From the course: Blender 3.3 Essential Training

Collections, scenes, and view layers - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 3.3 Essential Training

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Collections, scenes, and view layers

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- [Instructor] Welcome to the chapter on putting it all together. We've learned so much so far in this course. Modeling, texturing, sculpting, animation and even visual effects. Early on, we even touched a little bit on lighting and rendering. In this chapter, we're going to take those skills to the next level. We're going to take a look at how to organize our scene better, how to use the asset browser, playing with lighting and with the two render engines included with Blender, Eevee and Cycles. And then finally, we're going to put it all together, in composite, inside of Blender. Now, before we begin all of that fun stuff, let's talk a little bit about organization and how Blender organizes everything. We lightly touched on this in the past, but I really think it's important, so let's dive into it. The first thing to note is that the outliner is an incredibly powerful tool and you should spend some time renaming and even color coding things, so you know what you're looking for. In the previous chapter, we went ahead and made the rocket collection. And one of the cool things you can do, is right click and change the color. This is purely for visual sake, but it really helps. If I click on this cone, I should really double click on this and call it rocket. And while I'm at it, I can see it's a little faceted, so we can come over to object, shade, auto smooth. That way it'll shade it and then keep that bottom hard edge for us. Nice and hard. Smoke domain, we can leave alone. And down here, this is called the plane. We can double click that emitter and call it smoke emitter. Force is okay, but how about we call it smoke force. And this cube, we can call it lunar collision. That way we know it's actually the lunar floor. In fact, why don't we call it lunar floor collision. Now, in the previous chapter, you may have noted that we turned off the render ability of this lunar floor collision, and that's a really good thing, so that way we don't have this random block rendering in our scene. Let's move up to the next collection. And you can see we have a lot of stuff in here that we can rename and split apart. I recommend you go ahead and do that. I generally like to make another collection that is completely dedicated to camera and lights. I'm going to go ahead and do that, camera and lights. And you can make new collections just by going ahead and clicking on this collection icon. And you can, if I scroll up here, nest collections or you can just left click and drag to pull them out. It's up to you, but I definitely recommend you go ahead and clean up the naming scheme of the scene. Now let's talk a little bit more about what view layers and scenes are. Up here, you'll see scene, and this is going to be a little bit more important when we get to rendering, but this is the total sum collection of all the things inside of Blender. So, we call that a scene. Over here on the right is view layer and this is really handy, as it allows us to show different layers and render them at different times. Let's call this the foreground, and I'm going to click on this button right here, add a new layer. New. I'm going to click here, and I'm going to call this background. Now, you remember that original sculpt that we had? Let's go ahead and open up my initial collection here. Let's hide that. This was our original sculpt. I'm going to double click on the name and I'm going to call it original astronaut sculpt and I'm going to turn off the visibility. In fact, I'm going to turn off the visibility on virtually everything except for the sphere, which I'm going to double click and call Earth. Now, I'm going to hit the M key, M on my keyboard, right here in a 3D space, M and go to new collection. And here, I'm going to type in Earth. You'll see that in my outliner, that object is no longer in here. So I'm going to hide the collection, and you can see that Earth is now in its own collection, over here. Right click on it. Let's make it green. Since I'm on the background view layer, I want to turn everything off that isn't in the background. And now, I want to come to the foreground view layer and turn off anything that isn't in the foreground. View layers are going to be really handy when we get, later on, into rendering and compositing, but it's also just a really good way to organize your scene. So now that you have a good idea of how to rename and move things around with collections, go ahead and rename these and color code them to something that makes sense for you. And when you're ready, we'll move on to the next lesson.

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