Let’s Learn Blender!

Captions provided by White Coat Captioning (https://whitecoatcaptioning.com/). Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

JASON: Hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Learn with Jason. Today on the show, we are bringing back Prince, how you doing, Prince?

PRINCE: I'm doing great. It's a lovely Tuesday. We're going to make it happen. We're going to do some 3D things and figure out how all of that goes. [ Laughter ]

JASON: I'm already having some hesitation, I've got Blender open in the background and I don't know if everybody saw those boops go frame by frame.

PRINCE: Oh, no.

JASON: I'm going to make a request to the chat which is refrain from booping today because we are using every single I might, let's see, my CPU is currently running at 400%. So everyone, please be kind at

PRINCE: Oh, no. Oh, no.

JASON: It's going to be great. It's going to be great. So Prince, for folks who aren't familiar, you've been on the show a few times, but maybe give us a little bit of a background on yourself.

PRINCE: I am a developer experience engineer over at a company called Netlify. I work with you
[ Laughter ] I primarily focus on what is known as templates, I help make the getting started for flow as smooth as possible. And outside of that, really, I like to make things and so, most of that is both in websites but also, figuring out how to do 3D animation stuff. So that's a little bit about me.

JASON: Yeah, you've been doing really fun stuff with, I've been watching you make little scenes in Blender and some very, very cool stuff is going on. And it feels like there's been a bit of wave of this. I've seen you doing it, Sarah Viera, Josh Cuomo who has been in Blender, to name a few. It's been fun to watch this creative expansion, it's an adjacent tag. It's not really not dev, but it's not dev. How surreal does it feel moving from an engineering space to the Blender space? Does it feel like there's a lot of crossover?

I think the new feeling of getting started with something that you've never done before, that kind of hit me hard where it's like, oh, you have to start all over. There aren't that many transferable skills to the interfaces. But understanding, like, programmatically why do certain things need to be done a certain way gives me much more of an appreciation to the software where, like, Blender, for instance, is a completely open source project. And I think that's something really fascinating about, oh, why do they make these certain decisions? You can actually see why and the bugs that are made in the surface and whatnot. As far as skills, I used to do or still do things with 3JS, so how to understand the 3D space are transferable, but as far as, oh, what web development stuff I can do, absolutely none of that. That is not, no transferable things for that. [ Laughter ] I can do the browser, that part. But no, oh, there needs to be a server hosted somewhere.

JASON: Gotcha, yeah, so I think the most famous I think you see from Blender is usually, let's make a donut or something, right? And so, what I've seen as I've poked around on this is Blender is where most of the, like, those 3D renderings that we're seeing where somebody has made, like, a cupcake that doesn't look like a cartoon, it looks like a computer drawing, like a Pixar drawing, right? That seems to be the space where a lot of this is emerging. But Blender is used for a lot. Where have you kind of seen, I guess, as you've been learning, have you kind of noticed here's where Blender is being used? Some spots we might not be thinking about?

Yeah, I think a lot of times, people use these types of renders. The output you get from whatever kind of modeling you do. They do that into websites, that kind of backdrop, it's easier to make the 3D modeling as opposed to doing that 2D drawing in the same 3D space. That makes it look playful and fun. There's currently a lot of work being done with 3JS which is another web GL kind of project. There's a tool called Spline, which is a web based interface that lets you do 3D modeling and it's popular for animations. There are even movies made completely with Blender. There's a movie on Netflix called NextGen that models from Blender.

JASON: Really? That's cool.

PRINCE: I really is a product that's grown and grown and a lot of people used to consider, oh, it's not a commercial product, but very much here to say, it is a good product that is made by the hands of developers across the world. So

JASON: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I've seen I've seen more and more 3D renderings showing up in say anybody that watches my show, I'm accidentally a gear nerd and I'll go and look at the camera gear. Often they have a 3D rendering of how this works. Those are the kinds of things I can build if I'm in blender. I can go in and render, and they look, half the time I feel like I'm not sure it's a rendering because they look so dang realistic now.

PRINCE: Yeah.

JASON: I guess, what maybe there's a question like all the way at the bottom which is, you know, what got you thinking that you wanted to make something in Blender? What got you to download it and try it here first and see?

PRINCE: I think for me, it was, I never practiced how to do 2D art. So for me, it's like, oh, how to do that is actually, you have to kind of understand how the 3D world works to kind of put it into 2D. And I found that really difficult. And I was like, no, what if I tried 3D art and sees what it feels like. And I was kind of researching and being like, oh, you know, to get more spatial awareness and spatial understanding, the 3D space is something I live and breathe in every single day. Why not try to figure out how to model that? And then, take it down back into the 2D space?

JASON: Yeah. Did you find that that's interesting because I would immediately assume that, oh, 3D is way harder than 2D. Did you find that 3D was more approachable for you? .

PRINCE: Yeah, for me, I understood scale a little bit better, perspective a little bit better, as well. And so, it's kind of I don't know why it works that way for me. But, like, I couldn't understand how to translate objects into primitives. So things that are base objects, like square, sphere, I couldn't understand how to do that in 2D space at all. It's interesting, huh?

JASON: That's so interesting. And it makes sense, too, because like I wouldn't have thought about it, and this is just me putting my own experience bias in here. Because, you know, when I was a kid, I did a lot of drawing and took art classes on how to draw in 2D. So my brain, obviously, goes, oh, 2D is going to be easier. But really, that's because that's the thing I studied. But thinking about it the other way around where we exist in a 3D space and, like, to look at, say a mug, and then, you say, OK, draw a mug. You have to do a lot of converting in your head for what makes this 3D mug into a flat thing whereas if you're doing it in 3D, you go, well, there's the cylinder and knock the middle out of the cylinder. You can spin it and look at it. And it looks 3D. That makes a lot of sense. Huh.

That for me is the process of how it worked. Essentially, for me, when I started seeing things in the 3D space, especially a mug, I really struggled with something like that in a 2D space where I was like, how do you draw the circle,? How do you make it go further apart? And I don't know how people learn this, but I was like 3D space makes sense. I know it's a cylinder, I just need to put a hole in there and call it a day. And adding the handle on to it is another little thing you draw the line around and I'm like, OK, I can do that.

JASON: Yeah, absolutely. I got questions about the mug. So this mug says nerds are jerks. And for anybody who's wondering why birds are jerks, it's because during Jamstack Conf2021, last year, we had this huge plan I don't know if you saw it. But we did a sitcom and had a set design and costume and all of these big things, and then, the morning of the conference, a bird hit the transformer in the neighborhood and took down everything. Like, the whole electrical grid for 600 houses. And we had to scramble to get a truck and satellite internet and all of these things to be able to get even part of the show. We were only able to do about a third of the show that we had planned. So it was a very stressful day, and it's ever since then, I, you know, birds are kind of jerks. So

PRINCE: Birds are kind of jerks.

JASON: Now we have a future no fly zone on all future Jamstack Conferences. We surround them in mosquito netting and get the heck out of here. [ Laughter ] But, yeah. So that's fascinating to it really does make sense. My concept of 3D being harder is mostly because I never tried any 3D software. And also, there might be some like the technology advanced to make it more approachable to do 3D because I think when I was in high school, the only 3D that was available to me was, like, auto cap cat. I did some of that, but it never clicked for me. Yeah, I get this. I'm modeling the real world. I'm doing a lot of math. And I don't mind math, but it's not my favorite and it's not the way I do art. Like, math is not my artistic style. So actually, maybe that's another question, which is, what skills do you feel have been the most utilized as you're getting in the Blender? Is it a lot of math? What are you using to kind of work with this tool?

