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+  "text": " Hi everyone. So in this section we're actually going to cover how to block out our B-Tool and start modeling the prop that we're going to work on for this tutorial. So the first thing I wanted to just establish was this is the blockout that I created for the B-Tool project. So I just wanted to share that here. We are actually going to model out the elements in real time, but I just wanted to show what we're aiming for to begin with. So here is an example of the sort of detail that I would expect at this stage. So very simple primitive forms we've established the majority of the different elements we've got the heads and the horn in there we've obviously got our different sections for the legs and the back and everything there so it's really rough but it gives us a good idea as well. One of the first things I'll also do when I'm looking at assets is I'll try to establish what the the scale is in real world terms. And so just to really quick Google, I got a diagram here which shows, this is the beetle that I actually based the prop on. So we've got the Hercules beetle, I've just searched for the scale here. And you can see this gives us a rough indication of the size. So about six to 18 centimeters in length. Some reason this is in millimeters and inches here, but again, 1.2 centimeters to 3.6 centimeters in terms of height, and then 1.7 to 5.3 in terms of width. So I've made a box that roughly represents that scale, so five centimeters across 16 centimeters by four centimeters roughly. So that gives us a good indication. I'm not super worried in this case about the scale being very, very accurate. And one of the things I actually do as part of the modeling process is I scale everything up because one of the problems, if you try to model at a really small scale like this, is when you start to use things like bevels and modifiers and everything, you'll notice that you have to use very, very tiny values for those types of things. So it can be a little bit tricky to work with. And because I'm not too worried about this scale of this object for, I could always scale him up and down in terms of the actual final model. So I'm not too worried about it in this case. While I'm modeling, I potentially will scale up a little bit larger, but just getting an idea of what the scale should be in real world terms is always useful when it comes to this type of stuff. So that's some of the very basic beginning parts of this. The other thing I wanted to cover was about resources. So I'm just going to jump over into a different version of Blender here and something I wanted to just talk about is an add-on. So I'm just gonna quickly search for that So here's the website using sketchfab They've actually introduced an add-on in blender where you can download resources or models Using the sketchfab interface directly into blender So this is something I actually used as part of my project and I found it was really helpful for just getting started So especially if you are a beginner, I would definitely suggest this So if you go over and grab the plug-in you can just download this You just want to come over and download the zip file here, which is the sketchfab plugin and then over in blender To install plugins all you would do is come over into the preferences section here And I've actually already installed it But you basically just click this install button and choose the zip file and then we're going to enable the plug-in here and This will come up on the right hand side And so if you had an animal like a beetle for example you can do a search for beetle and then what you can see here is that give it a second to load it will basically load in different beetles and you can see that in this case it's also pulling up Volkswagen beetles as in the car as well but what's really nice about this is you can basically click the beetle click import and it's going to bring that model into the scene so then you can use that as a actual resource or a reference. So in this case it's brought in the object. I'm not sure why it's got all these extra sections in here. So it's achieved some reason it's underneath everything. But you can see here that we have a beetle model that we can actually use as a guide or a reference. So I definitely found that this was really helpful when it came to just getting the initial shapes established because just trying to understand the shapes of the legs from references is sometimes a little bit harder so this can be really helpful for more organic things definitely so just jumping back over into the scene that I have here we'll just jump over into this one and let me close out these other instances of blender that I have open so we can just keep that a clean base so I'll just close this one as well okay so I'll also just share the ones that I had downloaded here so we can see the types of resources that I was actually using when I was first starting to block things out. So here is, let me turn off the legs here as well. So and we can remove this scale as well. So this is just a an example of a Hercules Beetle. What I liked about this one is that it has a lot of the underside parts that would be be difficult to gather from reference as well. I mean, I do have some of that in reference. Like we can see here that I have some of that underside, but it's obviously a lot more difficult to grab reference images of that. So having it modeled out is definitely very helpful to see what the shapes look like underneath. And obviously we're gonna be changing this guy up a lot for Botic looking beetle. So this is obviously more supposed to be like a real beetle. So we'll use it as a guide, but we're definitely not gonna be trying to get a look like this, right? We're not trying to do a realistic beetle, we're trying to do a robotic one. And then this one is a rhino beetle. This one is more of a scan, so you can see it's actually from a real world beetle. So you can see a lot of the shapes and the patterns on the shells and things like that, which are really nice to see. But again, this is just a reference and a guide that we can use. And then we also have these Hercules beetles, there's a series of different ones. we've got. And I think these ones are actually from, because you can see there's a section on the bottom here where it attaches to something. I think these are like a scientific model that could be used sort of in a museum or something like that. And you can just see that we can get these different versions. So this one is the male one, we've got the female beetle as well. And then we've just got it separated out into the body and also into the legs as well. So we can see those different sections. So we'll definitely be using these as a guide when it comes to modeling and in some cases we can use it to actually generate some basic geometry for us for our blockout. So we'll be covering that as we start to do our modeling. So I just wanted to give that explanation there because I think it's a really helpful resource to be able to download and you can obviously use that as well if you are trying to, you know, if you didn't want to use say you you wanted to grab like other animals as well if you wanted to grab say a frog or you were doing a different model that wasn't a beetle you wanted to do something more simple then you could definitely use that to give you a guideline for modeling so hopefully that's helpful okay so now we're gonna actually start blocking out our beetle the first thing I wanted to do is just establish a hierarchy in terms of the folders and everything that we have here in the Outliner. So you can right click and add new collections or also press this little plus button up here to add layers. So I've actually got my existing beetle that I showed here. I can hide and unhide that for reference. But the first thing I want to do is basically establish folders. So the first thing I'm going to probably do here is just create a new collection and this is going to be the beetle blockout, let's say. I want to create folders for each of the sections. So I'm going to do one for the head and one for the body. So just kind of duplicate these up and rename these. So call this body. And then this is where we're going to keep our final thing. And if we look at the existing structure of everything, I have a working and a final folder. And the reason for this is because in some cases, I want to use instancing to basically repeat the object. So if we turn this on, I can sort showcase that. Here we have the legs, these are instances and we actually have our working files in here. So we're going to go over that process and then our actual body in our head are within these folders here. So we'll go over that structure but for now what I'll probably do is create a separate folder which will just be the working files and then I can create my legs, so this will be the beetle legs in here. So we have that kind of basic structure that we've created using the collections. So for example, if we wanted to create our head here, we'll just quickly add in some kind of rough shapes and cubes for the different sections. So like this is gonna be our head and we can match, I mean, we can match the current scale that we have or also using our reference guides that we have here Well, so if I go to we'll pick this one here and we'll enable that as well. So just grab our beetle So if we just get like our rough Objects in so that we know the sort of rough scales of these I'm just gonna basically Manipulate these cubes and that's gonna give us our head and our body So I'm just gonna put these in for now just as bases And so now I want to just show the process of creating the legs and how we're going to actually use collections and instancing to repeat those sections. Okay so for the legs if we have a look at our references here I'm just going to pull over where we start to look at the anatomy of our legs here so just open this one up here. You can see this is the rough structure of the leg you have a section here which is attached to the bottom of the body, we then have the femur and the tibia, which are the different sections of the leg, and then breaks into different sections here depending on the shape of the beetle. So if we look at that in terms of a real world reference as well, you can see that it is easy to kind of break into sections or into chunks here. So this is a good example. You can see how it's being broken down into the foot, into the tibia, into the femur, and then the coxahere as well which is attached to the body. So that's repeated so as we can see here we have all these different legs, we have six legs for the beetle so it makes sense to kind of break these pieces down into different sections and then instance them to create the legs of the beetle. So that's what I'm going to do here. So the first thing I want to do and I can use these guys as a guide right to establish the sort of scale so if I was to just start and I'm starting just with real basic shapes I'm starting with the cubes and then we'll get into actually detailing these up into a better block out models as well so I'm jumping around like different views here with the reference so I'm pressing the the slash key here and I can just go into the different view modes so if I wanted to look at this from the bottom view here I think this is actually the Tilda key that I'm pressing the Tilda key brings up this radial menu for the views. So I'm just gonna jump to the bottom and I just want to get the rough size of this like I don't care too much about the actual look of it at the moment I just want to get the rough scale and also we want to try and put the pivot point of this where it kind of makes sense that it would move around so you can see that actually the pivots kind of in a pretty good place if this was going to be moving around. It's going to be orientated from there and it seems to be working pretty nicely, right? So once I have that, let's make a few different folders for these different sections. So as far as our reference is concerned, we look at this from before. This is the femur. So I'm going to basically just make a folder under B2Leg and I'm just going to call that femur. So we can add this one to that, let's move it into the folder. And then what I want to do here is I want to position this, reset the transforms basically. So we're going to put this into world zero orientation here. And then the scale will just reset the scale as well. We can check on our other objects as well. We can reset the scale on these as well. So we just got our FEMA and what I want to do as well is I want this to orientate facing forward. Forward so at the moment it's facing to the right hand side so when we look at the front We're actually looking at the side of the leg But I want to orientate it so that it's this way so that we have it This is viewing from the front of the leg as if we were looking kind of downwards this direction, right? So that's our first shape established And then what I'll probably do here is for the next bit We're going to create a folder for the tibia, which is the next part of the the leg there So I'm going to do the same thing and I'm just actually going to duplicate this same box by pressing shift D And then I'm going to come over here, and I'm just going to get the right Roughly the right scale of this as well. You can rotate it if you want to check as well. We're just trying to rough Rough this out the moment. I'm not too worried about this being absolutely perfect I'm just kind of sliding this into place, right? So we can also just move this kind of up to get the rough scale as well. And remember that we're gonna reset the rotation and everything here as well. So we're just gonna, something like that. That feels like it's roughly matching the volume and the shape of the object there. So we can just reset the rotation, we'll reset the scale, and then I'm just gonna orientate that back. So now we have this guy, we can just rotate it 90 degrees. And we'll just press, I'm pressing Ctrl A to reset the scale here. So, cool, so that's resetting everything. We'll reset the rotation as well for both of these. Okay, so that's got our different leg pieces in place. I wanna make sure I've got the right one in the right folders there. And then finally, we're gonna do the foot. So we're just gonna come in here and we're gonna establish the foot. I think I've also, the reason this is saying foot 01 is because I already have in my working files done something similar with the leg where I've renamed this to be foot. So that's why it's renaming this to be for underscore one. So what we'll do is we'll just, we'll call this, so this one is our finished one. So I'm just gonna put an F over, after these just for finished so that we know it's not gonna duplicate the names there. So we'll just do that. And we can do the same for the head as well, right? So I'm just putting a couple of names in here just so that it avoids duplicating the folder names and everything there. Okay, so now we can rename this and it should be all good. So we