Month: October 2025

  • The Complete Blender Master Course Part-1 Blender Materials, Textures, and Node Components: A Comprehensive Guide

    The Complete Blender Master Course Part-1 Blender Materials, Textures, and Node Components: A Comprehensive Guide

    This text provides a comprehensive guide to using Blender, a 3D creation suite. It explains core functionalities like object manipulation, editing tools, modifiers, and materials. The text offers step-by-step instructions for tasks like creating and joining objects, using meta shapes, and constructing simple scenes. It also explores advanced features such as geometry nodes, textures, and shaders for intricate design control. Finally, the text emphasizes practical application through example projects, teaching users to build complex models like a Rubik’s Cube, a table scene, a fence, and a Sci-Fi corridor.

    Modifier Mastery: A Comprehensive Study Guide

    Quiz

    1. What is the primary function of the Mask modifier? The Mask modifier conceals portions of a mesh, either displaying a selected vertex group or hiding it, to limit visible areas.
    2. How does the Mirror modifier create symmetry? The Mirror modifier generates a duplicate of one side of a mesh on the other side along a chosen axis.
    3. Explain why the Multi-Resolution modifier is not covered immediately. The Multi-Resolution modifier requires prior knowledge of sculpting within Blender to be fully understood.
    4. What is the Remesh modifier used for? The Remesh modifier increases vertex count to enable more detailed modeling, and evenly distributes the new vertices across the mesh.
    5. How can the Screw modifier generate spiral shapes? By revolving a profile, usually a curve or an object, around an axis.
    6. What types of structures are best suited for use with the Skin modifier? Stick-like structures, like arrangements of vertices and edges without faces, because it is able to generate a 3D shape from vertices and edges.
    7. How does the Solidify modifier add thickness to an object? The Solidify modifier transforms a thin-walled object into a solid object by adding volume.
    8. What is the purpose of the Subdivision Surface modifier? This modifier subdivides an object’s surface by adding vertices, edges, and faces. It is used to give a smoother, rounded appearance.
    9. Describe the function of the Triangulate modifier. The Triangulate modifier reduces the number of vertices per face to three, mainly used for detailed models before rendering or exporting.
    10. Explain how the Hook modifier allows object manipulation in Object Mode. It allows you to manipulate or animate selected vertices of a mesh while in Object Mode, providing a way to deform the object by moving an associated “empty” object.

    Answer Key

    1. The Mask modifier conceals portions of a mesh, either displaying a selected vertex group or hiding it, to limit visible areas.
    2. The Mirror modifier generates a duplicate of one side of a mesh on the other side along a chosen axis.
    3. The Multi-Resolution modifier requires prior knowledge of sculpting within Blender to be fully understood.
    4. The Remesh modifier increases vertex count to enable more detailed modeling, and evenly distributes the new vertices across the mesh.
    5. By revolving a profile, usually a curve or an object, around an axis.
    6. Stick-like structures, like arrangements of vertices and edges without faces, because it is able to generate a 3D shape from vertices and edges.
    7. The Solidify modifier transforms a thin-walled object into a solid object by adding volume.
    8. This modifier subdivides an object’s surface by adding vertices, edges, and faces. It is used to give a smoother, rounded appearance.
    9. The Triangulate modifier reduces the number of vertices per face to three, mainly used for detailed models before rendering or exporting.
    10. It allows you to manipulate or animate selected vertices of a mesh while in Object Mode, providing a way to deform the object by moving an associated “empty” object.

    Essay Questions

    1. Discuss the creative applications of the Screw modifier in architectural modeling, providing examples of how it can be used to efficiently generate complex shapes such as staircases, columns, and decorative elements.
    2. Elaborate on the relationship between the Solidify and Subdivision Surface modifiers, detailing how their combined use can refine the appearance of 3D-printed objects by increasing their structural integrity and smoothing out layered surfaces.
    3. Compare and contrast the advantages and limitations of the Remesh modifier and traditional subdivision techniques in terms of vertex distribution, computational cost, and suitability for different types of modeling projects.
    4. Analyze the potential of the Skin modifier in the context of organic modeling, describing how it enables the efficient creation of complex, branching structures such as trees, veins, and abstract organic forms.
    5. Explore the artistic uses of the Displace modifier, explaining how it can be leveraged with procedural textures to generate realistic terrains, abstract art pieces, and detailed surface imperfections on various 3D models.