PRINCE: That's a great question. And I think, Blender allows a lot of it to just be the visual part. But depending on how complex you want to get into it, there's a lot of neutraling. So you kind of mentioned about, like, software's upgraded over time. And like, even like the last few months and the last six months, Blender's gone through revisions itself, and the interface is actually completely different since I started it, as well. And so, that's a huge yeah, for the most part, everything looks the same. But they did a visual rehaul, overhaul over all of it. And I think for me, one of the newest features that came out is called Geometry Nodes, and this is all mathematical based computations, both from the coloring of how to do things as well as what if you want to put instances of objects on a certain location in a random set of locations across this render? So they have a lot of stuff that's no math, and if you want to get further in, incrementally in, you can add more math along the way. For me, at least, I found that it's I like to do a lot of the visual aspects more and then kind of add the details with the more mathematical stuff to make it look more random.

Yeah. So a little more of your, choose your own adventure here. Not like you can only do 3D if you're a math whiz or something like that. Exactly. Got it. And that's also cool. You said you can use the math to do random things? Mm hmm.

JASON: Oh, does this mean, I know from some of my past streams in other types of generative art, that you can write like a noise function that will kind of randomly assign different values and give you kind of a pattern, but it's noisy enough that it doesn't look like a fixed pattern.

PRINCE: Yes.

JASON: So when you're saying these geometry nodes, you can do something like, say put grass on a field and make it look somewhat random?

PRINCE: Exactly that. You can the geometry nodes are a node based editor. You have these little things you drop into the interface that basically say, this represents the randomness, you can turn the dial to be certain kind of randomness or not. And you can connect nodes. So it affects the object that you're trying to render. So for instance, in your example of adding noise, you can change how much noise something looks. So if you want something to look more textured, so it has different types of roughness, you can add the noise in to make it more. Looks more organic in that way.

JASON: Yeah, OK, that's encouraging because I had thought previously that the way that people were doing these types of works is that they were meticulously going in and individually making every blade of grass. And I was like, oh, my God, what a patient person to go in and make these thousands of blades of grass. So that's that's something maybe I could do. Because you know, I know like oil painters, for example, they're very it's meditative. They just kind of very meticulously go through and do the same thing over and over, again. And gives it this amazing feel. This very, like, deep humanity. But I don't have patience for that. I know I'm never going to sit down in front of a 5 foot square canvas and draw 10,000 blades of grass to make this look real. I'm going to get board and get a paint brush. Good enough.

PRINCE: That's the geometry Nodes for you.

JASON: That's what I'm looking for. That's my paint bucket.

PRINCE: Exactly. You can definitely do that. That's where some of more of the math stuff comes in where you kind of have to know a little bit more about how do you designate different points on to a particular plane? How do you put objects on that particular plane? And now, I have to know math and make this look the way I want to. But it's kind of interesting to learn how that that math is a part of art, too. At the end of the day, like, you can kind of take an appreciation to I know just enough to get familiar with it. As opposed to I have to know meticulously that pi is significant in these ways for people watching, pi is significant in many ways into drawing that I didn't realize that then you have to start being like, oh, gosh, now I really have to learn stuff, physics and all that stuff? Oh, God. But most of the time they solve that for you in visual editor, you don't have to do that.

JASON: That part is nice. One of the things I do really like about the tooling that we get now as, as creatives, as developers is that we're starting to see a kind of, it's like assistive tech, right? We talk about this in frontend as being low code. Where it's not that you're not writing any code. You just have to do a lot less to make this stuff work. And I'm excited to hear that, you know, the same sort of things are happening in art where, and I've seen a little bit of this. Like, I used to do a lot in photoshop, and I'm seeing the new things happening where photoshop has AI filters now instead of you having to go in and select the outline of the thing and very carefully do brush replacement to erase that person in the background or whatever, which are all very challenging things, right? Now, there's like, photoshop knows that's a common use case. You've got a picture of somebody and there's a rando in the background, you want that to go away and you click the remove rando button and they go away. That's what it's actually called.

PRINCE: If you could customize photoshop, I'm certain you'll have that button waiting for you. You can do stuff like that, you could make your own little buttons if you wanted to. It does the scripting interface, Python is another common language into it. You can use more scriptable, based pieces.

JASON: That's really interesting. So now, we're talking about it's a base level where it provides you with kind of the foundation for building the stuff. But then, you as you build your own workflows can kind of make Python powered macros to do common tasks for you. And, you know, I've done that in other programming languages, as well. Programming languages where you just write a function or in, like, photoshop, you can put together macros or use something like Alfred on your computer where you say, oh, I want to take this thing, copy/paste it, move it over here, capitalize it all. And put it in my Obsidian.

PRINCE: Exactly.

JASON: That's cool. So this is not just like draw a donut. This is like something that it's got a lot of layers and complexity in, you know, you can go as low code as you want or no code by using just the visual interface. You can get into a little bit of code by doing some math. Get the geometry in there. Or you can go full on scripted, potentially procedurally generated scenes if you were to really go deep on this.

PRINCE: Exactly. I'm surprised you can go with the layers, you know, there's so many layers, like an onion almost. Set up right there for you.

JASON: Dang it. Dang it.

PRINCE: Or a parfait.

JASON: A parfait? Oh, I could go for a parfait. It's been a long time since I've had anything that could be adequately described as a parfait. I remember when I was a kid, you could go to Dairy Queen and they had that peanut buster parfait where it was 19 layers of caramel and then chocolate and peanut, and caramel. And I was like, yeah, that's definitely the best thing. And now as an adult, I'm like, give me the one that's mixed up. I don't want to stir anything.

[ Laughter ]

PRINCE: I wanted to touch on one last thing somebody said in the chat, which is talking about the changes that are made inside of Blender. So over time, there's different versions of Blender that come out. And different versions, just like in web development or any development, there's breaking changes, or there's minor changes. And over the course of time in the last few months, there have been a few breaking changes. We recently went into 3.0. And right now, the latest release that happened last week was 3.2. And between each of these measured versions, sometimes, it's the APIs change. Like literally similar to web development, there's APIs that we use similar to the geometry nodes, that's the biggest reasons why certain changes happen where the interface for that changed. People are like, oh, that's cool. And so, they're like, everyone has to figure out how do you do that thing you used to do in the last version but not in this version? Generally, things don't move around too much. But sometimes, shortcuts change or sometimes the interface is completely different. Just to make sure everything can move forward. It's all open source, so people are like, we have to keep up with making sure everyone knows what's going on.

JASON: Got it. Got it. OK. So I feel like any other questions I have are going to be easier if we're looking at stuff. So maybe the next thing to do here is get us over into the paired programming view. In this case, I guess the paired 3D ifying view. We are joined today by White Coat Captioning. We've got Diane with us today doing all of the live captioning here on the home page learnwithJason.dev. And that is made possible through the support of our sponsors, Netlify, NX and Backlight all kicking in to make this show more accessible to more people, which I appreciate very much. And we are talking today to Prince, who is on Twitter Twitter.com/Maxcell, you can find all sorts of goodness and 3D renderings and all of the things you're working on show up there. Which is a whole lot of fun. So we're going to talk today about Blender. Blender is at

PRINCE:.org.

JASON: We're going to be talking about Blender, here is that. And I have downloaded it and I've got it running in the back here. But before I start trying to do anything in there, is there any other resource or anything we should be looking at here? We'll go through a list of resources at the end for people who want to do self guided learning. But for me, should I have anything open as a reference or anything?

PRINCE: No. We're just going to free hand everything. That's the beauty of the art. You can sometimes just do that. We're going to get familiar with the interface. And so, I think, doing a bunch of a lot of stuff will be helpful.