have the foot I'm gonna come in to establish the shape of the foot in the same way I did before so I'm just basically roughing out The shape we're gonna scale this so I'm scaling Just by pressing s and then I press the axis I want to scale on so x to scale The axis here and then I can move this up as well was scale s and z on the z axis And then I'm just going to move this to roughly align with the foot. So this is going to be the foot and Then to move the pivot I'm using an add-on called pivot transform Which just allows me to edit this you can do it by clicking If you don't have the add-on you can do it by clicking the drop down and effect origin This will now allow you to move The pivot and then that's going to move into location But usually I would use pivot transform and just use the transform option to do that. So Cool. All right, so that's some now we've got the pivot in the in the right place there We can do the same thing just rotate move and we'll reset the scale Okay, and then this one we now want to move into the foot location So we now have our legs established and they're at world origin So if we hide our beetle now The next thing is we want to actually just have a version of our leg, right? So the first thing we're going to do is create a new folder under the blockout and we'll call this leg. So What we're going to do here now is and this can just be legs B for blockout. That's fine and then what we're going to do is we're going to reconstruct our leg out of those pieces. So the way that we do that is we will kind of hide the working files And then what we're gonna do is we have the FEMA the tibia and the foot I'm gonna bring back my reference that I was using just so I can position these correctly And I'm gonna press control or shift a to bring up my ad menu And I'm gonna come to collection instance and then I'm gonna search for FEMA, right? So we add that FEMA in We now have the FEMA as an instance and this is actually a collection instance So if we add or make changes to the FEMA itself, what you'll see is that this will update that collection. So that's really helpful, because it means we can add to this collection later and it's gonna update the legs. So yeah, so the first thing I wanna do is just build out the position of the FEMA. We'll just align it kind of where it was before. We're gonna bring it down. And so I'm just gonna hide the working files again. We're just gonna position this where we want it to go. So that's our FEMA added. You can see that empty scale at the moment is really large. So, because I have hard ops installed, what I usually do is just press Q and just bring the empty scale down so that we don't have to see that overview. Then I'll duplicate, you could duplicate the FEMA and then change under the collection instance here, we could alter, change that, but it will keep the name the same there. So what we could do as well is just do another one here and we'll choose the tibia. So now we can actually position our other piece of the foot, rotate that kind of roughly where we want it to be. And then this is now gonna create our foot piece here. And then if we wanted to do the alternative method, we could duplicate this. And then where it says under the object properties on the properties window here, where it says tibia, we could just change this to be foot. and it's gonna swap that out for the foot, right? So now we have these guys established, we can also reduce the empty scale. And then for the other feet, like to get those working how we want, we can just essentially now duplicate these that we've created here. So we have, we can rename this as well if we need to. So we have our TBA, we could also just rename this foot so that we know that piece is the foot piece. And so we can just now duplicate these control, to select them all and then shift D to duplicate them. And then we can actually position our pivot, oh sorry, position our legs here. So we can just rotate these. Another trick that you can also do is to parent these. So if we select this guy first and this one second and press control P, we can parent it. And now when we rotate this leg, it's also gonna rotate the other one here as well. And then we could parent this guy to here as well. So that now these have a hierarchy. So you can see that under the outliner that they're parented to each other. So when we select these guys, we can duplicate them and that parenting is respected, which means that when we move this guy here, we can just basically rotate the leg and the foot will come with it, which is pretty handy. So we're just kind of roughing this out and establishing the shapes and everything. We're not too worried about everything being perfect for now We will obviously improve these as we go along, but you can kind of see that we're getting our legs established. We probably would want to move these into the right location for the knees as well so that they kind of line up. You can sort of see that here. So we're just playing around with the transforms until we get this roughly into the right spot. You can rotate the legs and everything into the right position. So if we now hide our reference, you can see that we've got basically boxes a volume that we can actually see to establish the shapes and the forms of our model. So the next thing now is just to discuss the different ways that I'll start to actually replace these shapes with actual blockout models. So that will be the next step. Okay, so now we've got some of our basic volumes of the model blocked out in relation to our references here. I'm going to start by showing different techniques on how we can detail this up to being a more final block out So we're going to go through poly modeling and box modeling and we'll go through strip modeling and re-tapology and other different techniques that can showcase how to actually detail this up As we go through the rest of the tutorial as well We're going to build on those techniques and use different workflows for actually modeling out the the beetle here but I'm going to start off the first one I wanted to cover was the workflow for remeshing and retopology so manipulating if we've already got existing geometry how we can actually turn that into usable geo so that's going to be the first technique that I show okay so for retopology the first thing I would do is you need an existing piece of geometry and there's couple of ways to approach this the first is to read to apologize by hand and that technique is relatively straightforward the first thing that we would want to do is add in a vertices here that we can start to extrude from so I'm going to hold shift and right-click to move my 3d cursor and then I'm going to come to mesh and add a single verb from there I'm going to select vertices mode or press one on the keyboard and I'm going to extrude an edge and then from that edge I'll press e to extrude face here so we We now have a face that's sort of aligned roughly to this and we come to the view mode here. We can actually go into the edit view mode and then we can turn on the read topology option. The moment this just kind of shades it, you can't really see anything, but as we move around the model, you'll see that it's highlighted blue. So we actually need to flip this face. We're going to select the face itself and I'm going to press shift N and I'm going to click this button here that says inside which is going to basically flip the the face there so now we can see that it's blue so we want to snap this to the underlying geometry so one way we can do that is by adding a modifier called a shrink wrap modifier so we'll add the shrink wrap and we'll color pick the object and you'll see that now this is going to snap to the face we want to see that while we're editing verts we can also click this little button here and and now we can see that it snapped to the face. So if we go to face mode snapping we can also hold control to snap our verts to the face as we move them around as well. The shrink wrap is going to do that but it just means that we will avoid having vertices that are really far away from the model like this and then we have to get the shrink wrap to kind of snap them back. So yeah it's just going to be better if we also hold control to snap our verts as we move. And then to re-tapologize the process is pretty simple. You're just basically extruding out faces and then moving them around and manipulating them. So I'm effectively pressing E and then I'm selecting a vert and holding G and control and then moving these around. So I can follow the flow of the mesh and snap the verts to what I'm trying to do and align them. And then when I'm finished, this will be the model that we have there. So that's how you would approach this by hand. And we'll show that technique when we start to detail up a couple of the sections as well Another workflow is to use a modifier to basically remesh We can use the remesh modifier that comes with blender You have a few different options. You can do voxel remesh sharp remesh or blocks and generally sharp or smooth is pretty good And then you would increase the amount to get a read apologized version But the geometry isn't particularly nice with this particular workflow You can also turn on smooth shading if you want to smooth it out as well But this is another way to get slightly cleaner geometry than what we have here where it's all triangulated Here so that's one approach another approach which I tend to like to use Is using quad remesh? This is a an add-on a paid for add-on so you effectively select the mesh you would like to Run the remesh on and then in this case we can choose different options So adaptive quad count is basically the option for how much topology to put into more detailed areas So where we have say edges or particularly sharp sections, it's gonna put more topology in those areas That's the adaptive size and the quad count so we can disable and enable that or increase the tolerance for it I think 50% is the default and we can turn off These different options will get into those later as we use the modifier more but these can control how it read apologizes based off of the normals and the hard edges. You can hover over these as well if you want a description and then here we have our symmetry mode. So with this case I'm going to have symmetry on in the x-axis because this is a symmetrical mesh and I'm setting the quad count to a thousand and just leaving this as default and I'll run the remesh, we'll pause it and come back once the remesh is finished. Okay so the remesh is finished now, you can see this is the topology that we ended up with. So it's nice and quadded. This would be a pretty nice basis for our head. So I'm just going to move the pivot into the center here and then I'm just going to move this back to the origin and we'll sort of position this as our head piece for now. And I'm not worried about this topology being perfect because we're gonna rework this later but it just gives a good representation for what we need for the head. I don't actually want a horn in this case to be in the center of the head there, you could have that if you wanted to so to remove that horn it's quite straightforward, it's basically going to delete the faces, select this piece and delete the horn and then we'll just cap this precede to fill it out and And then we can come into the sculpting mode. And then I'll turn off the gizmo here. And I'm just going to hold shift and basically smooth out this little section that we have here. And then what I'll do from there is run the remesh again. So if I come over into this guy, we'll just remesh again. And that's going to smooth everything out. So now we've got this nice smooth rounded headpiece, which we can use later on for our model. That's the process for doing sort of manual retopology over the top of existing geometry, or also running remesh tools to get some geo that we can start to use. So the next technique I wanna show is more box modeling or poly modeling where we're actually gonna manipulate from primitive shapes. So usually I'll add in primitive shapes like I did here for the leg, and we're adding in cubes or cylinders and then manipulating that geometry by either adding in edge loops and cutting and then extruding and these kind of options to get the shapes that we want. So that's another technique that we can use. And then we can also use that in combination with our sub-div workflow, which we'll show as well. So in the case of this, what I wanna do is basically create the leg piece. So we're looking at this section here, which is the femur, the section underneath. And you can see that this is effectively like a cylindrical shape. It's got a slight bend to it. And then it kind of comes out like a bulbous sphere at the end in both these sections. And this looks like a bit more like a ball and socket joint where the two things connect together. And you can see that this again is ending in that more bulbous looking shape there. So this is sort of the general form I'm trying to capture with this. So to do that, it's really, it's gonna be pretty straightforward. I'm actually gonna use a sub div workflow for this. So with sub div you can press control to to basically do a smooth result here We actually have got two of these so just remove that and what you'll see is that if I turn on the optimal display This is basically going to add more topology and smooth out the shape So we go from this cube to this type of shape And so you can control the smoothing by coming into edit mode and using Say edges to kind of smooth that out and give a nice shape The other way to also manipulate this is using creases and we can do creases by coming over into the end panel here and Add the crease to an edge, right? So if we did that here, you're going to see that we get a sharp Edge where this is being manipulated. So if we were to add all creases to all the faces It's basically going to come back to being a cube again So you can use that to control the smoothing another way I like to do that is using hard ops by coming over into the menu, the hops helper here and basically turning it to creases and then I can select the edges I want to Crease and press Q and mark those as creases. So this can be really helpful for just going through and quickly Setting your crease sets. So that's how that looks. We can turn on the optimal display if we don't want to see the topology there So in this case what I would do to kind of get that nice smooth leg shape I'm going to start kind of adding in shapes here to basically create the bulbous look of the ends here So we're going to extrude out a piece here And then I want to basically extrude out in all directions on this particular area So I'm going to press I to inset and hold control which is basically going to extrude that out So now if we smooth that you'll see that we're getting a little bit more of that kind of shape that we can see there The next step is to kind of try to manipulate the edges we already have So I'm just gonna essentially drag these ones to kind of smooth that out a little bit there Probably you're