    Glossary

    • Modifier Stack: A list of modifiers applied to an object, processed sequentially, which can be reordered to change the final result.
    • Vertex Group: A collection of vertices that can be assigned specific properties or used to control the influence of modifiers.
    • X-Ray Mode: A display mode that allows you to see through the mesh to select vertices on the opposite side.
    • Mesh: A collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define the shape of a 3D object.
    • Boolean Modifier: A modifier that combines meshes using operations like union, difference, or intersection.
    • Axis Object: Used with the screw modifier to define the origin and orientation of the spiral created.
    • Bran Smoothing: Controls smoothing of geometry in a model.
    • Levels Viewport: Sets the degree of subdivisions visible in the 3D viewport.
    • Levels Render: Sets the degree of subdivisions that will be visible in the final rendering.
    • Vertex Select Mode: One of Blender’s selection modes that allows you to select individual vertices of a mesh object.
    • Merge Tool: Merges the vertices together and creates a combined mesh object.
    • Display Modifier: Used to displace a group of vertices as per a texture.
    • Noise Modifier: Modifies a curve to add a noise texture to its form.
    • Lattice Modifier: Lets you easily deform your objects, especially those with a large number of vertices.
    • Curve to Mesh: Takes a defined curve and converts it into a meshed surface.
    • Map Range Node: Used to remap a range of values to a new range of values, useful for controlling the intensity and contrast of textures.
    • Musgrave Texture: Creates detailed and realistic textures with varying levels of detail.
    • Normal Node: Gives information on the direction of normals.
    • Align Euler to Vector Node: Aligns the orientation based on the specified directions.
    • Attribute Node: Allows access to arbitrary attributes.
    • Map Range Node: Re-maps a range of values to a new range of values.
    • Subdivision Surface Node: Smooths and refines the model by subdividing the surfaces.
    • Distribute Points in Volume Node: Distributes points within a defined 3D volume.
    • Cycles Modifier: Allows an animation to repeat or loop over time.
    • Non Linear Animation: Allows the manipulation and repurposing of animations without manually adjusting the individual keyframes.
    • Mesh Line Node: Creates a mesh that looks like a line.
    • Normal Node: Gives you information about the normals.
    • Noise Texture: Provides a noise texture for distortions.
    • Vector Rotate Node: Takes the current vector and gives you the ability to rotate it along various directions.
    • Shader Editor: Allows you to create and edit materials and shaders.
    • Material Properties: Gives you the properties of the materials associated with the current mesh.
    • Points to Volume: Allows you to convert points into a volume.
    • Vector Math: Allows mathematical operations on vectors.
    • Emission: Property that allows a volume or surface to emit light.
    • Principal Volume: Shading node used for volumes.
    • UV Sphere: Standard sphere shape object, it is a primitive in Blender.
    • Volume to Mesh: Takes an object defined as a volume, and turns it into a mesh.
    • Distribute Points on Faces: Used to distribute a mesh over the surface faces.
    • Instance on Points: Creates copies of a source object on the location of every point.
    • Join Geometry: Combines multiple geometry streams into a single output.
    • Scale Elements Node: Can be used to scale the elements in a mesh.
    • Splits Edge Node: Splits the edges of a mesh and separates each face.
    • Edge Split Modifier: An alternative to the Splits Edge Node in the Modifier tab.
    • Extrude Mesh Node: Used to extrude certain faces to form a shape, like an edge or a border.
    • Compare Node: Used to select which faces to extrude.
    • Index Node: Generates index number of different faces and vertices.
    • Vector Math: An operation which changes mathematical value to the position of a different vector.
    • Voronoi Texture: Creates a cell like structure with random colors and shapes, can simulate structures like crystals.
    • Blackbody: A physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence.
    • Wireframe Display: Displays the underlying wireframe skeleton.
    • Object Info Node: Provides information on the object you selected.
    • Wanner Texture: To create spots on a surface, can be distorted with a noise texture.
    • Color Ramp: Used to define color.
    • Bump Node: Creates a bump (3D effect) on a texture.
    • Loop Cut: Used to generate a loop in the mesh.