JASON: Love it. Love it. Britney is giving me crap about the CPU, I have the big one, well, not quite, I have the M1. The M2's out. I'm trying here, I'm trying. [ Laughter ] OK. So I am this is Blender. And all I've done for everyone to know how much Blender I'm done in my entire life is I went to the Blender website, I downloaded it. I opened it, and I hit the new scene button. And that is where we are

PRINCE: And if you want to recreate that experience, you can go to file at the top left and then new, and then general.

JASON: Made this general.

PRINCE: Exactly. This is the base file. This is how it all starts. [ Laughter ] Then, D. Meyers is saying, behold the cube. Every person that starts with Blender, this is their first experience with Blender, it's literally like the cube. People will refer to it in tutorials as the cube because it's the base setup for every startup file. And most commonly, the next event that happens afterwards is people telling you to delete the cube because that's usually just the oh, you know, we give it a bit. And we're like, OK, we're going to add it back in. We're going to delete it. We're going to practice. You do the first thing, which you highlighted it and click something and that shows what is the current active element. So in Blender, doing any modifications, what is currently being selected? Click it, and to delete something, it's not intuitive per se, but you can use X, delete. And it's going to be like do you want to delete this? And you'll tell it, yes, it's OK to delete. It always asks for permission. Because we deleted it and I want you to practice also putting things on to the screen. I'm going to show you where in the interface we're going to do it. But to talk more generally about this interface right now is this is called a work space.

JASON: OK.

PRINCE: There are different work spaces. At the top, you'll see a bunch of little tabs. One is called layout. Right past that yeah, the layout, the modeling, sculpting, UV editing, texture, painting, shading, animations. Blender is used for so many things. And depending on your work flow, what you're doing in Blender, you might not want to do all of those things. But layout is generally where we'll see all of the objects being added in and letting us know, ah, this is what we're going to do. If you're doing animations, you'll be in the animation editor, but those are configured to have what you might need from Blender at that given time.

JASON: Yeah, and Adrienne is asking, all of the tricks for magic mouse users. It's going to be important for me because I'm also using a track pad, not a three button mouse. I can plug in a three button mouse if it's going to be a blocker, but I definitely don't have one hooked up right now.

PRINCE: I think you'll be OK. I think we'll be fine. [ Laughter ]

JASON: It's going to be great, everyone.

PRINCE: We're going to go in and add an object. Inside of the space, you're going to see view select add object. So we're going to surprisingly go to add. And there are different things you can add. Meshes, curves, surfaces, a whole bunch of stuff. Meshes

JASON: Meatballs.

PRINCE: Close, metaballs. [ Laughter ]

JASON: OK. All right.

PRINCE: In a certain weird way because what happens is if you put more of them together, they start blending together, no pun intended. They start being able to look like they're having like osmosis or whatever you want to reverse osmosis where they're mushing together. I don't know science cell things, I tried there. There you go. You added a lovely cube back, again. And you'll notice it's once again activated. It's selected. Anytime you want to add new objects, you're going to want to add it, but there might be a shortcut. You might Blender is a shortcut heavy kind of tool. We're never going to go and click the things moving for this. Partially, because it's too much mass movement. We want our hands on the keyboard to do these things. And we try to make sure to put them in context. So we'll delete it, again, with X. Perfect. Perfect. And then, we're going to do Shift A to add. And you'll see the same menu pops up. You can do the different types if you want. You can add a different thing if you want. Instead of

JASON: Yeah, let's add a different thing. Circle.

PRINCE: Circle is very uninteresting. Oh, wait. It's fine.

JASON: Should I put it back?

PRINCE: Yeah, let's do a UV sphere instead. We're just adding things, playing around. We want to be familiar. And I think that's one thing I want to call out to people who want to learn Blender is there's a lot to the interface. There's a lot of little things. And you don't learn everything at once. And I think that's similar to programming where it feels like you have to learn everything at once. There's so many key words, so many little things that you feel like you have to memorize. And it's very important to not try to do that all at once. I'm a big workflow type of person, so workflows are important because the more you accrue over time, the less you'll have to be like, oh, how do I do this thing? How do I add something into this? You need to know how to do that and knowing that is a technical skill at that point.

JASON: Mm hmm.

PRINCE: Technical in the sense of, ah, I need to remember the technique.

JASON: Well, and something I've talked about in the past and I think you and I have talked about this, as well, is that there's, there is mechanical skill and then there is, like, artistic skill. So, like, one of the things that's really challenging is for a lot of folks when they start learning a new skill, they, I think Ira Glass puts it your taste outstrips your talent.

PRINCE: Yes.

JASON: Sometimes, that's because you have a better understanding of what is good than you have of the mechanics of making good things exist. And this is actually a huge blocker for me. I don't use Vim because I can see what code should look like but I don't have the mechanical knowledge of keyboard shortcuts and different key combos and what Vim is capable of to actually make the things so I use something like VSCode that gives me a whole bunch of preferences and I don't have to learn the mechanical stuff. I think that's the same reason that 3D has intimidated me is that when I look at this, there are so many mechanical things I don't know that I can't get into a flow state of just creating things. And why 2D drawing feels more approachable to me is when I was a kid, I took all of the classes about how to do the mechanics of 2D drawing, so I don't have to think as hard about how do I make this thing look like it has perspective? And instead, I can play and try, right? And so, that mechanical learning is the hardest part of the learning curve, but it's also the most critical. Because it's what keeps us from being a musician. If you can sit down at the piano and play, it's way more fun to play piano. Than if every time you have to make a note and look at it and get on the computer and look up what the chord looks like and put your fingers in the right place. One note, now get the next one, right? [ Laughter ] So, yeah, basically, all of that to just strongly reinforce what you're saying about the mechanics of this, learning how these pieces fit together and what buttons do what things is so critical to being able to be creative.

PRINCE: Exactly. And the opposite side, I found this to be creative because I can just put things into the scene and call it what I see as art. Because one of the things that turned for me is I didn't realize that art is just literally how you I didn't realize, I've never learned how to appreciate art. But art as I've been doing more 3D, now I understand why people really enjoy this experience of, one, not only making it but perceiving what it means to them. And I didn't really get it at first. And now, I'm like, wow, this is like, there's so much depth into it.

JASON: Yeah. This is really I'm excited. So I made my meatball. No, a sphere.

PRINCE: You made a sphere in this one. Now, we're going to try to move the sphere. So we're doing little practices, right. We have it selected, and this is the this is usually where people try to close Blender because you did exactly what I thought you were going to do. That's not a bad thing. I didn't I wasn't looking for you to fail here. But this is exactly what I did, too, how do you move it?

JASON: Yeah, right. That's not doing what I think.

PRINCE: The thing about Blender is the mouse doesn't move the object itself. Now, the way we need to move it is using another set of keys. So on the left side the work space, you'll see a bunch of icons. You'll see all of these. These are different tools you can use. Right now, we're just in the select mode. And in select mode, that lets us select what object we care about trying to focus on. But if you go to the third one. You'll see the kind of arrows, yeah, that's the move one. If we click on move with the mouse and you'll now see these little, they call them gizmos, and you can start moving things in the space.

JASON: Ahhh.

PRINCE: Your cursor can go across the screen. You can loop, you can do that forever into infinity if you want to. And then you're like, oh, gosh, where did it go? Very normal, very fun. And if you're like, let's say you hate what you did with it and you're like, I don't like it, you can command C, undo it. There's an undo feature. Very important.

JASON: Hooray! I feel like I'm going to use that a lot. [ Laughter ]

PRINCE: This is probably the biggest reason of why I didn't like physical art is I was like, I hate making quote unquote mistakes.