gonna remove these guys for now because we don't need those ones The creases as well We can just remove creases for now and keep it more bulbous as you can see here So starting to resemble more like a bone type shape, which is pretty cool Then I'm gonna start to actually make the bends that we wanted to have as well So to see through the model and actually manipulate all of these verts that we can see here I'm going to press alt Z which will give me the transparency mode and I can just see through that and start to manipulate that here I also just want to kind of pull in these verts at the bottom as well to try to give that more of a Spherical shape we can do that both ends as well, which will kind of deform the shape a little bit Another thing I'd like to do is add some Verts in here and then kind of pull those out to get much more of a rounded Profile to these shapes and so something more along the lines of that which is working pretty nicely To kind of cut in the shape that we have on the end as a couple of ways to do that We could cut it in manually So if we were to kind of come in here And add some edges in and then we could just sort of bevel this out. So if we do that I'm gonna bevel it and And then we can sort of cut through the geometry just by pressing C and then removing that face Which is going to give us this guy and then we can actually extrude backwards as well by using if I press alt E I'm going to use extrude manifold which basically means that it's going to weld the verts as we as we extrude And I'm just going to tidy up this stuff as well Just kind of move these faces around and we'll just we'll recreate these how I want them to actually be so we're just gonna Essentially weld these up Actually, let me think about Another loop cut in there. I'm just gonna try and keep it as much as much as I can I'm trying to keep these quads just so that they will smooth Nicely here, so we're just basically welding these up. We can press F to fill these out So now we've got this kind of shape. I'm gonna start to move this one out here So that's starting to look pretty good and then hopefully once we smooth we can see that we're getting There's enough space in there now for the other leg to basically Connect in right so that's what I'm aiming for here with this end bit I also want to make this feel a little bit more bulbous. So I'm gonna start kind of extruding this out a little bit and trying to get more of a a shape and form to this particular area, right? That's what I'm trying to do here. So we might just also scale this a little bit so it becomes a little bit more rounded and a bit more bulbous. Some of these aren't really aligning great, so I'm just gonna come in and try and solve those as well. So we're starting to kind of get that interesting shape. Look at it from different angles as well to try and judge the silhouette as much as possible. and we're just trying to manipulate everything that we have there. So that's kind of how we're starting to do it. You can see the forms that we're getting there. I'm just by manipulating the verts here, I'm getting roughly what I want. Another thing you can also do is jump over into the sculpt mode. And I usually turn the gizmo off when I'm sculpting and I will just basically use the shift brush to kind of smooth things and then the draw brush to sort of push things inwards and out. and you can hold control if you want to do the opposite effect. So in this case, I'm effectively just starting to hold control to push this out to make this a nice bulbous shape and then holding shift to smooth it. And then if I click, it's going to push things in and out. So this is a nice way, again, to manipulate those shapes. So that, in a nutshell, covers the boxy modeling part and more of the subdivision workflow. And we'll use that in a lot of cases to create our shapes and forms. So for more organic shapes like this, I'm gonna probably use more strip modeling, like the read topology workflow that we showed. And then for things that are a bit more squareer or simple shapes like spheres and things like that, we'll most likely start from primitive shapes, like cubes and cylinders, and then manipulate the geometry to get us into the shape that we want. So now as well, we can just see how that's starting to look because I've updated that as well in terms of the model, right? You can actually start to see that that's updating as far as the legs are concerned. So now you can judge how things are looking. We can start to move these into the sockets of the actual leg shape and then turn the gizmo back on. We can also start to rotate our legs as well if we wanted to view how those are gonna look at different angles. So we can just get a feel for how all of this is starting to work and sort of interact together to get that sort of feeling across, right? So again, we can sort of manipulate this to create our leg shape and start to feel how the beetle is coming together. Okay, so now we're going to show a couple of the techniques to start finishing off the block out of the beetle. So to get the shape of the shell, I'm actually going to use the hand retopology method that I showed earlier. So I'm just gonna start by adding in the gizmo here by shift and right clicking. And then I'm gonna come in and add a single vert into here. We're gonna select vert mode and extrude that and we'll extrude the face here. So now I've got this set up. I wanna add a shrink wrap to this. So we'll do the shrink wrap and we'll select the face underneath. I'm gonna come over into edit mode and into retopology mode. And then I'm just gonna flip the face normal here so we can actually start to see our retopology mode. So this is all now working pretty nicely. We're gonna turn on face snap so we can actually snap our verts. And I'm gonna keep this really, the face is as large as I can possibly go to basically describe the form. And so as I start to extrude these out, I wanna keep my faces pretty big. And the reason for that is because if I get too detailed, the smoothing of this isn't going to work super well And it's also gonna mean that manipulating the geometry is a little bit harder. So keep this as big as you can when you're working. And I'm just looking to try to follow the shapes. We didn't really do a great job of snapping those verts there. So let me just come back and snap those and we'll just sort of snap and align. So I'm just trying to describe the shape of the shell here and just manipulate the verts until I get these roughly in the right place. but I want it to follow the flow of the shape of the shell. So I'm basically just trying to put in edges and I'm trying to keep, as I mentioned before, I'm trying to keep two quads as much as possible, not trying to do triangles if I can help it. I'm not worried if I have the occasional one, but I'm just generally trying to keep quads, which will make smoothing and things easier later on. So we'll just kind of come into there for that one and I might just add another edge in. So yeah, I'm gonna snap these guys as well. And it might also just be helpful to turn on the vert snapping so we can see that this is actually aligning pretty well with the shrink wrap. So that's all good. Okay, so now I basically wanna extrude these out and try to align them with the edges that I have here. So we're just sort of going through and aligning them. I might add another cut into this one. So it's a bit more even there. and then we'll just align, start to align the verts here. So that's all looking good. And then we're just gonna basically press F to fill in these verts that we have, or these faces that we have in here. And that's looking pretty good. And then for this guy, what we wanna do is basically fill these out as well so we can start to then just get a nice result. Okay. So that's how we've got the topology sorted out for the shell. And I'm also gonna just quickly align these a little bit nicer as well. So that's looking pretty good so far. I'm gonna commit that with the shrink wrap, just press control A, and then we'll move our shell over here. We're gonna come in and basically put the shell in in case of this box. So we'll remove the box. We're gonna shade smooth on the shell. And then I'm gonna actually add a solidify modifier to this. And so if I do that, you'll see that this is given a thickness to the shell and we can also add a smooth to that, so a subdivision to this guy as well. And then what I'll do to mirror things, I usually like to add an empty with just a plane axis in there and we'll put that in the center of the scene. And I'll call that mirror. So I usually use this as a mirror plane. So I'll just select the mirror object and then alt X to mirror the result we have here Where this is getting welded together? I'm going to come into the merge options and change the size of this and it's not going to merge together We'll come over into the read apology and just disable that and then what I'm going to do as well is I'm going to align these Verts I'm going to press s x and 0 and that's going to align them Do you want to select like this and then just move that roughly into the center for now? We do want a bit of a gap there, so I'm not going to move it a hundred percent But you can kind of see this has given us the basis for the shell in the back, right? So that gets that in there for the underside piece. I'm probably just going to quickly run a Retopology on this So let me just save here as well So I mostly want to do that because I want the underside Sockets for where the legs are going to go Represented in the block out. So that's why I'm just going to quickly run this retopology on that. So for this one I want to Start by just merging the verts because this has got lots of unworlded verts this particular model So we'll just do that and then we'll run our retopology and we're going to retopo this into something a bit more simplistic with a lower poly count so that's that's pretty good for now. I'm not worried too much about the shapes of this and what's actually on the top because I can read to apologize and model back over this later as well if I want like more detailed pieces. So we'll just go through and we'll just sort of start to add this back together so now we have our shapes there which means that we can actually see how our leg is coming together so the leg can sit in the sockets and we'll just try and line these up roughly with where they need to actually exist and then we can just kind of come in here and tweak the leg position there. So we're already getting a pretty good basis for our block out here for the B tool and you can see the topology is pretty simplistic we can definitely manipulate this quite easily later once we get into the high poly. So next I want to start by doing the eyes. So this is gonna be really straightforward because I know the eyes are a sphere. So we'll just come in and add a UV sphere. And then I'm just gonna scale this down. I wanna try and match the rough scale that we have in here and just get the position of that roughly correct. And then we'll just put this as a, sort of smooth this out. We're gonna do a shade smooth. And then we're just gonna move this over to where the eyes are. So this guy, we probably want to bring this down because we want the head and everything to align, everything to align correctly. And so what I want, let me turn off the legs and show you the thing I'm aiming for here is basically want this guy to where the sockets are and where the legs are going to align. I want that to be along the same axis. So essentially we have everything aligning where the legs are positioned. So we'll just do that. And then you can see that this one is not really aligning super well. So change the pivot and just move him down a little bit. So you can see that the legs are all aligned in the same axis there. Okay, and then we just move our eye socket there. So next is the horn shape. So for this, this is really straightforward. All I wanna do for the horn at the moment is just have a cylindrical shape. So what I would probably do to start with is maybe look at just grabbing a cylinder shape and I'm gonna keep that pretty low poly maybe like eight sided. We can always add subdivision to this later. So I'm just gonna sort of start to manipulate that and rotate that into the right position. And this is where we can use a combination of more of a poly modeling approach, but it also can definitely feel more like a strip modeling approach as well because you can sort of see that as we extrude these we're gonna scale the edges and you can start to see that as we rotate things, we're gonna get that shape. So we're just starting to build up the shape of the horn really quickly. I'm not too worried at the moment for the blockout of it being absolutely perfect at the end. Like I don't necessarily want this split look and I need to decide, I wanna decide later when I actually make my model what the shape of this horn is gonna be. Potentially I won't do this sort of split design, I might just go for more of a general horn type shape. So this is gonna cover the shape of the horn pretty well just to begin with and we can position that in. We wanna change the proportion of the horn as well. Another really easy nice way to do that would be to use like a soft selection. So we're just sort of starting to manipulate I'm gonna shade shade it as well. So we'll just shade smooth the horn and then I can press two to do a subdivision I'm just gonna come back out of this view and then I'm gonna put the I'm gonna mirror The eye socket as well. So we'll just mirror that so you can see the eye on the other side And then that should give us a pretty good basis there for this what I want to do Yeah, so the soft select sorry was the thing I wanted to show so you can press oh on the keyboard Which will enable soft select or click up here and then when you press G You'll see that you get this wheel you can cycle that up and down with the mouse wheel and then just use that to manipulate The horn you can also scale out as well. So you don't have to use You could do a soft selection scale as well. So we can do a lot of stuff here So for this case, I probably actually want the horn to be maybe a little bit a Little bit smaller there because I think that's going to be a better proportion and everything So yeah, we're starting to get into a pretty good spot there I think in let's sort of move some of these things into the right position. So this one is in the body So we'll move that there. This is the head. So we'll come in here with this guy and also for the head So now we're a bit more organized. We can start to delete some of our other the objects that we have in there. And then next I'm gonna just finish off and work on the legs themselves as well. So now to move over to detailing out the legs, we've got the final sections of these just to finish out. So we have our tibia and our foot. So we'll start with the tibia section here. So you can see that in this example, it is essentially a similar shape to what we have here, a cylindrical shape, which has a nice kind of bend to it, like