    Blender Modifiers: Procedural Modeling, Symmetry, and Non-Destructive Workflows

    This document summarizes the core concepts and techniques described in the provided excerpts from “01.pdf,” focusing on using modifiers in Blender. The document mainly covers mesh manipulation and deformation using a variety of modifiers.

    Main Themes:

    • Modifier Overview: The document provides a step-by-step guide to using various Blender modifiers for mesh generation, deformation, and visual effects.
    • Procedural Modeling: The document emphasizes the use of modifiers for procedural modeling, where changes to the base mesh or modifier settings automatically update the final result.
    • Symmetry and Duplication: The document highlights modifiers such as “Mirror” and “Screw” which allow for the easy creation of symmetrical and repetitive designs.
    • Non-Destructive Workflow: The document describes a non-destructive workflow where the original mesh data remains intact, and modifiers are used to create and edit in a flexible manner.

    Important Ideas and Facts (with Quotes):

    • Mask Modifier: Limits the visible or rendered part of a mesh using vertex groups. “It allows you to limit the part of the mesh which it would display in the 3D view editor or the part of the the mesh which will be rendered.”
    • Mirror Modifier: Duplicates a mesh across a defined axis, creating symmetry. “Basically what it does is that it duplicates one side of the mesh to the other side based on the axis that we have selected here.” It can be used to create objects with exact symmetry, where editing one side reflects on the other: “basically it creates a symmetry on both the sides so whenever you are making something which requires exact same symmetry on both the sides of your object then you must use the mirror modifier”
    • Remesh Modifier: Increases the number of vertices in a mesh for detailed modeling. “The Remish mod modifier increases the number of vertices in your object for detailed modeling and evenly distributes them in your mesh.” The “Octree Depth” setting controls the density of the remeshed geometry. The reason why the source went to the object mode before applying the modifier, “is that you can only apply a modifier to an object when it’s in the object mode and not in the edit mode”
    • Screw Modifier: Generates spiral shapes by revolving a profile around an axis. “Basically this modifier generates a spiral shape by revolving a profile or an object around an ax.” It allows control over the angle of revolution, screw offset (length), and iterations (number of repeats). The axis object can be changed by selecting an object as an access object. This, “means that this Cube will now Define the screw axis for example if I press G to move it then you can see how the screw axis is changing itself basically the radius and the position of the screw is changing by moving this Cube this is because this screw is taking this axis object that is this Cube as its reference”
    • Skin Modifier: Creates a surface from stick-like structures defined by vertices and edges. “The skin modifier uses the vertices and the edges to create a skin surface which helps to Define the shape of the object in a better way.”
    • Solidify Modifier: Adds thickness to thin-walled objects. “Basically what the solidify modifier does is that it converts thin wall objects into solid objects.”
    • Subdivision Surface Modifier: Subdivides the surface of an object, adding vertices, edges, and faces to create a smoother, rounded appearance. “The subdivision surface modifier basically subdivides the surface of an object by adding vertices edges and faces and it helps to give the surface of the object a smoother and rounded appearance” The “Levels Viewport” and “Render” settings control the subdivision level in the viewport and final render, respectively. The order of the modifiers in the modifier stack can greatly influence the overall shape. The modifier on top takes precedence over the modifier below.
    • Triangulate Modifier: Reduces the number of vertices per face to three. “Basically what the triangulate modifier does is that it reduces the number of vertices of each face in your model to a lower number.”
    • Volume to Mesh Modifier: Converts volume data into a mesh. The object on which this modifier is applied, “will take the shape of a particular volume.”
    • Weld Modifier: Merges vertices within a specified distance. “The weld modifier basically does the welding of the vertices of a particular mesh.”
    • Wireframe Modifier: Converts a mesh into a wireframe representation. “The wireframe modifier convert a solid 3D shape into a wireframe like structure.”
    • Displace Modifier: Displaces vertices based on a texture or vertex group. The source warns that, “for those of you who are new to this blender software and have not worked with textures yet it might be difficult to understand this display modifier but later on on when we will cover textures completely in this course then you will completely understand every concept of this display modifier properly”
    • Hook Modifier: Allows manipulating individual vertices in object mode via empties. “The hook modifier allows you to manipulate or animate selected vertices of a mes while in the object mode.”
    • Laplacian Deform Modifier: Deforms a mesh using hooks as anchor points, allowing for complex deformations while maintaining smoothness.
    • Lattice Modifier: Allows deformation of objects via a lattice structure, especially useful for meshes with a high vertex count. “By using the lce modifier you can easily deform your object especially if it has a large number of vertices.”
    • Animation: Describes techniques for animating objects, including setting keyframes, creating loop animations, and manipulating animation curves in the Graph Editor. Describes how to manipulate the curves to control the speed of motion.
    • Nonlinear animation: Allows “manipulation and repurposing actions without the need of handling the key frames.”