JASON: Right.

PRINCE: Physical art, I can't undo an action. Here, I can undo as much as I'd like to. So you're like, oh, I moved it over here, but now I'm like, I don't know about that. Nope. Undo. Oh, I don't know.

JASON: So I was just looking. I was looking here, they show shortcuts. So it says shortcut is shift spacebar G and this one was shift spacebar B. And it looks like if I if I hit shift spacebar, it shows me a bunch of stuff and I can go back D, and now I'm in select mode, B, now in move mode. OK, we're learning things.

PRINCE: Yes, now you have all of them. You learned about G is a way to move it, as well, if you select an object, you press oh, no. Now G.

JASON: OK. Cursor change. Oh, I just hold it. Nice, that's cool. Very cool.

PRINCE: Let's say you move it, but I don't want to move it on I don't want to move it on a specific axis, you could do G and Y, so they even stack certain things and you'll notice the green axes is now highlighted fully. You can now only move it across a specific axis, as well.

JASON: And if I hit Y does it change the axis?

PRINCE: Oh, let's try. It moves it. But you want to move on everything that isn't Y. This is isn't one of the creative ones. If you're like I hate Y, I don't want to see it, again, you can do shift Y, and everything but Y is what that means you can move on every axis except for the Y axis.

JASON: OK. All right. That wasn't making sense to me until I saw this happen. Can everyone see where I am on it's moving along the up and down and left and right but it won't move backward. Oh, that's cool.

PRINCE: Shift Z is another way to see it. Only on the flat surface and not up and down.

JASON: So if we had a like a stage, right? And we have things we want to move around like furniture, we could put it on this plane, no Z, and that way, everything is touching the stage, we can arrange the furniture around the room?

PRINCE: Exactly. That is exactly why you would do something like that. Because everything will start in the crosshair you see in the middle of the screen and it has that little cross hair, that's the cursor, formally known as, you can move that around everywhere, but every object will always start there.

JASON: Right.

PRINCE: That's very helpful there.

JASON: OK. That's cool. And then, I figured out by if I hit G, right? Free form, and if I hit Y, I'm on the Y axis, if I hit X, I'm X axis and Z, I'm on the Z axis. So you can just tell it where you want to move it. OK. This is making sense. I'm understanding.

PRINCE: See, you're putting it all together. Like I said, it's a very shortcut heavy thing, but if you're like, oh, I don't know how to do it with the shortcut, the gizmo we did before, which is the move tool, this was really helpful, as well. The third tool is the move tool. And you can do all of that, again. If you're like, oh, the Z axis, that's the blue arrow and the X is the Y arrow, sorry, the green arrow, red arrow, words are hard. Or Y is the green arrow. So you can move all of them the same way.

JASON: Yeah. Look at that. I get it.

PRINCE: And you'll notice the kind of squares on the side of the object, that's similar to moving it across certain axes but not other axes. So that's the shift Y, for instance.

JASON: Gotcha, OK. That makes sense. I'm with you.

PRINCE: All right. We have a nice little object here that is, that is kind of small. What if we wanted it to be a little bit bigger? The fifth tool on the side there, if you kind of move, you'll see scale. If you press that, scale is if you try to use any of these little things, you can scale by that particular axis. You have a stretched ball or squished ball.

JASON: Little pancake.

PRINCE: We can make pancakes!

JASON: Oh, all right.

PRINCE: I like pancakes. That's pretty cool. So you're probably thinking to yourself, this is a little hard to see. It's kind of far away. We want to oh, I guess you could just make it big. That also solves the problem. [ Laughter ] We are now making giant pancakes. I don't know how much flour we used to make this. I hope it tastes OK. [ Laughter ]

JASON: A gluten nightmare.

PRINCE: This is why I have found Blender to be very fun. You can just have fun and you can make things. Quote, unquote, mistakes, happy accidents in this case. You know, you figured out you wanted a pancake and all of a sudden you have a pancake.

JASON: Oh, and Jacob's saying, it could also be because it was meatball when it started, now it's a smashburger. Uh oh. We making smashburgers today?

PRINCE: Is that what you want?

JASON: Maybe we make this a smashburger.

PRINCE: OK.

JASON: To do that, we have to come up with a handful of shapes. Top bun, bottom bun, we've got to do the patties and we'll also need, like, you know, we would need to put sauce on the patty somehow kind of have a thing that follows the surface of another thing. That could be a good way to get through some stuff. How are we doing on time? We've got like 45 minutes.

PRINCE: Yeah. I think we can get all the way to the buns, we'll get the patty, I think we can do this all. We practiced a bunch of different things. The last thing I care for is rotation. We probably aren't going to rotate, but I think it's important to at least practice it. Before the scale 2, oh, now you're rotating the view. So the gizmo on the right hand side, the top right hand side there that you're playing around with, that allows you to control the viewpoint. That's not what the camera's going to render out to us, but this is us being able to see the entire 3D space.

JASON: You actually just might have answered a question, which is I just noticed this little buddy over here

PRINCE: Yeah.

JASON: Is this the camera?

PRINCE: That is the camera. So by default, the startup file has a simple object that is square or cube to be technical, a light and then a camera. And if you're like, what does it look like right now when I render it out? There's a camera right underneath that gizmo, you see the magnification lens, the hand and the camera, that's going to look like when we render it out to the screen. When we're ready for our rendering, our final product. This is what it's going to appear as a nice floating gray disk.

JASON: Got it, got it, got it. Oh, and this is our light here. This

PRINCE: Mm hmm. And right now, you'll not notice the lighting happening because in this view mode, we don't get any access to light. You're playing with the controls and I don't know what it's going to do to our light, I'm very excited to see. But let's say we wanted to see what it looks like. I told Jason before we started the stream, in order to make sure Jason doesn't crash the screen, we want to make sure not to go into certain viewport shading. At the top right of this view, there are a few little buttons we can press. The first one is a wire frame, if you click on that one, it's going to show us all of the edges and vertices inside of our object. This is really helpful because sometimes you want to know if things are in alignment and lines are really helpful. If we want to go into the technical terms about how 3D rendering works, like, everything needs to be told, like, what point into the universe it is. And then, we need to eventually tell it what kind of layer on top is it? And that's called a mesh. So this beautiful disk is what this is what it really looks like. There's a lot of faces on it. Anytime there are these edges connected, that's what's making known as face. Sometimes you might want to move face, you might want to use edges, vertices, and that goes back into shapes. You can move points, vertices, lines, edges, or whole faces, which is 4 or several edges together.

JASON: Got it.

PRINCE: Let's go into the next one, that's the one we were in, and the one right after that, this one is showing us the model without color on it. This one we're in is the one with color. Let's say we wanted to add color. This is what we're going to add a material for. And this is where it's going to get interesting. Because I'm going to now describe how to get to a material. Let's say I love you're playing with the lighting.

JASON: I actually don't know if it's moving is what I'm confused about.

PRINCE: Right now, you're scaling it. I don't know if this light scales, it may not do that. But you can change the type of light that is. If you wanted to play around with the lights so let's change the light. On the right hand side, on the top right, you're going to see what's known as the outliner. That's what's going to say what are the objects in the shape? And on the bottom side, you're going to see a list of other configurations that we can do. And one of those is a green lightbulb that green lightbulb is a configuration we can do for our light. And if we're like, oh, what kind of different lights do we want? There's a sunlight, point light and these kind of translate to different types of lighting sources that you'll have, as well, depending on if you're familiar with like photography. This kind of all has similar aspects into it. But let's say we wanted to give a plane. So let's do shift A.

JASON: Shift A.