an S curve type shape. but then it has these more horn type shapes. So they're more kind of sharper sections to the end of the leg there. So again, we can approach this in a similar sort of way to how we did before, where we start to actually add in some box modeling and everything and just flesh that design out. So if we come over into the tibia, we'll just enable that. You can see here. One thing I also like to do at this stage is I would also like to add in sort of, I guess they would be helpers to basically tell me the rotation and how these are gonna line up. So we're putting in a cylinder here because we know that looking at the rotation of this, essentially what's gonna happen is this is gonna rotate just in one axis, this elbow joint here, right? Whereas this one is much more of a ball and socket, So it's going to rotate as a in most directions. This one is only gonna rotate in one axis. So we're putting in a cylinder into this one. And then we can do the same for the femur as well. So if we put in this cylinder that we have, and just find these guys, we'll put them actually where they need to go. So let's put them in here. And then this one, we're gonna put into the femur. And then what we'll do in this cylinder here is we're gonna line this up with where we want the cylinder or the leg to actually be placed. So that can be used as a guide. So when we come to our blockout, you can see that we've got our cylinder in here and we can then align the leg where this should go. So if we change our pivot to be local space pivot, we can position this into here. And then we know as we rotate this that this is going to be rotating in the right orientation. You'll see that with these guys, because of the way we positioned the leg, we just rotated this around. So what we could actually do to resolve this issue is just inversely scale it and then rotate it. So that's gonna give us, which is fine for now, we wouldn't want to have inverse scale in the final model, but we can just do that for positioning for now. So we can actually align things up and set everything up correctly. So now you can see that we've got this rough, these roughly in the right places there. So they don't have to be perfect for now, but just trying to get the idea across of how this is actually going to work. And then for the same, when we look at the shape of the foot here as well, at this end, going over into our reference, you'll see that we make this a bit bigger, that the rotation of this, this is what it looks like in terms of how they rotate on the insect here. So this one you can see is rotating in different axes. This one is only in the one axis on the kneecap. And then if we look at, I mean, you can tell by looking at these guys when you see them in motion as well that this one can rotate in some different axes as well. I think this is connected almost like a ball and socket underneath. So it gives a little bit more manipulation on the bottom there. So we could do a similar thing for this where we add in, let's try and add in a UV sphere and we'll scale this one down. And then we're just gonna position this at the end. So this is where we're gonna connect. Likelihood as well is that this is going to be offset and be slightly underneath. So we're gonna have more of this kind of situation here where it's offset slightly, but we can add that in and now you can see this is where this guy will get connected to. So that's sort of how we are gonna align things. As far as starting to actually block these out now to be more closer to this type of shape, let's start working on that. So we'll just hide the block out here. And the first thing I'm going to shade smooth these as well. This one, I could also potentially make these a bit longer by just moving some of these and manipulating them slightly. And looking at the shape there, I'm going to want to start bringing out a little bit, let's just turn off soft select, we're gonna want to scale out these guys a little bit. So we're just starting to scale those and bring them up a little bit and you can also see from the shape as well of those that it does this nice curve. So again we're gonna try and start to manipulate this and bring that big kind of curve forward like this kind of shape right and then I want to give it some form in this axis so we're also going to do this kind of thing so we can start to really get that shape coming through and we can just be really kind of simple with it for now because we're not super worried about this being perfect at this stage we just want to try and get a lot the shapes and everything in And we're just gonna start to scale these out a bit. I wanna make it a bit thicker as well. It doesn't feel like it's really thick enough. So we'll just sort of scale that up and then bring these ones down a bit. And we're just, we're gonna shade smooth the whole thing so it's nice and looking pretty good there. Okay, bringing out the shape. So yeah, and then it's gonna end, it has like kind of different spike shapes. So we can start to build the spikes in as well if we want to. So we can just extrude these out and then kind of scale them down. And that's effectively just gonna give us like a really quick way of getting these spikes in, right? So I'm just sort of starting to do that using the sub div again to just sort of smooth them out. And then I think this one, this front one kind of is rotated. If we look at this, it's rotated. We've got one that direction. Oh, and then another one, which is coming forward, right? So we probably would want to give this guy a bit more of a spike here, like this. And we might also, it's actually undo that because I want to add a bit of a gap between these two spikes. So I'm gonna do, think a bit more like that, which just means we can start to control this a little bit there. And then we also have another one that's sort of here on the end. So I'm gonna do the same thing, just sort of extrude that out. And then our cylinder that we have, that sort of sits between the two of these. So this guy here, the sphere I should say. I wanna also try to get, because you can see that this kind of bends. I wanna try and manipulate some of the shapes that we have here as well. So let's try and just sort of move some of these down. We're gonna make this one more of a spiky shape. And then these guys, we're gonna basically pull those down. And we'll also pull this edge down so we can start to bend. And then what we wanna do here is start to pull this one up so we can create that nice overhang look, right? So we're just manipulating the geometry really simply here. Just trying to get the forms across by looking at the reference that we have. You can also use your pure reference boards to do this as well, but I'm using a actual 3D example just because I have the shapes and forms in there. So this would already be a pretty good basis just to work with here. So let's kind of leave that one there. Okay, so here we can see how this is now looking with the updates to the model. At the moment, he's looking a bit chunky compared to the other one, so we might want to come in and just do a little bit of manipulation on that particular area. So it's really simple to do, obviously, all we do is come in to our object. Now we wanna just manipulate, I think, the shapes of this. So we're just gonna sort of come in here and just sort of scale these down a little bit so they can get a little bit thinner. and we'll start to maybe move some areas over as well. So let's just kind of move this and manipulate this as well. And we can also, using the soft select as well, we can sort of easily just push things around. I sometimes would find that in the same way we did before, you can use things like the sculpting tools to tweak this stuff as well. So we can play around. I mean, I quite like it when it's a bit more chunky exaggerated as well so you can definitely get a good feel for how you want that to look but for now at least this is looking pretty good so now we'll start on the final part which is just the the claws at the bottom and these are really easy to understand they're broken down into different segments and then you have the claws at the end so you've got different sections to it which then connect up to that leg and then we have the claws so we're going to do something like that and I'm I'm going to look at the actual real world reference for that as well so you can see this is what the shapes are looking like So there's two claws and then there's one two three four five sections to it So again really simple for that. We're going to come over into the foot. We've already got one piece So we'll just actually manipulate this back into going to start to move this out and create Maybe four pieces and then one larger piece at the end. So we'll do something like that So that's going to create that nice segmented look and the shape of these and the size of these we can always adjust these and reuse these later If we want these to actually Kind of individually bend and manipulate we would need bones in those individual sections later So we probably wouldn't want to group them all together in one thing, but we can always adjust that later So yeah, we're gonna sort of scale out the shapes of these a little bit and just get more of that kind of rounded field to things for this I'm probably gonna use the Use the crease sets and everything here and we'll probably try and set the creases Select the creases so press shift G to select all the creases and then I'm gonna put the creases down a little bit there So point point five, which is going to give us our shape So I'm just sort of manipulating this to give us a pretty good look And then I can do turn off the soft select to do something similar for these So just trying to give these a little bit of Form as well Cool, and then we'll do creases again, and I'm just going to select the creases and also do the same thing as before So we're just kind of segmenting. I'm gonna basically now duplicate this segment and create a few more kind of coming back here which is now gonna these are gonna connect up so we probably want a sphere at the end of this as well so we'll add in just turn off the the reference here as well we're adding a UV sphere and then we'll just scale this guy down as well so he's just going to be where we actually position our pieces. So we want to just align these. I might make these a little bit smaller as well. So just scale those slightly, something like that. It's feeling pretty good. And then we'll just shade this smooth. This is going to be our end piece. And then we also want to add the claws. So the claws, they look like this kind of shape there at the end of this piece. The other thing as well is that this has a bit of a bend to it So I'm gonna basically try and do something a bit more like that We could do the same with these guys as well if we just edit Kind of connect these That one isn't letting me select the birds on it, which is weird. So let me just Yeah, okay, let's just I tell you what let's Let's remove the modifiers on these and we'll just for now we're just going to join them together so it's easier to manipulate. So to join them you just select them all and press control J and then we can now set our smoothing and we will just grab these sections and I want to pull them up so we'll just do that to give them like a nice kind of bend to them which I think looks pretty cool. So if I look back at the reference now, you can see it's kind of how this is starting to look which is pretty good These ones They also need to kind of connect over the top of this. I'm not too worried about that for now Because this is just a block out. So we'll add now a Another cube in here and we're gonna make our claw shape So for the claw all we want to do here is come in and just basically position the cube somewhere here And then we'll extrude this out and just for now I want to really quickly to make this claw I'm going to just do something along the lines of this which will basically create our shape and then I'm just going to bevel the claw so that's going to give us the real simple claw shape and we can just then we want to we could Rotate this and maybe scale them up a little bit we might want to scale down the claw at the end a bit. So I'm thinking maybe just trying to bring this shape in. And I want to basically make it feel sharp at the end. So just kind of try and do that, which is good. Something like that is probably fine for now. We can always refine this a lot later, obviously. And then I'll just select the mirror and mirror the claw so now you can see that we have that nice shape at the end If we now look at it this with the actual beetle block out here We need to move our claws into the foot Collection there so at the moment this is definitely feeling too large So we're going to want to scale all of these elements down and just to quickly do that I'm going to parent everything to the sphere and then I'm just going to quickly scale everything and that's going to scale all of the elements and now to kind of exaggerate some of our shapes I want or try to get them to match our reference a little bit more I'm going to definitely make these Turn off that guy and just make these like a little bit thinner Which should be good and then I also want to Select all of these and kind of bring The shape up a little bit so it feels like more of a thinner claw and then this guy oops Just redo that think as I have Let's try again, let's move those up there and then we'll just Move these ones this way a bit Okay, and then we can now rotate this back something like that and then the other thing I also want to do is make this piece a bit longer so I'm going to just do that and move the claw. Just trying as much as possible to get the forms correct at this stage so you can kind of see here this is what I'm doing this guy is definitely like a little bit more thinner as well so maybe we can scale this area in a bit so like that and we'll bring this up a bit too and then I want to I want now want to make the clora a bit more chunky I think I've gone a bit too far with it so we're just gonna thicken those up just move this down a little bit there okay yeah that's definitely feeling more natural and it's like it's working better so yeah so this I mean this is not absolutely perfect in terms of forms and shapes and I would definitely manipulate a few little areas here and there to try to to get them to match up closer with our shapes. Like for example, these are a little bit chunky on the ends and they could definitely come in thinner, like the legs of those, you know, if they were more kind of along that line, like along these lines, that's definitely gonna work a bit better. So there's proportion changes I would definitely make to tidy this up, but this definitely shows a lot of the workflows that I would follow when it comes to blocking out my model. So you're getting those shapes in there. So that's pretty much it. So what I'll do now is I'll recap everything and then we're gonna set the homework for the very first session here.