    3D Modeling Modifiers in Blender: An FAQ

    Here’s an FAQ that addresses the concepts and uses of various modifiers in Blender based on the provided text:

    1. What does the Mask modifier do in Blender?

    The Mask modifier allows you to selectively hide parts of a mesh in the 3D viewport and during rendering. It works by utilizing vertex groups; only the portions of the mesh associated with the specified vertex group, or conversely, those not associated with it, are displayed. You can reverse the selection to show the inverse of the defined vertex group.

    2. How does the Mirror modifier work, and when should I use it?

    The Mirror modifier duplicates a mesh across a chosen axis (X, Y, or Z), creating a symmetrical copy. Editing one side of the mesh automatically mirrors the changes to the other side. It is useful when creating objects that require precise symmetry, saving time and ensuring consistency.

    3. Why is the Remesh modifier useful, and how does the “Octree Depth” setting affect it?

    The Remesh modifier restructures the topology of a mesh, increasing the vertex count for detailed modeling and distributing vertices more evenly. It is especially helpful when subdivision doesn’t produce the desired vertex distribution. The “Octree Depth” setting controls the level of detail; a higher value increases the vertex count (and thus detail) but also increases computational demands. It’s recommended to keep the depth around 4 or 5 for moderate PCs.

    4. How does the Screw modifier create spiral shapes, and what is the purpose of the “Axis Object” option?

    The Screw modifier generates a spiral shape by revolving a profile (like a circle) around an axis. Settings include angle of revolution, screw (offset along the axis), and iterations (number of repetitions). The “Axis Object” lets you use another object in the scene to define the screw axis. Moving or rotating the “Axis Object” changes the radius and position of the screw.

    5. What is the Skin modifier used for, and what kind of structures does it work best with?

    The Skin modifier creates a 3D surface (“skin”) from a stick-like structure of vertices and edges. It’s particularly useful for generating a mesh from a framework of connected edges where faces are initially absent. It is considered to work best with stick-like structures.

    6. How does the Solidify modifier add thickness to an object?

    The Solidify modifier converts thin-walled objects into solid objects by adding thickness to their surfaces. You can control the thickness value to achieve the desired effect.

    7. What does the Displace modifier do, and how can vertex groups and textures be used with it?

    The Displace modifier displaces vertices based on a texture. It can target a specific vertex group, allowing for localized displacement effects. Applying a texture (like a noise texture) modulates the displacement based on the texture’s patterns, allowing for complex deformations.

    8. How does the Laplacian Deform modifier work in conjunction with Hook modifiers, and what does it allow you to achieve?

    The Laplacian Deform modifier enables you to deform an object by manipulating control points (hooks) attached to specific vertices. Multiple hooks can be grouped, and their combined influence dictates the object’s deformation. This enables complex deformations and animations that would be difficult to achieve manually.

    Object Properties Panel: A Guide

    The object properties panel allows for object manipulation.

    Specifically, the object properties panel can be used to:

    • Change the location of a selected object by entering different values. For example, typing “1.5 m” in the Z direction will move the object accordingly.
    • Relocate objects by clicking the left mouse button and dragging. Finalize by releasing the left mouse button.
    • Rotate or scale an object in a particular direction.

    Configuring Units of Measurement in Scene Properties

    The metric system can be modified in the scene properties. To do so:

    • Go to scene properties.
    • Click on units.
    • Change from metric to imperial.

    The source expresses a preference for the metric system.

    Blender Outliner Editor: Object Management

    The outliner editor in Blender allows you to manage objects in your 3D viewport.