PRINCE: Into the scene, yep. Shift A. And then, let's go back to mesh and let's add a plane.

JASON: OK.

PRINCE: And the plane is a flat surface, it is just that. Let's leave it back in the center. And let's scale it with S. S for scale.

JASON: S for scale. Nope. S for scale. There it is.

PRINCE: And now, you're making this beautiful, beautiful table for us for our little burger.

JASON: Mm hmm.

PRINCE: I really, really want to render it so badly. I want to see what happens. And I show we shouldn't. So I'm going to we're going to try it. OK. Before we click the button, there's some things we can test. No, don't click it! [ Laughter ] There is a screwdriver and a wrench.

JASON: Screwdriver and wrench.

PRINCE: Right where we saw the light source. No that one. And then there's an LCD screen for the camera. The one right there. Notice here, the rendering samples, this is how many pictures it's basically going to take to say what does it look like? And you'll notice the tab says rendering engine. Do not click this. The rendering engine is what I was mentioning before. If we change our rendering engine from EV to cycles, it does ray tracing on, that's the lens we can do computations for you. EV does not do as many computations, but because I can hear, I think maybe your fans spinning, I don't know how well this is going to work. But we're going to try it, we're going to see. We're going to click on the last render sending that's the one. [ Laughter ]

JASON: OK.

PRINCE: Everything's kind of dark. Let's click on our light source.

JASON: Let's click on our light source.

PRINCE: Inside of the view there's going to be the light lamp, yeah, that's the one. Now, you're going to click on the green light. Yeah, now your light is not doing anything. That is weird. Oh.

JASON: OK. I think I moved something and I don't know exactly how.

PRINCE: Oh, the size of it is small. Let's put it let's do control Z. And let's do it, again. And then, you'll see oh, let's go back to area light.

JASON: I think I messed with it a while back.

PRINCE: We're going to see. You see the size X and Y, let's make the size bigger, keep doing that. You may have told this poor light it doesn't know what it's doing anymore. Oh, no.

JASON: Yeah, I think I might have fully busted it.

PRINCE: This poor little light.

JASON: What did I do? Sorry, buddy. OK. Sunlight today because

PRINCE: Sunlight is fine. Sunlight is very strong right now. So we can turn the strength of our sunlight down. Back in the see, look, you can see the shadow being casted on it. It's very difficult to tell there's anything in there because everything is really white. And instead of dragging it down, you can type in here, you can do something like, let's do 2. Not 200.

JASON: OK. There we go.

PRINCE: Simple light. It's a little simple light. The UV is way too high. [ Laughter ] What we're going to do is give our little pancake, Smushburger some color. Right now, it's a little uninteresting. If we go towards the you see where the tab, the green vertexes are, if we scroll down further there, mm hmm. And you'll see right underneath it is this like ball that's material properties. You click on that. This is how we give our little pancake Smushburger some color. You need to add new material, and click on that plus button.

JASON: There it is. Beautiful.

PRINCE: Cool. And then, you'll see there's different things inside of here. There's a lot of configurations you can do, but the one we're going to care about is the base color. That's what is actually going to tell it, this is the color you're supposed to look like. And you can see in realtime the color's changing for us. And it uses things like RGB, HSV and hex, the things you're familiar with inside of CSS, it can use.

JASON: Got it.

PRINCE: You can do saturations, as well.

JASON: Yeah, this is looking burgery.

PRINCE: Chat, let me know if this looks like a burger real quick. Is Sarah in the chat here? Is this what a burger looks like?

JASON: We didn't make a bucket of water for Sarah to feel confident this is a burger.

PRINCE: Oh, my gosh. If we're making Sarah's burgers, we'll have to add some fish and bubbles around here.

PRINCE: Fish and bubbles! Now you have the skills of 3D model, what the burger would look like, Jason.

JASON: Coming for you. [ Laughter ]

PRINCE: Let's add a top bun, I think.

JASON: OK. Yeah. Let's do it. So shift A.

PRINCE: Yep, perfect. We can do, basically, like I mentioned before, we can use all the different shapes we have to kind of change them around. For me, I probably would just use a BUBC, again. And that's generally something you can do, you can start with the object you're familiar with and start scaling the part or tweaking them a little bit to get what you want. In our case, you might scale it all together so the white circle would be what I choose to rescale everything. But we want to match it to the top. I'll let you figure out how much extra fluff there needs to be burger wise, I don't really know what a Smushburger looks like yet.

JASON: OK. Let's go here and we'll kind of scale this up.

PRINCE: Mm hmm. And you oh, I can't see quite if it's aligned. That gizmo you had before, like on the right side, there is an X, Y and Z. And if you click on the circles that says X, Y and Z, oh, don't do that to the right side where it has the little thing that turns the camera, you can actually click on those and that will give you the perspective of just the flat view.

JASON: Nice. This shows us I have gotten these out of alignment. Is there like a line up button? Like center these on each other?

PRINCE: There are but I'm not certain if that will move it further. We can try to let's click that, again. Go to. Let's do object and let's go to snap, and then snap to, let's do snap to snap selection to cursor. So that's going to move it for probably a little bit down.

This gives us almost everything that we wanted. So I can take these two pieces, then, and I can

PRINCE: Look at you. Multiple selections, you can do that, too.

JASON: OK. So then, I've got my, I've got my burger bun, and then, we can do, like a squish

PRINCE: OK.

JASON: That's kind of bun looking, and we can do one of these to make it a little bit bigger, about like so.

PRINCE: I like it.

JASON: I want to cut it in half.

PRINCE: Let's click on the green Y, I'm going to call it a gizmo.

JASON: That's a gizmo.

PRINCE: We want to get it right. Yeah. Look at you. Who needs a middle mouse button when you can do it by hand like this? I didn't even teach you how to do that. You already knew. Boom.

JASON: I had a suspicion.

PRINCE: So I mentioned before, there's different views you might want to have. In our case, we're actually going to go to the wire frame view and you can press Z, just Z, of and that will let us be able to do that.

JASON: Nice.

PRINCE: And we want to cut a circle. Remind me to zoom in to get the accuracy correct. Let's zoom in a little bit tiny bit more. Perfect. And what we're going to do is press forward slash, backslash, the one that is the question mark.

JASON: Got it.

PRINCE: This focuses just the object we care about. You'll notice the pancake, I mean Smushburger is no longer there. The thing is no longer in front of us. We can just focus on this. And we want to grab a certain set of lines that, probably the middle section. So you can click on a line, oh, actually, this is actually something I've totally skipped on a while back. Right now, there's different modes. Right now, we're in object mode, and we need to go into edit mode. And edit mode lets us move through the different lines. So before, we could change the entire object, but now, we can take parts of our object. We can click on the vertices or the edges of our object, and we can delete them if we want to or we can split them apart and do whatever you want. In our case, let's do half of our burger. Take it, and that could delete the edges, if you want. And you could do X, and this is where we will decide. We will delete either vertices edges or edges and faces, let's do vertices. And now, you got two burger buns.

JASON: OK. Nice. OK, then I can let's go back to object mode. And now, are these separate pieces?

PRINCE: They are not. And that's a great question. Because right now, that's one of the no more headable things if you do things in object mode or edit mode, do I want them separate or together? Let's go back to edit mode quickly.

JASON: Edit mode.

PRINCE: Select the bottom. And rotate really quick just to make sure we've got everything selected. Because the worst thing you select is you select some things and don't select the other things.

JASON: Oh, like leave a couple of these out.

PRINCE: Exactly, but the view we have now lets us do x ray and we're going to do P, press P.

JASON: Separate.

PRINCE: And we're going to separate. And you'll notice the top right in the outliner, you'll have a sphere 001 or sphere '002. And what this does is basically says, here are two different objects from our selection.