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " Hi everyone. So in this section we're actually going to cover how to block out our B-Tool and start modeling the prop that we're going to work on for this tutorial. So the first thing I wanted to just establish was this is the blockout that I created for the B-Tool project. So I just wanted to share that here. We are actually going to model out the elements in real time, but I just wanted to show what we're aiming for to begin with. So here is an example of the sort of detail that I would expect at this stage. So very simple primitive forms we've established the majority of the different elements we've got the heads and the horn in there we've obviously got our different sections for the legs and the back and everything there so it's really rough but it gives us a good idea as well. One of the first things I'll also do when I'm looking at assets is I'll try to establish what the the scale is in real world terms. And so just to really quick Google, I got a diagram here which shows, this is the beetle that I actually based the prop on. So we've got the Hercules beetle, I've just searched for the scale here. And you can see this gives us a rough indication of the size. So about six to 18 centimeters in length. Some reason this is in millimeters and inches here, but again, 1.2 centimeters to 3.6 centimeters in terms of height, and then 1.7 to 5.3 in terms of width. So I've made a box that roughly represents that scale, so five centimeters across 16 centimeters by four centimeters roughly. So that gives us a good indication. I'm not super worried in this case about the scale being very, very accurate. And one of the things I actually do as part of the modeling process is I scale everything up because one of the problems, if you try to model at a really small scale like this, is when you start to use things like bevels and modifiers and everything, you'll notice that you have to use very, very tiny values for those types of things. So it can be a little bit tricky to work with. And because I'm not too worried about this scale of this object for, I could always scale him up and down in terms of the actual final model. So I'm not too worried about it in this case. While I'm modeling, I potentially will scale up a little bit larger, but just getting an idea of what the scale should be in real world terms is always useful when it comes to this type of stuff. So that's some of the very basic beginning parts of this. The other thing I wanted to cover was about resources. So I'm just going to jump over into a different version of Blender here and something I wanted to just talk about is an add-on. So I'm just gonna quickly search for that So here's the website using sketchfab They've actually introduced an add-on in blender where you can download resources or models Using the sketchfab interface directly into blender So this is something I actually used as part of my project and I found it was really helpful for just getting started So especially if you are a beginner, I would definitely suggest this So if you go over and grab the plug-in you can just download this You just want to come over and download the zip file here, which is the sketchfab plugin and then over in blender To install plugins all you would do is come over into the preferences section here And I've actually already installed it But you basically just click this install button and choose the zip file and then we're going to enable the plug-in here and This will come up on the right hand side And so if you had an animal like a beetle for example you can do a search for beetle and then what you can see here is that give it a second to load it will basically load in different beetles and you can see that in this case it's also pulling up Volkswagen beetles as in the car as well but what's really nice about this is you can basically click the beetle click import and it's going to bring that model into the scene so then you can use that as a actual resource or a reference. So in this case it's brought in the object. I'm not sure why it's got all these extra sections in here. So it's achieved some reason it's underneath everything. But you can see here that we have a beetle model that we can actually use as a guide or a reference. So I definitely found that this was really helpful when it came to just getting the initial shapes established because just trying to understand the shapes of the legs from references is sometimes a little bit harder so this can be really helpful for more organic things definitely so just jumping back over into the scene that I have here we'll just jump over into this one and let me close out these other instances of blender that I have open so we can just keep that a clean base so I'll just close this one as well okay so I'll also just share the ones that I had downloaded here so we can see the types of resources that I was actually using when I was first starting to block things out. So here is, let me turn off the legs here as well. So and we can remove this scale as well. So this is just a an example of a Hercules Beetle. What I liked about this one is that it has a lot of the underside parts that would be be difficult to gather from reference as well. I mean, I do have some of that in reference. Like we can see here that I have some of that underside, but it's obviously a lot more difficult to grab reference images of that. So having it modeled out is definitely very helpful to see what the shapes look like underneath. And obviously we're gonna be changing this guy up a lot for Botic looking beetle. So this is obviously more supposed to be like a real beetle. So we'll use it as a guide, but we're definitely not gonna be trying to get a look like this, right? We're not trying to do a realistic beetle, we're trying to do a robotic one. And then this one is a rhino beetle. This one is more of a scan, so you can see it's actually from a real world beetle. So you can see a lot of the shapes and the patterns on the shells and things like that, which are really nice to see. But again, this is just a reference and a guide that we can use. And then we also have these Hercules beetles, there's a series of different ones. we've got. And I think these ones are actually from, because you can see there's a section on the bottom here where it attaches to something. I think these are like a scientific model that could be used sort of in a museum or something like that. And you can just see that we can get these different versions. So this one is the male one, we've got the female beetle as well. And then we've just got it separated out into the body and also into the legs as well. So we can see those different sections. So we'll definitely be using these as a guide when it comes to modeling and in some cases we can use it to actually generate some basic geometry for us for our blockout. So we'll be covering that as we start to do our modeling. So I just wanted to give that explanation there because I think it's a really helpful resource to be able to download and you can obviously use that as well if you are trying to, you know, if you didn't want to use say you you wanted to grab like other animals as well if you wanted to grab say a frog or you were doing a different model that wasn't a beetle you wanted to do something more simple then you could definitely use that to give you a guideline for modeling so hopefully that's helpful okay so now we're gonna actually start blocking out our beetle the first thing I wanted to do is just establish a hierarchy in terms of the folders and everything that we have here in the Outliner. So you can right click and add new collections or also press this little plus button up here to add layers. So I've actually got my existing beetle that I showed here. I can hide and unhide that for reference. But the first thing I want to do is basically establish folders. So the first thing I'm going to probably do here is just create a new collection and this is going to be the beetle blockout, let's say. I want to create folders for each of the sections. So I'm going to do one for the head and one for the body. So just kind of duplicate these up and rename these. So call this body. And then this is where we're going to keep our final thing. And if we look at the existing structure of everything, I have a working and a final folder. And the reason for this is because in some cases, I want to use instancing to basically repeat the object. So if we turn this on, I can sort showcase that. Here we have the legs, these are instances and we actually have our working files in here. So we're going to go over that process and then our actual body in our head are within these folders here. So we'll go over that structure but for now what I'll probably do is create a separate folder which will just be the working files and then I can create my legs, so this will be the beetle legs in here. So we have that kind of basic structure that we've created using the collections. So for example, if we wanted to create our head here, we'll just quickly add in some kind of rough shapes and cubes for the different sections. So like this is gonna be our head and we can match, I mean, we can match the current scale that we have or also using our reference guides that we have here Well, so if I go to we'll pick this one here and we'll enable that as well. So just grab our beetle So if we just get like our rough Objects in so that we know the sort of rough scales of these I'm just gonna basically Manipulate these cubes and that's gonna give us our head and our body So I'm just gonna put these in for now just as bases And so now I want to just show the process of creating the legs and how we're going to actually use collections and instancing to repeat those sections. Okay so for the legs if we have a look at our references here I'm just going to pull over where we start to look at the anatomy of our legs here so just open this one up here. You can see this is the rough structure of the leg you have a section here which is attached to the bottom of the body, we then have the femur and the tibia, which are the different sections of the leg, and then breaks into different sections here depending on the shape of the beetle. So if we look at that in terms of a real world reference as well, you can see that it is easy to kind of break into sections or into chunks here. So this is a good example. You can see how it's being broken down into the foot, into the tibia, into the femur, and then the coxahere as well which is attached to the body. So that's repeated so as we can see here we have all these different legs, we have six legs for the beetle so it makes sense to kind of break these pieces down into different sections and then instance them to create the legs of the beetle. So that's what I'm going to do here. So the first thing I want to do and I can use these guys as a guide right to establish the sort of scale so if I was to just start and I'm starting just with real basic shapes I'm starting with the cubes and then we'll get into actually detailing these up into a better block out models as well so I'm jumping around like different views here with the reference so I'm pressing the the slash key here and I can just go into the different view modes so if I wanted to look at this from the bottom view here I think this is actually the Tilda key that I'm pressing the Tilda key brings up this radial menu for the views. So I'm just gonna jump to the bottom and I just want to get the rough size of this like I don't care too much about the actual look of it at the moment I just want to get the rough scale and also we want to try and put the pivot point of this where it kind of makes sense that it would move around so you can see that actually the pivots kind of in a pretty good place if this was going to be moving around. It's going to be orientated from there and it seems to be working pretty nicely, right? So once I have that, let's make a few different folders for these different sections. So as far as our reference is concerned, we look at this from before. This is the femur. So I'm going to basically just make a folder under B2Leg and I'm just going to call that femur. So we can add this one to that, let's move it into the folder. And then what I want to do here is I want to position this, reset the transforms basically. So we're going to put this into world zero orientation here. And then the scale will just reset the scale as well. We can check on our other objects as well. We can reset the scale on these as well. So we just got our FEMA and what I want to do as well is I want this to orientate facing forward. Forward so at the moment it's facing to the right hand side so when we look at the front We're actually looking at the side of the leg But I want to orientate it so that it's this way so that we have it This is viewing from the front of the leg as if we were looking kind of downwards this direction, right? So that's our first shape established And then what I'll probably do here is for the next bit We're going to create a folder for the tibia, which is the next part of the the leg there So I'm going to do the same thing and I'm just actually going to duplicate this same box by pressing shift D And then I'm going to come over here, and I'm just going to get the right Roughly the right scale of this as well. You can rotate it if you want to check as well. We're just trying to rough Rough this out the moment. I'm not too worried about this being absolutely perfect I'm just kind of sliding this into place, right? So we can also just move this kind of up to get the rough scale as well. And remember that we're gonna reset the rotation and everything here as well. So we're just gonna, something like that. That feels like it's roughly matching the volume and the shape of the object there. So we can just reset the rotation, we'll reset the scale, and then I'm just gonna orientate that back. So now we have this guy, we can just rotate it 90 degrees. And we'll just press, I'm pressing Ctrl A to reset the scale here. So, cool, so that's resetting everything. We'll reset the rotation as well for both of these. Okay, so that's got our different leg pieces in place. I wanna make sure I've got the right one in the right folders there. And then finally, we're gonna do the foot. So we're just gonna come in here and we're gonna establish the foot. I think I've also, the reason this is saying foot 01 is because I already have in my working files done something similar with the leg where I've renamed this to be foot. So that's why it's renaming this to be for underscore one. So what we'll do is we'll just, we'll call this, so this one is our finished one. So I'm just gonna put an F over, after these just for finished so that we know it's not gonna duplicate the names there. So we'll just do that. And we can do the same for the head as well, right? So I'm just putting a couple of names in here just so that it avoids duplicating the folder names and everything there. Okay, so now we can rename this and it should be all good. So we have the foot I'm gonna come in to