Modeling candy letters with Blender

In this Blender tutorial we are going to see how to navigate the interface, what all these panels that make up the interface in Blender are for, and in addition to this we will make our first design which will be candy letters.

The first thing you should know is that Blender is a software to create content in 3D and of course in 2D as well, it has numerous options and we can do the same thing in different ways and functionalities that we can execute from different menus and Blender keyboard shortcuts; the most practical thing is to learn the keyboard shortcuts which in the end are learned on their own as we create our 3D content.

We have already done several developments in Blender, among them, we know the Differences between Perspective and Orthogonal (Orthographic) projection in Blender

Getting to know the Blender interface

Before starting with the design, the first thing we are going to do is get to know a little bit about the interface that Blender provides us; The first screen we see is divided into these 5 panels and this central view, the central view where the magic happens, is where we have our 3D scene, in which by default when opening Blender the first thing we see is a cube, a lamp and this triangle which is the camera:

Then, if we go to the right we see another panel, this time with several options which allow us to add, details, textures, physics, colors and even manipulate the shape of our 3D object which we will see little by little as we do this and other modeling tutorials in Blender:

In this same panel, at the top, we see the hierarchy of our project, that is, all the elements that make up our project; we have the cube, the camera, the lamp and the world which is the rest of the visible scene:

In the left panel we see some other options that can change according to the properties we apply to our object, we also have some options to apply transformations to our 3D or 2D object, we can delete it, clone it, join it, manipulate animations, physics, in general it is a complement to the right panel that also allows us to manipulate the mesh of our object, give it characteristics and some modes.

And at the bottom we see what is known as the timeline that helps us to make animations, we have it to indicate the frame where it starts, and where it ends, playback buttons for the animation we make as well as pause buttons:

At the top we see a few more options that allow us to move between other modalities of Blender, different visualizations of the 3D scene, different 3D scenes from here we can manipulate the transformations of our 3D object, we can translate, scale and rotate.

Among other options; Likewise, we will understand all these panels as we progress through the 3D modeling tutorial in Blender and in future tutorials and we will see how practical it is to have everything just a few clicks away.

We can also move around by holding down the middle mouse button and we can orbit the view, to put it in some way.

If we press shift along with the middle mouse button, we can move from left to right and up and down.

If we scroll the wheel then we can zoom in and zoom out.

As indicated at the beginning, we are going to make some candy letters, and for that this cube we have here is not useful; so we are going to delete it, for that first we must select the object and for that we use the right mouse click and then we press the delete key or X and delete.

Blender offers us basic geometric primitives that we can use, to see that range of options we can access from the Add button:

Or with shift + A and we see the different primitives, which one to use depends on what you want to do, for example if you want to make a planet we use a UV sphere, if we are going to model a body or a box we usually use the cube we had a while ago, in this case we are going to use a Text:

Which by default is in 2D, that is, it is completely flat on the Z axis, we press 7 to view the text from above, to edit it, we must switch to edit mode which among several things allows us to modify the structure at the level of faces, segments or vertices of a geometric figure, likewise we will deepen this later; in the case of texts, it allows us to modify the text itself, but we will modify the text later.

Creating our candy letters

Once explained how we move in Blender and what its panels are for, now we are going to start with the design and modeling in Blender of our candy letters; to do this we place ourselves in our 3D view and press shift + A and then on Text:

The next thing we need to do is rotate the text to make it easier to view, to do this we press the R key then X to lock the rotation on the X axis and finally we type 90 to rotate the text 90 degrees.

Next step we add a panel using shift + A and then Mesh and Panel and position the panel below the text; then we hit S to scale and type 100 to scale:

Next step we select our lamp, then we press 3 on our numeric section and move the lamp so that it is in front of the text:

And then we press 7 on the keyboard and position it as we show in the image:

The next thing we have to do is position the camera correctly, we press 0 on the keyboard and then N on the keyboard and the option that says Look Camera to View:

This option will allow us to move the camera while we move through our 3D environment just as we explained previously, with that position the view where you prefer; when you finish deactivate the "Look Camera to View" option and hide the panel by pressing N again on the keyboard.

With this we finish the modeling of our 3D design in Blender, now we are going to apply materials to get the final result of our candy letters; the first thing we will do is switch from Blender Render to Cycles Render and select our panel and add a Diffuse BSDF material to it and change the color to a dark color:

We select the lamp, go to its settings and set the size as 3 and the intensity as 3000:

Then we select the text, add, go to the modifiers section and add a Subdivision Surface and set it to 3:

The next thing we are going to do is add a material to the text called Diffuse BSDF and select in the color section as a type (to select the type click on the small round icon) and select Magic Texture; then we can switch to the view type as Rendered and set the following configuration for the Magic Texture:

In such a way that the corresponding candy striping remains.

Now let's go for the gloss, for that we change the layout to Compositing, we click on Node tree type:

As you can see we add a Mix Shader type node, which we combine with the current material that we added to the text called Diffuse BSDF with a new material that we will add called Glossy BSDF:

In such a way that combining both materials we achieve first the texture of the candy letters together with the characteristic candy gloss.

This would be all for this tutorial; you can see the final result in the video or in the promotional image of this post.

Next step, learn how to convert images into 3D models in 5 minutes for modeling in Blender