JASON: Ah, yes.

PRINCE: What you'll want to do is go out of edit mode back into object mode. And if you ever want to do that faster, you can press tab, and that will let you select.

JASON: Nice, OK.

PRINCE: Easily into object mode by default. If you want to change that at any point you can, as well. Now you have two objects, top bun and bottom bun. And you're probably like, I don't like looking at the wire frames anymore, let's press Z, again and go back to solid.

JASON: OK. So

PRINCE: Backslash, again.

JASON: There's our little burger. OK, so we have a couple things that, so the first thing that I'd probably want to do at this point is I'm noticing, like, this is more round and this is more round on the bottom. So if I want to, like, smoosh this piece down so this is flat at the bottom, how would I flatten the bottom of this?

PRINCE: I love that. So let's do that. Do you also want to put faces on your burgers? So they look like buns?

JASON: Let's do it.

PRINCE: Let's press real quick. We're selecting this one. So select an entire ring of things, this is a secret trick. It's not that secret. You can use the option select or do that. Right now

JASON: Options select.

PRINCE: Option click on the line. You'll notice how that what it does it gets the whole line around to connecting. So you can do that in different versions, as well. And right now, we want a new face on our handy dandy thing, to make a face, you press F.

JASON: F for face.

PRINCE: F for face and you've got a nice little face. Beautiful. And if we want to make the other one do the same thing, I can do that exercise.

JASON: I need to get out do I have this locked somehow?

PRINCE: If you edit mode into an object, you have to go to object mode and then edit mode for the other thing.

JASON: OK. Got it.

PRINCE: Only focusing on one thing.

JASON: F.

PRINCE: Beautiful. Look at this 3D modeler out here making his first 3D model. We love to see it.

JASON: Feeling pretty good about this.

PRINCE: It's looking pretty good. Pretty smooshed so far. If we go back into one of the buns, whichever one you want. In our case, we need to go back into edit mode and

JASON: OK.

PRINCE: Maybe we go and find the center point of our bun.

JASON: Like here?

PRINCE: Toward the bottom. Yeah, we can do that, too. That probably works. And let's say we want to scale it. We want to proportionally scale everything around it. So what we're going to try to do is we're going to press O for proportional scaling. That's going to turn on if you look at the top center of the work space, you're going to see this highlighted like standard deviation thing, if you I wish I had better words for this. [ Laughter ] So notice where it says global.

JASON: Here.

PRINCE: OK. If you move your cursor a little bit over, you'll see this bell curve and if you click on the bell curve, there's different ways to do the proportional editing. This one is smooth but if you want to do randomness or anything like that, that's something you can customize how you want to edit. So now, when we move things around, it's going to move other things proportionally to it smoothly.

JASON: OK. OK.

PRINCE: Before we move anything at all.

JASON: If I come in here and I click this, oh, it does nothing.

PRINCE: Yep, perfect.

JASON: Move.

PRINCE: Yes, yes. You notice everything is moving proportionally together. And and so that moves like your burger now has just beautiful, beautiful. Let's say we go towards the top part of our bun. Because we want the top to move inward, right? Maybe the bottom of our bun is what I should say in your perspective. In my mind I'm thinking the bottom, oh, I guess that works, too.

JASON: So what I'm kind of picturing is if we take this bit here and so I'm going to have to fix this. Because what I really want is the bottom bun is going to be, actually, you know what I should do, we should cut this off and put a new face on it.

PRINCE: We have the power to do all that. We've practiced all of these things.

JASON: We have the power. So I'm going to take this, and I'm going to get all of these I'm going to delete.

PRINCE: Remember, we're not OK.

JASON: No?

PRINCE: We're not in x ray mode right now, so you were right, we just immediate to make sure we select all of the faces even the ones we don't see. So we press Z.

JASON: For wire frame is x ray.

PRINCE: And that should make sure to give us the wire frame, we always test our things before we do it, otherwise, we're going to see a random face. And wee want the vertices in this case.

JASON: So then, I center up. Then I need to get all of these for the face?

PRINCE: You can do that, too. Look at you. Shortcut magic over here.

JASON: Solid.

PRINCE: Look at that. We've got a nice looking this is a very nice looking burger. We had no practice whatsoever about Blender. So this is Jason learning in realtime how to make a burger with 3D modeling tools. We love to see it.

JASON: And then, I've got this it's still moving proportionally with me. So if I option click, do one of these, and then, maybe an option click and do one of these come on, here we go. That's looking a little bun like.

PRINCE: That's a pretty solid a pretty solid bun. I'm not going to lie. Like, I really didn't expect I told Jason before, I think you have really good spatial technique. I think you'll pick this up really quickly and he really has. I didn't need to tell him anything, he already knew. Just told him the commands, he's running with it.

JASON: OK, if we do this, then. We should be able to do the same thing for this bun, assuming I can how do I select, again? What have I done? Object mode, edit mode.

PRINCE: Edit mode of the meat right now, is that what you want?

JASON: Yes. Yeah, I want to make the meat similarly like flat on the top and bottom so that we have the kind of burger shape, right?

PRINCE: Mm hmm.

JASON: It's get out of here. There we go, that seems right, and then, if I take this line and do a face. This line and do a face, and we'll come out to solid, there we go, that looks good.

PRINCE: Masterful burger work. JA ya great.

PRINCE: This is a really good looking burger.

JASON: It's doing OK. We'll need to do a little bit of work around like, I don't know how to now I've chopped these, I'd want to round them a little bit.

PRINCE: Oh, you want to round them? We can do that.

JASON: Let's try to round the bottom of the bun. I want this to feel more like, you know, organic.

PRINCE: OK. Let's try one thing. Sometimes, you'll notice there's a lot of faces right now, right? Kind of like squarish. If you right click on the object, you'll see different types of shading. Smooth shade or shade flat. And we want to shade smooth.

JASON: Whoa.

PRINCE: That gives it a more smooth looking thing. For now, let's do smooth flat just so we can get the right angles on it. Oh, perfect. And you want it to have more of a roundedness.

JASON: Right.

PRINCE: We can click on the object. Let's tab into object edit mode. And then, let's try adding a bevel.

JASON: Do I click on this to add the bevel? Or leave it unselected?

PRINCE: Let's select it. Select where you want it to be round. Perfect, control B or command B.

JASON: B?

PRINCE: Might not look like it's doing anything.

JASON: I hit control B and command B and I don't know what I've done. Holy buckets.

PRINCE: You made the bevel. So this is interesting. I usually don't OK don't click anything notice on the bot ton.

JASON: I'm going to undo what I've done.

PRINCE: Do it, again. Perfect. Get the distance that you want for it. Yeah, perfect.

JASON: Like that?

PRINCE: Press the left mouse, perfect. So what we're doing is making sure that everything is going to go well, and on the bottom left, you'll see a little thing that says bevel, and we want to expand that menu. And the reason I wanted to call this out is by default whenever you do any sort of movements or create new objects, these are preset definitions you could do or you could edit customization, but you can only do this when you first make the thing. And you'll notice you started playing around with the segments. And you can make the segments a little bit more to add some more segments, that gives it more rounded effect if you want the width of the segments to be bigger, you can change that, as well. So kind of gives you a little bit more customizations along the way.

JASON: I got it. OK. Yeah. That's fun. And that kind of does what we wanted. I'd probably do that a little bit differently if I was going to do it, again. But I'm happy for it for a first try.

PRINCE: Yeah, and we go back into object mode. Love that. And look at that little burger bun. And you can

JASON: Now, I'm going to duplicate you, copy, paste.

PRINCE: Look at you using commands.