establish the shape of the foot in the same way I did before so I'm just basically roughing out The shape we're gonna scale this so I'm scaling Just by pressing s and then I press the axis I want to scale on so x to scale The axis here and then I can move this up as well was scale s and z on the z axis And then I'm just going to move this to roughly align with the foot. So this is going to be the foot and Then to move the pivot I'm using an add-on called pivot transform Which just allows me to edit this you can do it by clicking If you don't have the add-on you can do it by clicking the drop down and effect origin This will now allow you to move The pivot and then that's going to move into location But usually I would use pivot transform and just use the transform option to do that. So Cool. All right, so that's some now we've got the pivot in the in the right place there We can do the same thing just rotate move and we'll reset the scale Okay, and then this one we now want to move into the foot location So we now have our legs established and they're at world origin So if we hide our beetle now The next thing is we want to actually just have a version of our leg, right? So the first thing we're going to do is create a new folder under the blockout and we'll call this leg. So What we're going to do here now is and this can just be legs B for blockout. That's fine and then what we're going to do is we're going to reconstruct our leg out of those pieces. So the way that we do that is we will kind of hide the working files And then what we're gonna do is we have the FEMA the tibia and the foot I'm gonna bring back my reference that I was using just so I can position these correctly And I'm gonna press control or shift a to bring up my ad menu And I'm gonna come to collection instance and then I'm gonna search for FEMA, right? So we add that FEMA in We now have the FEMA as an instance and this is actually a collection instance So if we add or make changes to the FEMA itself, what you'll see is that this will update that collection. So that's really helpful, because it means we can add to this collection later and it's gonna update the legs. So yeah, so the first thing I wanna do is just build out the position of the FEMA. We'll just align it kind of where it was before. We're gonna bring it down. And so I'm just gonna hide the working files again. We're just gonna position this where we want it to go. So that's our FEMA added. You can see that empty scale at the moment is really large. So, because I have hard ops installed, what I usually do is just press Q and just bring the empty scale down so that we don't have to see that overview. Then I'll duplicate, you could duplicate the FEMA and then change under the collection instance here, we could alter, change that, but it will keep the name the same there. So what we could do as well is just do another one here and we'll choose the tibia. So now we can actually position our other piece of the foot, rotate that kind of roughly where we want it to be. And then this is now gonna create our foot piece here. And then if we wanted to do the alternative method, we could duplicate this. And then where it says under the object properties on the properties window here, where it says tibia, we could just change this to be foot. and it's gonna swap that out for the foot, right? So now we have these guys established, we can also reduce the empty scale. And then for the other feet, like to get those working how we want, we can just essentially now duplicate these that we've created here. So we have, we can rename this as well if we need to. So we have our TBA, we could also just rename this foot so that we know that piece is the foot piece. And so we can just now duplicate these control, to select them all and then shift D to duplicate them. And then we can actually position our pivot, oh sorry, position our legs here. So we can just rotate these. Another trick that you can also do is to parent these. So if we select this guy first and this one second and press control P, we can parent it. And now when we rotate this leg, it's also gonna rotate the other one here as well. And then we could parent this guy to here as well. So that now these have a hierarchy. So you can see that under the outliner that they're parented to each other. So when we select these guys, we can duplicate them and that parenting is respected, which means that when we move this guy here, we can just basically rotate the leg and the foot will come with it, which is pretty handy. So we're just kind of roughing this out and establishing the shapes and everything. We're not too worried about everything being perfect for now We will obviously improve these as we go along, but you can kind of see that we're getting our legs established. We probably would want to move these into the right location for the knees as well so that they kind of line up. You can sort of see that here. So we're just playing around with the transforms until we get this roughly into the right spot. You can rotate the legs and everything into the right position. So if we now hide our reference, you can see that we've got basically boxes a volume that we can actually see to establish the shapes and the forms of our model. So the next thing now is just to discuss the different ways that I'll start to actually replace these shapes with actual blockout models. So that will be the next step. Okay, so now we've got some of our basic volumes of the model blocked out in relation to our references here. I'm going to start by showing different techniques on how we can detail this up to being a more final block out So we're going to go through poly modeling and box modeling and we'll go through strip modeling and re-tapology and other different techniques that can showcase how to actually detail this up As we go through the rest of the tutorial as well We're going to build on those techniques and use different workflows for actually modeling out the the beetle here but I'm going to start off the first one I wanted to cover was the workflow for remeshing and retopology so manipulating if we've already got existing geometry how we can actually turn that into usable geo so that's going to be the first technique that I show okay so for retopology the first thing I would do is you need an existing piece of geometry and there's couple of ways to approach this the first is to read to apologize by hand and that technique is relatively straightforward the first thing that we would want to do is add in a vertices here that we can start to extrude from so I'm going to hold shift and right-click to move my 3d cursor and then I'm going to come to mesh and add a single verb from there I'm going to select vertices mode or press one on the keyboard and I'm going to extrude an edge and then from that edge I'll press e to extrude face here so we We now have a face that's sort of aligned roughly to this and we come to the view mode here. We can actually go into the edit view mode and then we can turn on the read topology option. The moment this just kind of shades it, you can't really see anything, but as we move around the model, you'll see that it's highlighted blue. So we actually need to flip this face. We're going to select the face itself and I'm going to press shift N and I'm going to click this button here that says inside which is going to basically flip the the face there so now we can see that it's blue so we want to snap this to the underlying geometry so one way we can do that is by adding a modifier called a shrink wrap modifier so we'll add the shrink wrap and we'll color pick the object and you'll see that now this is going to snap to the face we want to see that while we're editing verts we can also click this little button here and and now we can see that it snapped to the face. So if we go to face mode snapping we can also hold control to snap our verts to the face as we move them around as well. The shrink wrap is going to do that but it just means that we will avoid having vertices that are really far away from the model like this and then we have to get the shrink wrap to kind of snap them back. So yeah it's just going to be better if we also hold control to snap our verts as we move. And then to re-tapologize the process is pretty simple. You're just basically extruding out faces and then moving them around and manipulating them. So I'm effectively pressing E and then I'm selecting a vert and holding G and control and then moving these around. So I can follow the flow of the mesh and snap the verts to what I'm trying to do and align them. And then when I'm finished, this will be the model that we have there. So that's how you would approach this by hand. And we'll show that technique when we start to detail up a couple of the sections as well Another workflow is to use a modifier to basically remesh We can use the remesh modifier that comes with blender You have a few different options. You can do voxel remesh sharp remesh or blocks and generally sharp or smooth is pretty good And then you would increase the amount to get a read apologized version But the geometry isn't particularly nice with this particular workflow You can also turn on smooth shading if you want to smooth it out as well But this is another way to get slightly cleaner geometry than what we have here where it's all triangulated Here so that's one approach another approach which I tend to like to use Is using quad remesh? This is a an add-on a paid for add-on so you effectively select the mesh you would like to Run the remesh on and then in this case we can choose different options So adaptive quad count is basically the option for how much topology to put into more detailed areas So where we have say edges or particularly sharp sections, it's gonna put more topology in those areas That's the adaptive size and the quad count so we can disable and enable that or increase the tolerance for it I think 50% is the default and we can turn off These different options will get into those later as we use the modifier more but these can control how it read apologizes based off of the normals and the hard edges. You can hover over these as well if you want a description and then here we have our symmetry mode. So with this case I'm going to have symmetry on in the x-axis because this is a symmetrical mesh and I'm setting the quad count to a thousand and just leaving this as default and I'll run the remesh, we'll pause it and come back once the remesh is finished. Okay so the remesh is finished now, you can see this is the topology that we ended up with. So it's nice and quadded. This would be a pretty nice basis for our head. So I'm just going to move the pivot into the center here and then I'm just going to move this back to the origin and we'll sort of position this as our head piece for now. And I'm not worried about this topology being perfect because we're gonna rework this later but it just gives a good representation for what we need for the head. I don't actually want a horn in this case to be in the center of the head there, you could have that if you wanted to so to remove that horn it's quite straightforward, it's basically going to delete the faces, select this piece and delete the horn and then we'll just cap this precede to fill it out and And then we can come into the sculpting mode. And then I'll turn off the gizmo here. And I'm just going to hold shift and basically smooth out this little section that we have here. And then what I'll do from there is run the remesh again. So if I come over into this guy, we'll just remesh again. And that's going to smooth everything out. So now we've got this nice smooth rounded headpiece, which we can use later on for our model. That's the process for doing sort of manual retopology over the top of existing geometry, or also running remesh tools to get some geo that we can start to use. So the next technique I wanna show is more box modeling or poly modeling where we're actually gonna manipulate from primitive shapes. So usually I'll add in primitive shapes like I did here for the leg, and we're adding in cubes or cylinders and then manipulating that geometry by either adding in edge loops and cutting and then extruding and these kind of options to get the shapes that we want. So that's another technique that we can use. And then we can also use that in combination with our sub-div workflow, which we'll show as well. So in the case of this, what I wanna do is basically create the leg piece. So we're looking at this section here, which is the femur, the section underneath. And you can see that this is effectively like a cylindrical shape. It's got a slight bend to it. And then it kind of comes out like a bulbous sphere at the end in both these sections. And this looks like a bit more like a ball and socket joint where the two things connect together. And you can see that this again is ending in that more bulbous looking shape there. So this is sort of the general form I'm trying to capture with this. So to do that, it's really, it's gonna be pretty straightforward. I'm actually gonna use a sub div workflow for this. So with sub div you can press control to to basically do a smooth result here We actually have got two of these so just remove that and what you'll see is that if I turn on the optimal display This is basically going to add more topology and smooth out the shape So we go from this cube to this type of shape And so you can control the smoothing by coming into edit mode and using Say edges to kind of smooth that out and give a nice shape The other way to also manipulate this is using creases and we can do creases by coming over into the end panel here and Add the crease to an edge, right? So if we did that here, you're going to see that we get a sharp Edge where this is being manipulated. So if we were to add all creases to all the faces It's basically going to come back to being a cube again So you can use that to control the smoothing another way I like to do that is using hard ops by coming over into the menu, the hops helper here and basically turning it to creases and then I can select the edges I want to Crease and press Q and mark those as creases. So this can be really helpful for just going through and quickly Setting your crease sets. So that's how that looks. We can turn on the optimal display if we don't want to see the topology there So in this case what I would do to kind of get that nice smooth leg shape I'm going to start kind of adding in shapes here to basically create the bulbous look of the ends here So we're going to extrude out a piece here And then I want to basically extrude out in all directions on this particular area So I'm going to press I to inset and hold control which is basically going to extrude that out So now if we smooth that you'll see that we're getting a little bit more of that kind of shape that we can see there The next step is to kind of try to manipulate the edges we already have So I'm just gonna essentially drag these ones to kind of smooth that out a little bit there Probably you're gonna remove these guys for now because