    Here’s what the sources say about what you can do in the outliner editor:

    • Hiding objects: To hide an object, select it, then in the outliner editor, click the “I” shaped icon next to its name. Click the icon again to make the object visible. Alternatively, you can press “H” to hide an object and Alt+H to unhide it.
    • Object names: The names of objects in your scene are displayed in the outline editor. You can rename objects by double-clicking on their name in the outliner editor. For example, a duplicated cylinder might be named “cylinder.001”. You could rename this to “cylinder duplicate”.
    • Checking object names: The names of objects in your scene can be checked in the outline editor. For example, a selected object might be named ‘Cube’, while a cylinder is named ‘Cylinder’.

    Blender: Shade Smooth Guide

    ‘Shade smooth’ is a function in Blender that smooths the surfaces of objects. To use it, an object needs to be selected, followed by right clicking and selecting ‘shade smooth’.

    To apply shade smooth using geometry nodes:

    • The set shade smooth node needs to be added.
    • It can be connected between the joint geometry and the viewer node.

    Meta Shapes: Liquid-like Forms for Animation and Texturing

    Meta shapes are described as clay-like forms having a rounded shape. They exhibit unusual behavior when they get close to one another. When moved close together, they appear to pull and flow together like liquid droplets. To finalize a structure made of meta shapes, the left mouse button must be clicked.

    Other metabol objects, such as the metabol cube, behave similarly. When brought close to any of the metaballs, it will react in the same way. Meta shapes can be used to create effects via animation and texturing.

