Name: Beginner Blender 4.0 Tutorial - Part 2: Basic Modelling
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T09:20:45.000Z
Duration: 18 min 39 s
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Gerund

Now we know how Blender functions, let's start building that doughnut.

Present continuous

So, as before, let's, uh, well first of all, just to repeat, make sure you are working with a new scene.

Completely new scene, don't want any remaining monkey heads lying around.

Let's begin fresh slate, and let's delete our default cube, just with the delete key, and let's replace it with a new object.

You might remember the hotkey for that is Shift-A.

And as I mentioned before, you usually want what is underneath mesh, because these are your primitives.

So we want to start with something that most resembles what it is we're building.

And if it was a house, you might start with a cube.

If it was a vase, you might start with a cylinder.

In our case, we want the doughnut-shaped one, although mathematicians call it a torus for some reason.

Now if I zoom in by scrolling up, we can see we have something resembling a doughnut.

Looks like a pretty weak looking doughnut, you know, very flimsy.

Looks like the, doughnut before it's cooked, when they just drop it into the vat, and it's just this little wispy thing.

So immediately after you do some actions in Blender, you have options to change it.

And the options are hidden down here in the bottom left-hand corner.

You see a little box, and if you click that box, you see options.

And look, we can change the dimensions of our torus.

Now something to note is that these options in Blender only appear immediately after you have that action.

If you do another action, like say deselect your torus by mistake, it's gone, right?

Because Blender has assumed you have moved on.

You've accepted the state of your doughnut, and this is the one you want, right?

Now if you haven't done anything drastic or changed this object in some severe way, you can temporarily bring it back by hitting F9.

I just remember that immediately after I have added an object, if I want to tweak it, now's my chance before I move on to something else.

Okay, so we could change, you know, the size of it here.

I'll use the term resolution loosely to make it higher or lower fidelity.

And a mistake that a lot of beginners make, and I say this because this was the exact mistake I made way back in 2003 when I need a realistic looking doughnut, so I guess I need to go really high resolution.

I remember my first project, one of my first projects, was for a high school film project, and I wanted to have a close-up of a face.

Didn't realize faces were going to be difficult, but I went really high poly, and then it was just an absolute nightmare to work with.

So the problem, the reason you don't want this, is that for starters, things that are high poly are very slow to render, and they're very hard to work with if you want to tweak the shape of it.

But also, as you learn and you grow with 3D, you'll discover that it is a lot easier to add resolution to something later on, but it's very difficult to take it away if you've already built it into it and you don't need it.

So, long way to say, what we actually want is to have as few polys, these are called polys, as you can get away with.

So I'm going to go with 32 major and 12 minor.

And don't worry that it looks all jagged, because we will fix that in a moment.

Now, the major and minor, this is really up to you, but I find that something that looks kind of chunky, like a fat donut, just looks really delicious.

So I'm going with something around about this size, okay?

And once I'm happy with this, once I'm ready to click off, I click off, the options are gone, and this is it.

This is the donut that I am now working with.

So how do we make this look higher resolution, less jagged?

So if you right click with your object selected, go to shade smooth.

And look at that, this is immediately better.

Without getting too technical, this is kind of a fakery.

It's sort of like the shader is telling the renderer that this is a really high poly dense mesh when it really isn't.

It's just basically kind of like averaging out faces.

And anyway, it's very technical, but basically means it's not going to add anything to your render time, but it's going to look smoother.

And so this is generally what you want for something that is smooth and organic looking like we want.

If you were rendering like architectural or like hard surfaces, like later on, we're going to put this on a counter, then the object would obviously want to be flat.

But in our case, we're just going to use shade smooth.

But you might notice that looking at this, especially if you go side on, that you've got this sort of jagged shape around here, right?

So the silhouette is really breaking that illusion that this is a high poly or a smooth looking donut.

But thankfully, rather than adding all of that complex density into the mesh itself, and then making it hard to remove later on, there is another way through modifiers.

So if we go over here to our properties, right, this very confusing, lots of option looking properties, click on the wrench.

And this is the section called modifiers.

And this is one of those object dependent things.

So if you've got your camera selected, you won't see it.

So it's only when you've got actual meshes that you might see this modifier here.

So it's much easier to explain if we just add one.

So up here, add modifier, and you've got a range of options here that can do a whole number of things.

The one that we're looking for is generate, and it is called subdivision surface.

And it is a really common modifier that you use all the time.

In fact, it's so common, it's actually, you can just immediately add it to any object just by hitting control one, but don't do that because we've already got it.

Now, some of you might have just discovered that your donut has disappeared.

If that is the case, you need to go to edit preferences, and then underneath viewport, where it's got subdivision at the very bottom, disable GPU subdivision.

That will then make the subdivision perform on your CPU instead, instead of your GPU, which is maybe non-existent or not performing whatever, but disable that and it should appear.

But if it's already working for you, don't disable it, keep it going because GPU will be faster.

Well, it's a lot easier to explain if we look at the shade flat mode, because we're not being tricked by the smooth shading there.

If I set this levels viewport to zero, this is our original mesh.

This is before we add the subsurface essentially.

When we increase this, you can see that it is adding resolution to our mesh.

And the more I increase this viewport levels here, the finer and finer that detail becomes.

So to explain it, because this is such a very, very common modifier, it's kind of important to understand how it's working.

You can see that this is, these squares here, these are called faces, by the way.

And for each one of these faces here, as I add a level, you can see it's becoming four faces, right?

And then now if I zoomed in on this one face here, if I do another level, that's now become four faces.

And then if I zoom in again, it's now become four faces.

And you might also know that it is smoothing it out as well.

Like this jagged edge that we've got here, you can see now becomes smoother.

So to quickly visualize that, if I just draw it, like imagine you've got like a 90 degree corner, right?

If you add a subsurf modifier, what it's going to do is it's going to add a point here, right?

It's also going to take that point there and it's going to average it out.

It's going to average it out between these points.

And it's going to create another one there and another one there.

So you then from having that really hard corner there to having something that looks a lot smoother.

So it's going to take a point and it's also going to change it to make it look smoother, generally speaking.

So now as I increase this, you can see it's getting smoother and smoother.

Now, the reason there are two options here, you've got levels viewport and levels render.

So reminder, this gray area that we operate in is called our viewport.

So as an example, you could see if I just turned it off for the viewport, it looks very jagged.

But then for my render, if I increase that to three, if I do my render, which you could go up there and render image or remember the hotkey F12, you can see that that donut is now smooth, but I go back and you can see it's jagged.

So the viewport, you want to generally keep it lightweight.

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Beginner Blender 4.0 Tutorial - Part 2: Basic Modelling

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