JASON: What makes it move? B. That's the one. And I need you to go down. And now we've got double smashburger.

PRINCE: Double smashburgers, y'all. And right now, it's a great looking burger. So let's go back into the material preview. And you'll see here, we've got these two buns, and you'll notice it copied over the material, as well, for that

JASON: Which I love. That's very nice.

PRINCE: By default, it's going to do that. They're not linked together. Meaning if you change one of them to be smaller, then they're not going to do it. But if you change the color, since they're using the same material, both of the colors will change.

JASON: Right.

PRINCE: If that was a burger where it was yellow like that, I would not be eating it. Just letting you know. Just letting you know.

JASON: That's a good bun color. Let's go with that. And is this can I take this material and drop it on this one?

PRINCE: You can. You can actually click on it hold and drag it oh, did you click on it? Maybe not. It's fine. Let's click on the bun instead.

JASON: Bun.

PRINCE: And you'll see that material thingy there you were just hovering over it the circle and you can select it. And now, it has the same color. Look at that burger.. That's a pretty solid burger, I'm not going to lie.

JASON: I ain't mad at it.

PRINCE: Now we need some cheese. Cheese really is just a plane if you think about it. Depending on what kind of cheese you like.

JASON: Yeah, so in a perfect world what I'd love to do is we would have the cheese would be, like, an American slice, right? So square. But then, I want the edges to drip over the side. So in my mind, what I would get is I would have let's say a plane. Now I've got this plane and I'm going to move this up to like herish. Now it's visible. OK. And then, I would want that to be, let's just make it yellow.

PRINCE: Mm hmm. Look at you. The quickness. Already calling it out. It definitely looks green. It could be the orange playing tricks on us. It's kind of giving you highlighted yellow.

JASON: Highlighted yellow is a good American cheese color. That definitely feels green. Am I doing something weird?

PRINCE: No, I don't think you are. I think you're fine. I think it's the reflection off of the material of the burger.

JASON: Oh, like the lights?

PRINCE: The lighting causing that effect. If we don't want the lighting effect, what we can that's some big cheese. OK.

JASON: We probably want it about like this. That's about roughly what the size would be, and then, I want drip these edges.

PRINCE: Mm hmm. So you could we could try this, I feel like it might not work the way I want it to. But go into edit mode. Perfect, and you already knew you needed to click on the thing. We probably going to need to add more lines. You'll notice that if we try to move the vertices, try to move it down, you can do G, Z. All of it's moving down. We don't want to do that. We probably need more lines. Before we do this, press O for me so we can remove the proportional editing, just for a second. And now, let's right click on our cheese.

JASON: Right click on the cheese.

PRINCE: And you'll see subdivide. This is going to add more lines to this. It's going to add more lines and you can add a ton of them. You should be seeing them but I don't know if I do.

JASON: Do I have all of it selected? Or just the I think I only have the one vertices. Let me try, again.

PRINCE: Now it's working, perfect. We want probably a lot.

JASON: Let's go to ten?

PRINCE: That's fine.

PRINCE: Can you undo this?

JASON: Yes.

PRINCE: This is important, right now you're in vertex mode, between the vertices, that's what doing the editing. Let's do a face, instead. So right now you can only click on the vertices, but we want to click on the face because we want the faces to droop down. On the top next to edit mode, there's a point, a line sorry, that's the one, and a face. We want to be in the face mode. And now, do some subdivisions.

JASON: OK.

PRINCE: This is what I was expecting, these little squares to pop up. That's going to help tell Blender, there's more geometry to pay attention to.

JASON: There we go.

PRINCE: And you could do test if you wanted to. But now press the number one. That takes us to vertex mode, it's quick, easy thing. And if we want to droop it down, we need to click one of the vertex and do proportional editing, we'll press O, and then, we'll droop it down, G and then Z.

JASON: OK. It's kind of doing what we want.

PRINCE: Let's turn the proportional editing down a little bit.

JASON: What did I just do? I started using I'm just narrowing the

PRINCE: Basically the effect.

JASON: Hey!

PRINCE: This is the effect of the proportional editing. If you want the circle to be smaller, that's the effect. That's kind of like

JASON: That's very cool. Got it. OK. So that feels.

PRINCE: You can do that with all of the others, if you want. And we can move things on the end.

JASON: I'd want this moved in. And maybe I want to select all of these

PRINCE: Mm hmm.

JASON: And then, we'll move let's get this one, too. And we'll move all of those kind of back in like this, right? And got a little bit of an issue here.

PRINCE: We can cover it up, if you'd like. I have some tricks for that.

JASON: Oh, I could definitely let me just get out of this then, I'll undo that. Maybe we'll droop one of these.

PRINCE: We could make it all work. So cheese is usually not this thin. Cheese is usually a little thicker, so sometimes you might want to add something but don't want to destructively do it. You don't want to override what is originally there. And you want to go into the little wrench, the blue wrench to the side. Modifier to change the geometry to look a certain way P and nondestructively. And we're going to add a little skin buffer on it. So under generate, there's the skin. [ Laughter ] Sorry, not skin, let's undo that. It's a beautiful cheese burger. It's beautiful.

JASON: That's
[ Laughter ]

PRINCE: Let's undo that.

JASON: OK.

PRINCE: Click the X button next to it. Go back to modify, not skin, solidify. That's my bad. That's the right one because it gives it a little nice outlook. Instead of the thickness BNT .01 meters, we're going to increase the thickness a little bit. Inside the modifier tab, again, there's a thickness control and you can make it thick. We want to go the opposite direction, the offset needs to not be negative 1, but rather 1. Under thickness there's offset. We turn it to 1. Perfect. And then, you have

JASON: I want to go back in here and we'll go to a positive.

PRINCE: And now you've got a thick cheese.

JASON: Yeah. All right. And then, I made this concave by mistake, and if I want that to be out is there like a not an inny, an outtie button?

PRINCE: You're going to have to move the vertex. [ Laughter ] You're done. You're done. You're done.

JASON: What would make this really easy for me is if I could take this whoops, I want to go here and here. If I could take this one and this one, right? And I could add a line between them? That would flatten it out.

PRINCE: I think so. Let's try oh, my God, I just forgot I forgot it. I forgot what it is.

JASON: Is it (inaudible)?

PRINCE: Let's try that.

JASON: Path or pairs?

PRINCE: Oh, I really don't know.

JASON: Let's try it. What have I done? Yeah, looks like it did what we want. So let's go back to, what was the

PRINCE: Or if you want, you can material preview.

JASON: Solid, that's closer to what we wanted. You know what, that's

PRINCE: Looking pretty cheesy.

JASON: It's not perfect, it's getting closer, so I'll accept it. And if we were

PRINCE: Slightly loosen the other ones and say this is our burger.

JASON: Yeah, any way to duplicate this across all four corners?

PRINCE: No.

JASON: So I want to do Z and we want to go into this mode. And then connect this.

PRINCE: I don't know if we can mirror all of it. No, probably not. Oh, huh, yeah, look at you. One of these and one of these and then it was J. Oh, yeah, look at this. Look at you. Shortcuts.

JASON: OK, so now

PRINCE: All to the learning path, as well. You just kind of learn something and you're like, I'm going to use this technique to solve that type of problem. That is definitely the Blender way.

JASON: Droop.

PRINCE: Look at you.

JASON: So that was definitely a more what I was after. So this is not perfect by any means, but it gives us a little bit of a droopy cheesy boy, I can go to object mode and I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste and I'm going to come in here. And I'm going to go on the Y axis only. Right?

PRINCE: Oh, look at that.

JASON: And my next are trick which is to rotate this 45 degrees.