    The COMPLETE BLENDER MASTERCOURSE (Part-1) #blender #b3d #animation

    The Original Text

    you’re watching the part one of the blender Master course and before starting I should tell you that this entire video of over 11 hours comprises of the first 40 chapters of the blender Master course the first 40 chapters will cover the basics of blender the modeling tools techniques modifiers materials textures and shaders the notes system and we’ll even begin with the chapters related to Geometry nodes then in the part two of this course whose link will be added in the description once it is uploaded we’ll cover the remaining chapters of the geometry notes then we’ll understand about animation compositing shape Keys add-ons particle systems all types of physics and simulations and then we’ll also model a 3D character then we learn about character rigging and even character animation so there’s nothing to wait for and let’s start with the Journey of this blender Master [Music] course in this chapter we’ll be understanding that why we’re choosing blender for 3D animation and about some basic features of blender which you must know before using this application also we will be installing the latest version of blender and we’ll also check if our system specification matches with that of blender minimum and recommended system requirements or not so to begin with the first question that may come in the mind of a beginner in 3D is why blender and the answer to this is that with blender you can make almost everything from a simple model to Motion Graphics and even complex characters also blender releases many new versions from time to time fixing bugs and sometimes bringing new features as well now we should check the basic and recommended system or Hardware requirements for blender and for this I should move to my PC screen now first of all open any browser search for blend blender.org this will take us to the official page of blender now we’ll click on the download button here before downloading this software we look at the requirements for running blender for Windows users it says that you need to have at least Windows 8.1 installed and the recommended is Windows 10 or Windows 11 at least 8 GB of RAM is required to run blender and to avoid any lags or crashes in blender you need to have 32 GB of RAM GP of at least 2 GB of V RAM is required and 8 GB of vram is for a faster and smoother experience in blender for Mac users you can check the minimum and recommended requirements here for Linux users it’s mentioned here so now we’ll download blender on our PC so if you using Windows then you can download blender directly by clicking on this button download blender 4.1.1 but if you’re using Mac or Linux then you can download it from here so basically the latest version of blender right now is blender 4.1 but if you’re watching this video few weeks after uploading then obviously the blender must have released a new version so you can download that so I’ll download 4.1 version right now and it’ll download in a few seconds but till then I’ll answer another question that comes in mind of many beginners and that question is that should you use a laptop so basically yes you can use a laptop but just make sure that you have connected a basic three button Mouse with it although blender can run with just a trackpad and without using a laptop without using a mouse but you will feel the need to buy one if you decide to use blender in the long run now coming back to downloading part it will download in a few seconds and it’s not a very heavy software it’s just 327 MB now that it’s downloaded we’ll click on open file here now it will install blender on our PC we’ll click on next accepting all the agreement terms and conditions and click on install button so it will take a few seconds to install blender on our PC so it’s installed on our system now we’ll search for blender do blender 4.1 and this is the screen that appears the first time you open blender on our PC so this is the splash screen of blender and from here you can change the theme of blender blender dark to blender light or deep gray but most of the people use blender dark so we’ll set it on blender dark here and space bar should be set to play and these are the settings that must be there in blender before running the software so now that we have installed blender and even opened it on our system so this was all in the chapter number one of this [Music] course in this lecture we learn about basic interface of blend blender how to open and use different things in blender and by the end we’ll also be having our first standard image so as discussed in the previous chapter this was the splash screen of blender which appears the first time you download an open blender and this allow us to set the theme of blender and make some very basic settings and if you click anywhere else on this screen this splash screen will disappear and this screen Arrangement appears which has multiple panels in it and this is called the graphical user interface of blender now there are different windows in blender where you will be working and these are called the panels or basically the editors of blender the major area is covered by this 3D viewport where you will be spending maximum amount of your time as it basically contains all the objects that you will animate and make different things in blender then this is the outliner editor and it contains the names of all the objects that you are working on now this is the property panel in which you will basically edit all the properties of the objects that are present in a particular file in blender and this is the timeline editor which will be used while we animate different stuff in blender now this is the default cube of blender which always appears whenever you open a new file and along with this a lamp and a camera also appear now you can select any of these using the left Mouse button click now here the lamp is selected and using the left Mouse button click the camera is selected so this was about the default things that appears whenever you open a new file and this is the tool panel of blender which basically covers the very basic operations like moving rotating scaling Etc and we will learn these in our future chapters now you can toggle the object properties panel using the N key and and this is basically used to edit um the basic properties of different objects in viewport very quickly so it’s time to analyze the tool panel by using the move tool rotate tool and the scale tool and for this you need to click on this Cube here which will be the object that we going to move and you need to click here in the tools panel the move button now as you click the move button these arrows will appear on the object which are known as gizmos in blender and if you left click on these arrows and drag it then object will also move along with it and if you leave the the left click button then the objects get relocated at that place so these are the axis in blender and these also represent the XY and Z axis this red one is the x axis this green one is the y- axis and this blue one represents the Z axis in blender now if you want to rotate any object then you need to click here in the tools panel and then you can drag it as per the direction which you need to rotate the object for example if you want to rotate it in