we don't need those ones The creases as well We can just remove creases for now and keep it more bulbous as you can see here So starting to resemble more like a bone type shape, which is pretty cool Then I'm gonna start to actually make the bends that we wanted to have as well So to see through the model and actually manipulate all of these verts that we can see here I'm going to press alt Z which will give me the transparency mode and I can just see through that and start to manipulate that here I also just want to kind of pull in these verts at the bottom as well to try to give that more of a Spherical shape we can do that both ends as well, which will kind of deform the shape a little bit Another thing I'd like to do is add some Verts in here and then kind of pull those out to get much more of a rounded Profile to these shapes and so something more along the lines of that which is working pretty nicely To kind of cut in the shape that we have on the end as a couple of ways to do that We could cut it in manually So if we were to kind of come in here And add some edges in and then we could just sort of bevel this out. So if we do that I'm gonna bevel it and And then we can sort of cut through the geometry just by pressing C and then removing that face Which is going to give us this guy and then we can actually extrude backwards as well by using if I press alt E I'm going to use extrude manifold which basically means that it's going to weld the verts as we as we extrude And I'm just going to tidy up this stuff as well Just kind of move these faces around and we'll just we'll recreate these how I want them to actually be so we're just gonna Essentially weld these up Actually, let me think about Another loop cut in there. I'm just gonna try and keep it as much as much as I can I'm trying to keep these quads just so that they will smooth Nicely here, so we're just basically welding these up. We can press F to fill these out So now we've got this kind of shape. I'm gonna start to move this one out here So that's starting to look pretty good and then hopefully once we smooth we can see that we're getting There's enough space in there now for the other leg to basically Connect in right so that's what I'm aiming for here with this end bit I also want to make this feel a little bit more bulbous. So I'm gonna start kind of extruding this out a little bit and trying to get more of a a shape and form to this particular area, right? That's what I'm trying to do here. So we might just also scale this a little bit so it becomes a little bit more rounded and a bit more bulbous. Some of these aren't really aligning great, so I'm just gonna come in and try and solve those as well. So we're starting to kind of get that interesting shape. Look at it from different angles as well to try and judge the silhouette as much as possible. and we're just trying to manipulate everything that we have there. So that's kind of how we're starting to do it. You can see the forms that we're getting there. I'm just by manipulating the verts here, I'm getting roughly what I want. Another thing you can also do is jump over into the sculpt mode. And I usually turn the gizmo off when I'm sculpting and I will just basically use the shift brush to kind of smooth things and then the draw brush to sort of push things inwards and out. and you can hold control if you want to do the opposite effect. So in this case, I'm effectively just starting to hold control to push this out to make this a nice bulbous shape and then holding shift to smooth it. And then if I click, it's going to push things in and out. So this is a nice way, again, to manipulate those shapes. So that, in a nutshell, covers the boxy modeling part and more of the subdivision workflow. And we'll use that in a lot of cases to create our shapes and forms. So for more organic shapes like this, I'm gonna probably use more strip modeling, like the read topology workflow that we showed. And then for things that are a bit more squareer or simple shapes like spheres and things like that, we'll most likely start from primitive shapes, like cubes and cylinders, and then manipulate the geometry to get us into the shape that we want. So now as well, we can just see how that's starting to look because I've updated that as well in terms of the model, right? You can actually start to see that that's updating as far as the legs are concerned. So now you can judge how things are looking. We can start to move these into the sockets of the actual leg shape and then turn the gizmo back on. We can also start to rotate our legs as well if we wanted to view how those are gonna look at different angles. So we can just get a feel for how all of this is starting to work and sort of interact together to get that sort of feeling across, right? So again, we can sort of manipulate this to create our leg shape and start to feel how the beetle is coming together. Okay, so now we're going to show a couple of the techniques to start finishing off the block out of the beetle. So to get the shape of the shell, I'm actually going to use the hand retopology method that I showed earlier. So I'm just gonna start by adding in the gizmo here by shift and right clicking. And then I'm gonna come in and add a single vert into here. We're gonna select vert mode and extrude that and we'll extrude the face here. So now I've got this set up. I wanna add a shrink wrap to this. So we'll do the shrink wrap and we'll select the face underneath. I'm gonna come over into edit mode and into retopology mode. And then I'm just gonna flip the face normal here so we can actually start to see our retopology mode. So this is all now working pretty nicely. We're gonna turn on face snap so we can actually snap our verts. And I'm gonna keep this really, the face is as large as I can possibly go to basically describe the form. And so as I start to extrude these out, I wanna keep my faces pretty big. And the reason for that is because if I get too detailed, the smoothing of this isn't going to work super well And it's also gonna mean that manipulating the geometry is a little bit harder. So keep this as big as you can when you're working. And I'm just looking to try to follow the shapes. We didn't really do a great job of snapping those verts there. So let me just come back and snap those and we'll just sort of snap and align. So I'm just trying to describe the shape of the shell here and just manipulate the verts until I get these roughly in the right place. but I want it to follow the flow of the shape of the shell. So I'm basically just trying to put in edges and I'm trying to keep, as I mentioned before, I'm trying to keep two quads as much as possible, not trying to do triangles if I can help it. I'm not worried if I have the occasional one, but I'm just generally trying to keep quads, which will make smoothing and things easier later on. So we'll just kind of come into there for that one and I might just add another edge in. So yeah, I'm gonna snap these guys as well. And it might also just be helpful to turn on the vert snapping so we can see that this is actually aligning pretty well with the shrink wrap. So that's all good. Okay, so now I basically wanna extrude these out and try to align them with the edges that I have here. So we're just sort of going through and aligning them. I might add another cut into this one. So it's a bit more even there. and then we'll just align, start to align the verts here. So that's all looking good. And then we're just gonna basically press F to fill in these verts that we have, or these faces that we have in here. And that's looking pretty good. And then for this guy, what we wanna do is basically fill these out as well so we can start to then just get a nice result. Okay. So that's how we've got the topology sorted out for the shell. And I'm also gonna just quickly align these a little bit nicer as well. So that's looking pretty good so far. I'm gonna commit that with the shrink wrap, just press control A, and then we'll move our shell over here. We're gonna come in and basically put the shell in in case of this box. So we'll remove the box. We're gonna shade smooth on the shell. And then I'm gonna actually add a solidify modifier to this. And so if I do that, you'll see that this is given a thickness to the shell and we can also add a smooth to that, so a subdivision to this guy as well. And then what I'll do to mirror things, I usually like to add an empty with just a plane axis in there and we'll put that in the center of the scene. And I'll call that mirror. So I usually use this as a mirror plane. So I'll just select the mirror object and then alt X to mirror the result we have here Where this is getting welded together? I'm going to come into the merge options and change the size of this and it's not going to merge together We'll come over into the read apology and just disable that and then what I'm going to do as well is I'm going to align these Verts I'm going to press s x and 0 and that's going to align them Do you want to select like this and then just move that roughly into the center for now? We do want a bit of a gap there, so I'm not going to move it a hundred percent But you can kind of see this has given us the basis for the shell in the back, right? So that gets that in there for the underside piece. I'm probably just going to quickly run a Retopology on this So let me just save here as well So I mostly want to do that because I want the underside Sockets for where the legs are going to go Represented in the block out. So that's why I'm just going to quickly run this retopology on that. So for this one I want to Start by just merging the verts because this has got lots of unworlded verts this particular model So we'll just do that and then we'll run our retopology and we're going to retopo this into something a bit more simplistic with a lower poly count so that's that's pretty good for now. I'm not worried too much about the shapes of this and what's actually on the top because I can read to apologize and model back over this later as well if I want like more detailed pieces. So we'll just go through and we'll just sort of start to add this back together so now we have our shapes there which means that we can actually see how our leg is coming together so the leg can sit in the sockets and we'll just try and line these up roughly with where they need to actually exist and then we can just kind of come in here and tweak the leg position there. So we're already getting a pretty good basis for our block out here for the B tool and you can see the topology is pretty simplistic we can definitely manipulate this quite easily later once we get into the high poly. So next I want to start by doing the eyes. So this is gonna be really straightforward because I know the eyes are a sphere. So we'll just come in and add a UV sphere. And then I'm just gonna scale this down. I wanna try and match the rough scale that we have in here and just get the position of that roughly correct. And then we'll just put this as a, sort of smooth this out. We're gonna do a shade smooth. And then we're just gonna move this over to where the eyes are. So this guy, we probably want to bring this down because we want the head and everything to align, everything to align correctly. And so what I want, let me turn off the legs and show you the thing I'm aiming for here is basically want this guy to where the sockets are and where the legs are going to align. I want that to be along the same axis. So essentially we have everything aligning where the legs are positioned. So we'll just do that. And then you can see that this one is not really aligning super well. So change the pivot and just move him down a little bit. So you can see that the legs are all aligned in the same axis there. Okay, and then we just move our eye socket there. So next is the horn shape. So for this, this is really straightforward. All I wanna do for the horn at the moment is just have a cylindrical shape. So what I would probably do to start with is maybe look at just grabbing a cylinder shape and I'm gonna keep that pretty low poly maybe like eight sided. We can always add subdivision to this later. So I'm just gonna sort of start to manipulate that and rotate that into the right position. And this is where we can use a combination of more of a poly modeling approach, but it also can definitely feel more like a strip modeling approach as well because you can sort of see that as we extrude these we're gonna scale the edges and you can start to see that as we rotate things, we're gonna get that shape. So we're just starting to build up the shape of the horn really quickly. I'm not too worried at the moment for the blockout of it being absolutely perfect at the end. Like I don't necessarily want this split look and I need to decide, I wanna decide later when I actually make my model what the shape of this horn is gonna be. Potentially I won't do this sort of split design, I might just go for more of a general horn type shape. So this is gonna cover the shape of the horn pretty well just to begin with and we can position that in. We wanna change the proportion of the horn as well. Another really easy nice way to do that would be to use like a soft selection. So we're just sort of starting to manipulate I'm gonna shade shade it as well. So we'll just shade smooth the horn and then I can press two to do a subdivision I'm just gonna come back out of this view and then I'm gonna put the I'm gonna mirror The eye socket as well. So we'll just mirror that so you can see the eye on the other side And then that should give us a pretty good basis there for this what I want to do Yeah, so the soft select sorry was the thing I wanted to show so you can press oh on the keyboard Which will enable soft select or click up here and then when you press G You'll see that you get this wheel you can cycle that up and down with the mouse wheel and then just use that to manipulate The horn you can also scale out as well. So you don't have to use You could do a soft selection scale as well. So we can do a lot of stuff here So for this case, I probably actually want the horn to be maybe a little bit a Little bit smaller there because I think that's going to be a better proportion and everything So yeah, we're starting to get into a pretty good spot there I think in let's sort of move some of these things into the right position. So this one is in the body So we'll move that there. This is the head. So we'll come in here with this guy and also for the head So now we're a bit more organized. We can start to delete some of our other the objects that we have in there. And then next I'm gonna just finish off and work on the legs themselves as well. So now to move over to detailing out the legs, we've got the final sections of these just to finish out. So we have our tibia and our foot. So we'll start with the tibia section here. So you can see that in this example, it is essentially a similar shape to what we have here, a cylindrical shape, which has a nice kind of bend to it, like an S curve type shape. but then it