.

We learned the following in this lecture:

- Adding a mix node to combine materials

- Using a ‘geometry proximity’ node to define the distance data
- Sending the distance data to a group output node
- Using an attribute node to store vertex data
- Link the vertex data to the distance data from the geometry nodes

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CHAPTER 02 (LECTURE 15)

I like to organize the objects in the outliner before we continue to work on the scene. We
haven’t named the dice from the previous session, and the new dice need to be named
as well.

Create a new collection and call this ‘Dices’ select the collection and add two new ones
named ‘Old’ and ‘New’.

Now you can drag and drop the old dice into the ‘old’ collection and the just created dice
into the ‘new’ collection. From this point, we continue to work on the scene.

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Select the dice we created in geo nodes and press the Alt + H key to bring it back into the
main scene. We now have the table and chairs back in the scene, we only need to scale
the dice, so it is the same size as the other ones. Press the S key / 50 to scale it to the right
size. Then move it a bit upwards with the G + CTRL key to snap it on the table.

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We need to add some subsurface color to add the light absorption effect. This works
the same as we applied to the other dices. Change the subsurface radius to .5 and the
subsurface color to a red color. Use a subsurface value of .2 to start with and change the
roughness of the BSDF to .3.

You can now duplicate the dice two more times and change the color to blue and green.
Don’t forget to make the material unique, otherwise, you change the color from the one
you copied. Also rotate every dice when you make a duplication to change the number.

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We still have the other dice in the scene, we can hide this collection to make space for the
new dice. Before I hide the old ones, I use the position of these to replace them with the
new ones. As soon you have the new dice in position you can hide the old collection. This
way you don’t need to work out a new composition of the scene.

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When reviewing the scene, we can see the red dice has way too much color absorption.
We need to lower the subsurface value to get a better effect. I ended up with .01, but feel
free to play with these values to get the right result.

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If I compare both scenes, small differences can be seen. The most key difference is the
lack of a bevel in the geometry nodes. I was not able to add a smooth curve effect to the
holes. Maybe a bevel node will be implemented later, but for now, I ended up with the
current setup.

The new dice look more rounded, this is because we applied the smooth effect in a
different way than the old dice. If you want more rounded corners on the old dice, select
the vertices on the edges of the dice and scale them a bit by pressing the S key. This way
you add a smoother effect to these dice.

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And so, we arrive at the end of chapter two. Working on dice seems to have no
connection with environment modelling, however, did you know dice were used almost
3000 years ago? I think dice have a close connection with human beings and the way we
play games. This is why it’s a perfect match for an introductory chapter in Blender and
transforming the default cube into a dice.

The next chapter will be all about grass creation. From this point, we start to work on
strands, weeds and terrain creation. We slowly move to large environments and add more
assets to create the scene of our dreams.

It’s a long ride, but I will add all my motivation and passion to this course to help you in
your development and learning of the craft. Let’s move to the next chapter!

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