X Direction then you need to drag this X1 the red one here and for example if you want to rotate it this much then leave it here so this is the rotated object in the X Direction similarly if you want to rotate it uh in y direction or in Z Direction then you can do so using the particular gizmos now it’s rotated in the Z direction as well as the X Direction now scaling any object is also very similar to rotating and moving it you need to click here on the scale option then if you need to scale it in Z Direction then you need to drag the blue one so it is SC up now and if you want to scale it down then you need to move it like this then drag it like this now it is scaled down and similarly for other axis for example for x axis you can scale it down in xaxis as well and this one is for y axis but with usage of blender you might observe that uh using gizmos for moving rotating and scaling is not convenient every time so blender also gives you the option to use shortcuts for moving rotating and scaling so for moving you can use the G key and move it anywhere you want in the 3D viewport if you want to set a position then you need to click left but left click button on the mouse and it gets set in that position now if you want to rotate this in a particular direction then you need to click R button and move your cursor and it gets rotated in that particular direction now to set it on a particular rotation you need to left click and this is the new rotation of your default Cube similarly to scale it the shortcut key is s key so if you press s and then move your cursor then the object will scale up and scale down now to set it you need to left click like this and this is the scaled object now now the next thing is zooming in and into the 3D viewport and rotating it so for that if you want to zoom in and out then you can do that by your scroll wheel if you rotate your scroll wheel then you can zoom in and zoom out of your 3D viewport and to rotate it or move around the viewport you can do it by uh pressing the scroll wheel button and moving it this will allow you to rotate the view Cort or basically pan in now if you want to go up down left and right in the 3D viewp then you can do that by pressing the shift key and along with that press the middle Mouse button or the St wheel button and if you move your cursor or basically the mouse then you can go up down left and right in the 3D view Port like this and if you leave any of the two buttons then the position will get set now if you’re just a beginner or you’re just starting out in blender then you might think that that it’s too much it’s too hard or there is too much to memorize but with time these things will become a habit of yours and you will find it very easy and interesting to do the next thing is that now since everything cannot be made with just a default cubin blender so blender gives us the option to make different objects and add different objects in the 3D view port and for this first we need to delete this default Cube and we can do it by using the X key if you press the X key and press delete the object will get deleted and to set up a new object add a new object you need to click shift Plus a this will give you a list of different objects that can be added in blender for example if we want to add a UV sphere then we’ll click on mesh and then uis spere and uere will get added here but one question that might uh strike your mind is that why is it appearing at the center or basically at the intersection of these two axes the reason is this 3D cursor that you can see here if I turn off the gizmos then this is the 3D cursor that you can see here whenever you add any new object in blender it gets added at the location where the 3D cursor is present and to move this 3D cursor anywhere in your 3D view Port then you can do it by pressing the shift key plus right click Mouse button and this 3D cursor will get relocated but if you want to uh get this 3D cursor back at the original position then you can do it by shift plus C and the 3D cursor will get back at the center of the 3D World now many people find these gizmos very boring to work with and therefore blender gives you the option to use shortcut keys for moving rotating scaling in a particular direction as well so if you want to rotate it in a particular direction for say uh x axis then you can press R then instantly press X also and the object will rotate only in the x axis now similarly if you want to scale it in a particular direction say y- axis then you can press s and then Y and it will get Scaled up only in the y direction similarly for moving if you press G and say you want to move it in Z Direction then you can press Zed and left click then it gets uh reload located in the Z Direction the next thing that we are going to explore are the modes and blender and for this I’ll delete this object and add a new Cube here now the different modes of blender allow you to do different operations for example if you want to edit the vertices or the edges of a particular object then you can do it only in the edit mode and not in the object mode or any other mode similarly if you want to do weight painting of an object then you can do it only in the weight paint mode and not in the object or edit mode so for different objects there are different different modes in blender and you can discover them here where sit in object mode so the cube has the option of object mode edit mode sculpt mode and fit PA mode texture paint and vertex paint mode but the most important ones are the object mode and the edit mode as you would spend most of your time working in these two modes only now to enter into the edit mode you can click edit mode here or you can also use the Tab Key to toggle in between object and edit mode like this as we enter the edit mode you can select the vertices of your object using the left click Mouse button like this and right now we are in the vertices selection mode only and to change it to Edge selection of face selection you can do it from here if you click on the second option then you can select the edges of your object like this and if you want to select the faces then you can go here and select the face mode and now you can select the faces of your object you can also do it using the shortcut keys and the shortcut keys for selecting the uh vertices or or the edge or the face selection mode are the one two and three keys but these keys are not from the numpad but from here in the keyboard now if you click two the S selection mode will appear and if you click three the face selection mode will appear one is for the Vex selection two is for the edge selection and three is for face selection mode now to come out of the edit mode you can do it using the Tab Key now we are into the object P again for people who have just started out working on blender and they feel that it’s too boring to learn so many new things altoe you need not worry since the best way to deal with this problem is practically making something in blender and so we will start our first practical session in this chapter right now in which we’ll basically make this simple looking Rubik’s Cube in this way we’ll also understand about adding basic colors or materials in our scene now before starting this practical session there’s one more important thing that I must tell you and it’s basically about