has these more horn type shapes. So they're more kind of sharper sections to the end of the leg there. So again, we can approach this in a similar sort of way to how we did before, where we start to actually add in some box modeling and everything and just flesh that design out. So if we come over into the tibia, we'll just enable that. You can see here. One thing I also like to do at this stage is I would also like to add in sort of, I guess they would be helpers to basically tell me the rotation and how these are gonna line up. So we're putting in a cylinder here because we know that looking at the rotation of this, essentially what's gonna happen is this is gonna rotate just in one axis, this elbow joint here, right? Whereas this one is much more of a ball and socket, So it's going to rotate as a in most directions. This one is only gonna rotate in one axis. So we're putting in a cylinder into this one. And then we can do the same for the femur as well. So if we put in this cylinder that we have, and just find these guys, we'll put them actually where they need to go. So let's put them in here. And then this one, we're gonna put into the femur. And then what we'll do in this cylinder here is we're gonna line this up with where we want the cylinder or the leg to actually be placed. So that can be used as a guide. So when we come to our blockout, you can see that we've got our cylinder in here and we can then align the leg where this should go. So if we change our pivot to be local space pivot, we can position this into here. And then we know as we rotate this that this is going to be rotating in the right orientation. You'll see that with these guys, because of the way we positioned the leg, we just rotated this around. So what we could actually do to resolve this issue is just inversely scale it and then rotate it. So that's gonna give us, which is fine for now, we wouldn't want to have inverse scale in the final model, but we can just do that for positioning for now. So we can actually align things up and set everything up correctly. So now you can see that we've got this rough, these roughly in the right places there. So they don't have to be perfect for now, but just trying to get the idea across of how this is actually going to work. And then for the same, when we look at the shape of the foot here as well, at this end, going over into our reference, you'll see that we make this a bit bigger, that the rotation of this, this is what it looks like in terms of how they rotate on the insect here. So this one you can see is rotating in different axes. This one is only in the one axis on the kneecap. And then if we look at, I mean, you can tell by looking at these guys when you see them in motion as well that this one can rotate in some different axes as well. I think this is connected almost like a ball and socket underneath. So it gives a little bit more manipulation on the bottom there. So we could do a similar thing for this where we add in, let's try and add in a UV sphere and we'll scale this one down. And then we're just gonna position this at the end. So this is where we're gonna connect. Likelihood as well is that this is going to be offset and be slightly underneath. So we're gonna have more of this kind of situation here where it's offset slightly, but we can add that in and now you can see this is where this guy will get connected to. So that's sort of how we are gonna align things. As far as starting to actually block these out now to be more closer to this type of shape, let's start working on that. So we'll just hide the block out here. And the first thing I'm going to shade smooth these as well. This one, I could also potentially make these a bit longer by just moving some of these and manipulating them slightly. And looking at the shape there, I'm going to want to start bringing out a little bit, let's just turn off soft select, we're gonna want to scale out these guys a little bit. So we're just starting to scale those and bring them up a little bit and you can also see from the shape as well of those that it does this nice curve. So again we're gonna try and start to manipulate this and bring that big kind of curve forward like this kind of shape right and then I want to give it some form in this axis so we're also going to do this kind of thing so we can start to really get that shape coming through and we can just be really kind of simple with it for now because we're not super worried about this being perfect at this stage we just want to try and get a lot the shapes and everything in And we're just gonna start to scale these out a bit. I wanna make it a bit thicker as well. It doesn't feel like it's really thick enough. So we'll just sort of scale that up and then bring these ones down a bit. And we're just, we're gonna shade smooth the whole thing so it's nice and looking pretty good there. Okay, bringing out the shape. So yeah, and then it's gonna end, it has like kind of different spike shapes. So we can start to build the spikes in as well if we want to. So we can just extrude these out and then kind of scale them down. And that's effectively just gonna give us like a really quick way of getting these spikes in, right? So I'm just sort of starting to do that using the sub div again to just sort of smooth them out. And then I think this one, this front one kind of is rotated. If we look at this, it's rotated. We've got one that direction. Oh, and then another one, which is coming forward, right? So we probably would want to give this guy a bit more of a spike here, like this. And we might also, it's actually undo that because I want to add a bit of a gap between these two spikes. So I'm gonna do, think a bit more like that, which just means we can start to control this a little bit there. And then we also have another one that's sort of here on the end. So I'm gonna do the same thing, just sort of extrude that out. And then our cylinder that we have, that sort of sits between the two of these. So this guy here, the sphere I should say. I wanna also try to get, because you can see that this kind of bends. I wanna try and manipulate some of the shapes that we have here as well. So let's try and just sort of move some of these down. We're gonna make this one more of a spiky shape. And then these guys, we're gonna basically pull those down. And we'll also pull this edge down so we can start to bend. And then what we wanna do here is start to pull this one up so we can create that nice overhang look, right? So we're just manipulating the geometry really simply here. Just trying to get the forms across by looking at the reference that we have. You can also use your pure reference boards to do this as well, but I'm using a actual 3D example just because I have the shapes and forms in there. So this would already be a pretty good basis just to work with here. So let's kind of leave that one there. Okay, so here we can see how this is now looking with the updates to the model. At the moment, he's looking a bit chunky compared to the other one, so we might want to come in and just do a little bit of manipulation on that particular area. So it's really simple to do, obviously, all we do is come in to our object. Now we wanna just manipulate, I think, the shapes of this. So we're just gonna sort of come in here and just sort of scale these down a little bit so they can get a little bit thinner. and we'll start to maybe move some areas over as well. So let's just kind of move this and manipulate this as well. And we can also, using the soft select as well, we can sort of easily just push things around. I sometimes would find that in the same way we did before, you can use things like the sculpting tools to tweak this stuff as well. So we can play around. I mean, I quite like it when it's a bit more chunky exaggerated as well so you can definitely get a good feel for how you want that to look but for now at least this is looking pretty good so now we'll start on the final part which is just the the claws at the bottom and these are really easy to understand they're broken down into different segments and then you have the claws at the end so you've got different sections to it which then connect up to that leg and then we have the claws so we're going to do something like that and I'm I'm going to look at the actual real world reference for that as well so you can see this is what the shapes are looking like So there's two claws and then there's one two three four five sections to it So again really simple for that. We're going to come over into the foot. We've already got one piece So we'll just actually manipulate this back into going to start to move this out and create Maybe four pieces and then one larger piece at the end. So we'll do something like that So that's going to create that nice segmented look and the shape of these and the size of these we can always adjust these and reuse these later If we want these to actually Kind of individually bend and manipulate we would need bones in those individual sections later So we probably wouldn't want to group them all together in one thing, but we can always adjust that later So yeah, we're gonna sort of scale out the shapes of these a little bit and just get more of that kind of rounded field to things for this I'm probably gonna use the Use the crease sets and everything here and we'll probably try and set the creases Select the creases so press shift G to select all the creases and then I'm gonna put the creases down a little bit there So point point five, which is going to give us our shape So I'm just sort of manipulating this to give us a pretty good look And then I can do turn off the soft select to do something similar for these So just trying to give these a little bit of Form as well Cool, and then we'll do creases again, and I'm just going to select the creases and also do the same thing as before So we're just kind of segmenting. I'm gonna basically now duplicate this segment and create a few more kind of coming back here which is now gonna these are gonna connect up so we probably want a sphere at the end of this as well so we'll add in just turn off the the reference here as well we're adding a UV sphere and then we'll just scale this guy down as well so he's just going to be where we actually position our pieces. So we want to just align these. I might make these a little bit smaller as well. So just scale those slightly, something like that. It's feeling pretty good. And then we'll just shade this smooth. This is going to be our end piece. And then we also want to add the claws. So the claws, they look like this kind of shape there at the end of this piece. The other thing as well is that this has a bit of a bend to it So I'm gonna basically try and do something a bit more like that We could do the same with these guys as well if we just edit Kind of connect these That one isn't letting me select the birds on it, which is weird. So let me just Yeah, okay, let's just I tell you what let's Let's remove the modifiers on these and we'll just for now we're just going to join them together so it's easier to manipulate. So to join them you just select them all and press control J and then we can now set our smoothing and we will just grab these sections and I want to pull them up so we'll just do that to give them like a nice kind of bend to them which I think looks pretty cool. So if I look back at the reference now, you can see it's kind of how this is starting to look which is pretty good These ones They also need to kind of connect over the top of this. I'm not too worried about that for now Because this is just a block out. So we'll add now a Another cube in here and we're gonna make our claw shape So for the claw all we want to do here is come in and just basically position the cube somewhere here And then we'll extrude this out and just for now I want to really quickly to make this claw I'm going to just do something along the lines of this which will basically create our shape and then I'm just going to bevel the claw so that's going to give us the real simple claw shape and we can just then we want to we could Rotate this and maybe scale them up a little bit we might want to scale down the claw at the end a bit. So I'm thinking maybe just trying to bring this shape in. And I want to basically make it feel sharp at the end. So just kind of try and do that, which is good. Something like that is probably fine for now. We can always refine this a lot later, obviously. And then I'll just select the mirror and mirror the claw so now you can see that we have that nice shape at the end If we now look at it this with the actual beetle block out here We need to move our claws into the foot Collection there so at the moment this is definitely feeling too large So we're going to want to scale all of these elements down and just to quickly do that I'm going to parent everything to the sphere and then I'm just going to quickly scale everything and that's going to scale all of the elements and now to kind of exaggerate some of our shapes I want or try to get them to match our reference a little bit more I'm going to definitely make these Turn off that guy and just make these like a little bit thinner Which should be good and then I also want to Select all of these and kind of bring The shape up a little bit so it feels like more of a thinner claw and then this guy oops Just redo that think as I have Let's try again, let's move those up there and then we'll just Move these ones this way a bit Okay, and then we can now rotate this back something like that and then the other thing I also want to do is make this piece a bit longer so I'm going to just do that and move the claw. Just trying as much as possible to get the forms correct at this stage so you can kind of see here this is what I'm doing this guy is definitely like a little bit more thinner as well so maybe we can scale this area in a bit so like that and we'll bring this up a bit too and then I want to I want now want to make the clora a bit more chunky I think I've gone a bit too far with it so we're just gonna thicken those up just move this down a little bit there okay yeah that's definitely feeling more natural and it's like it's working better so yeah so this I mean this is not absolutely perfect in terms of forms and shapes and I would definitely manipulate a few little areas here and there to try to to get them to match up closer with our shapes. Like for example, these are a little bit chunky on the ends and they could definitely come in thinner, like the legs of those, you know, if they were more kind of along that line, like along these lines, that's definitely gonna work a bit better. So there's proportion changes I would definitely make to tidy this up, but this definitely shows a lot of the workflows that I would follow when it comes to blocking out my model. So you're getting those shapes in there. So that's pretty much it. So what I'll do now is I'll recap everything and then we're gonna set the homework for the very first session here."
+    }
+  ]
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