PRINCE: Press R to rotate. And then then you want to rotate it along the Z axis. You want to rotate Z and then, tight 45.

JASON: No way! Perfect. OK.

PRINCE: Blender lets you do all of these modifications with numbers, as well. It stacks all of these things together.

JASON: So this is perfect.

PRINCE: Look at that burger.

JASON: This is definitely I'm not going to lie, we're coming up on time here so we should probably call this a good stopping point and look at resources, but this is so much more of a 3D rendering than I thought I would pull off in a first session. Like, I really did think we were going to get like here's a square, and we've got some lights on it and oh, look we made it look like plastic, rock or something. But this

PRINCE: What we made is a burger.

JASON: And we could pass this out. This could be a fun way of doing a low polyburger. I could put this nobody look at this and go, oh, that's a work of art. But it's also not, not a burger. [ Laughter ]

PRINCE: Yes.

JASON: This is a good question. Can you make the cheese more fluid so it reacts to other objects? That's a good question because I feel like I've seen something in Blender where you can kind of take one thing and put it on top of another thing and it sort of uses that mesh to shape it. Is that like is there a button for that? Or is that sort of bit more advanced technique?

PRINCE: I would say, in my mind, I'm thinking of like the shrink wrap technique, there is a modification shrink wrap it. But my worry is it will literally shrink wrap so much it'll take the cheese and put it underneath the patty. To do it more organically, you have to do a little bit of hand editing. So I think the way we did it probably gives us the best effect without having to do too much.

JASON: Got it. There may be some things we could've done to make it more fluid before we started hand tweaking but we're going to need hand tweaking to make this work.

PRINCE: Yeah, and that's part of Blender. That'll happen quite a bit, you get 80% of the way and have to do hand tweaking to get it the way you want it.

JASON: That's probably a reasonable thing to expect, right? The computer's not going to do the whole thing for you.

PRINCE: Exactly.

JASON: You can get something that feels very, like, what's that dire straits music video? The actual song called Money for Nothing? I want my MTV, I can't remember what the song was actually. They did that whole videos in 3D and it's very like blocky and like low poly 3D. So we can get that sort of thing done. But if we want it to feel more organic, more personal, you've got to put the extra time in to do the work of manually tweaking.

PRINCE: Exactly.

JASON: Prince, this is fun. This is really, really cool. What anything, given our four remaining minutes, anything else you want to look at? Or do you want to start pointing at resources?

PRINCE: I think we can point at resources, my very last thing, and the most important thing we forgot to do, somebody pointed out in the chat a while back, we never saved.

JASON: Oh, yeah.

PRINCE: The one thing we want to do is make sure to save. Because like I mentioned, Blender could crash on us at any point today, we were streaming, camera stuff and also Blendering in general, it could have just been like, nope, you're not going to be saving today. Definitely want to save your files. And save regularly.

JASON: I'm going to save this here. I'll probably put this somewhere that we can link as a because if I save this, anybody with Blender could access the file and open it and play with it?

PRINCE: Yes.

JASON: I'll put this in dropbox and we'll make that the demo link for the show today. If anybody wants to get Blender and get this burger and play with it and show me how you would do the cheese better.

PRINCE: Ooo.

JASON: This also sort of looks like a little robo crab you would see in a video game with the pointy flappers.

PRINCE: I love that.

JASON: So I want to see what y'all are going to do with Blender. Take this burger, make it better. Put the toppings you want on it and show me how you make your perfect burger. Prince, where should people go if they want to learn more about Blender?

PRINCE: I feel like there's a variety of resources, all over. The way that I learned Blender is actually through different YouTubers and practicing a little bit. Wait, if you play that song. I was going to say

JASON: I'm not going to get into I wanted to make sure it was linked for the show notes since we talked about it.

PRINCE: Across YouTube, there's a variety of different YouTubers doing Blender. A lot of people talk about Blender Guru, but I think they go further in depth into things. Another person has a polygon runway. Please note, we're not going to do Blender Guru, Polygon runway has a set of courses that are paid, but there's a free resource they have that is learn illustration in one hour, under shop courses if you go into it. Click on shop courses on the top there. And scroll to the bottom. And the top and the bottom left there, there's, oh, you just passed it.

JASON: Here we go.

PRINCE: Learn to illustrate in one hour. This is the first course I used. They talk about the different shortcuts, as well and I found that valuable. It made me aware that there are artists that do low poly. That do these very square shaped base kind of perspective. And I really like it kind of takes the burden of making these 3D human esque looking things.

JASON: Yeah, and I like it when you take detail out. It lets you play with like concept before you have to make it look perfect. Which I really thoroughly enjoy that.

PRINCE: There's a variety

JASON: Paid options if you want to go deeper. You've got like some low ish poly stuff that looks a little more like designed, 3D lettering is very cool, and this character looks really intense, which is super fun. And now, all the way down here, you've got some really intense stuff like neon lights and things. Lots of fun going on in here.

PRINCE: This creator has plenty of stuff on YouTube that is accessible if you're interested in animations, polygon runway is on YouTube the same way. They have a variety of different things they do. Yeah.

JASON: Polygon runway. Find the YouTube channel and drop that. Here it is. So here is this. OK. So, yeah, lots of resources there. And, I know you also post a lot of your work in progress, you're kind of learning in public on that which is one of my favorite things about that you share your work. Anywhere else you want people to check out?

PRINCE: I think just any really, there's just a lot of things out there. Everyone has a different way to doing their art. And the most important thing, I think, is learning the mechanics and, like, giving yourself a little bit of grace. Today, we made a little burger and we learned how to just make it fun. And I think that's what my advice to you to end us off is like, make it fun for yourself. Don't be like, oh, I'm not good enough for it. That was the thing that trapped me really hard when I started. But really enjoy making something and accept that you have to make a lot of things before you start really enjoying the way it comes out. But have fun with it at the end of the day. Doing something you like like a burger.

JASON: Yeah, I really do think the goal for this stuff, make it playful, if you're having fun, you're more willing to stick through the frustrating bits. What is this button, right? If you treat it like a chore or like a job that you don't enjoy, you're going to make any excuse to not do it, right? Find a way to make it fun, make it silly. I think that's definitely such a life hack. OK. So with that, we are out of time. So let me do one more shout out, we've got Diane from White Coat Captioning doing all of the live captioning for us, thank you so much. That's made possible by our sponsors, Netlify, NX and Backlight kicking in to make this show more accessible to more people. Go and give Prince a follow @Maxcell on Twitter. With that, I think let me show the schedule. A couple fun things coming up. We are going to let's see this one is actually going to be rescheduled. So on Thursday, we're going to do a solo. I'm going to see if I can get that realtime thing I was trying to build working and I've already done CSS, so I can't waste the whole episode on CSS this time. Watch me prove that wrong. And next week we'll have Neil Pai comen on. Lots of good things coming up. Lots of things I have not put into the schedule, as well. Just, you know, make sure you click these buttons. Follow on Twtich, add on Google calendar, I think we've got an RSS feed now. Lots of good ways for you to get information on what's coming up on the show so you can come hang out because it's fun, fun to hang out. Fun to be friends. Prince, thank you so much for spending time with us today.

PRINCE: Absolutely.

JASON: Any parting words for the chat?

PRINCE: I hope you all get to do fun and exciting things you enjoy. And I'm really thankful to have the space to share something I'm really interested with all y'all. So

JASON: Always a blast to have you around. I've said it before and I'll say it, again, you are sun shine, it is so much fun to spend a little bit of time with you. Thanks, y'all, for hanging out. We're going to find someone to raid and we will see you next time.

PRINCE: Bye, y'all.