saving your file I have personally experienced it many times that I’m making something on blender and due to some crash or maybe some power failure blender closes and if I not save that work manually there is no backup and all the time gets waste all my energy gets waste that’s because blender doesn’t UT to save anything so before beginning this practical session we’ll first save our file for this you need to click control+ s and we’ll save a file on our desktop I’ve made a new folder blender Master course and we’ll name our file as chapter 2 so now our file is saved and we can begin our first practical session of making this Rubik’s Cube a rubic Cube’s shape and structure is nothing but a cube only so we do not need to change the shape of this default Cube very much and we’ll Begin by adding colors or materials to it to do this we need to click here in the properties editor make sure that the cube is selected and is highlighted from here you can change the material properties like the base color its metallic strength Etc we’ll be exploring all these in detail in the upcoming chapters but for now we look at the base color option only suppose we want to change its color to Red now if you select red here we observe that this no change in the objects color in the 3D viewport the reason behind this is that we are currently in the solid mode and in blender there are four modes of viewport shading which you can change from here in the upper right corner the first one is the wireframe mode where you can only see the edges of the object in a wired form second one is the solid mode in which we are working till now the third one is the material preview and in this mode we can see the colors that we have assigned to our object and the last one is the render preview mode and in this mode you can see how your output would look like when it it’s ready as for the lighting and other effects you can also switch between these modes using a shortcut key that is Zed now you can enter any mode like this now we are in the material preview mode we have one problem here and that is we did not want to color the entire Cube as red to assign different colors to different faces we need to enter into the edit mode using the Tab Key and now we’ll select this upper face by pressing three for face mode and now selecting this face now we’ll assign it another color by adding a new material and for this have to click at the plus button here then we’ll click at new and assign here now it has changed it color to the default white we’ll change it to something like blue blue looks good on it similarly we will assign different colors to the different faces of this Cube for this pH we’ll assign yellow color like this and for this face we’ll assign some other color uh let’s assign green for this face now we have four faces ready for this face we’ll assign white color and for the last pH let’s assign a new color let’s assign it purple now although this Cube has different colors on its faces but still it does not look that good that’s because we need to assign more colors like in this one for this we need to increase the number of vertices so that there are more faces where we can assign assign more colors in the cube for this purpose we’ll use the subdivide option first select all the faces of this Cube for that you can use the shortcut key a to select all now right click and select subdivide click here and increase the number of cards to two now it looks fine and now we’ll change the color of these smaller Cube faces now we’ll assign blue color to these three faces for this we’ll select the three of them to select them together we will press shift key and then select them like this or else you can also do one more thing that is to press the left click button and then drag it like this the three faces will be selected now we’ll click at the blue material and click assign the three faces will now get assigned blue color similarly we will change the color of these three faces we’ll change it to White and for these three white faces we’ll change them to pink color now these three faces will be select and we’ll assign them yellow color so that’s basic structure of a cube ready now we’ll press tab to enter the object mode to get the final render we will get it from The View as per the camera sees it so to enter into the camera view press zero on your numpad so this is our camera view and to make it look better we’ll rotate this cube in the Z Direction press R then Zed and you can rotate it like this and if you rotate in X Direction then it looks something like this in y direction you can rotate it like this you can finalize any rotation which suits to you and looks good to you uh let’s finalize this one I know it’s not uh looking like realistic Cube and that’s because we are yet to cover a lot in blender we have tried to create something on our first practical session with less than 1% knowledge about blender but as you continue to learn and understand all the concepts you will be able to make realistic looking animations as well but yes to make it look a bit more interesting we can try one more thing we will enter into the edit mode click a to select all and now we’ll use a new tool called bevel basically it will make the edges look a bit rounded or curved we will be understanding this tool as well in much detail in the upcoming chapters to use it right now we’ll Press cr+ B and move your cursor slightly to see its effect and then release it using the left Mouse button click now to fix this mismatch in colors in these Edge Loops we’ll change the Colors by selecting all of them and assigning them a different color to select the entire Edge Loop we first enter the face mode by pressing three to select the entire Edge Loop we’ll press alt and then select by left click like this and to select multiple Edge loop at once we’ll press shift and ALT simultaneously and select the edge Loop now this Edge Loop is also selected similarly we will select all these Edge Loops now now one thing to note is that selecting them will take some time and you have to judge on your own on which face to click to select the correct Edge Loop so try practicing it after this chapter ends and in upcoming practical sessions also we will be doing this again in order to master it now we’ll assign these Edge Loops black color so that they look interesting so we’ll create a new material here and to get black color here we will bring this down like this and now we click the assign button coming back to the object mode we observe that there are still some faces left that should be colored black so we’ll select those particular faces in the edit mode and assign them black color for example this face that is red colored this should be black so that it matches with the edge Loops so we’ll go to Black material and click assign similarly this one now our cube is finally ready and we’ll return back to the object mode and click zero for camera view so now it looks more realistic than before and so we’ll render it now which means that we will ask our software blender to give us the output as an image form to check the lighting in this scene and that how the final output would look like we’ll press Z and enter into the rendered viewport now this one face is a bit dark because of the lighting since a lamp is located here so the light does not fall on this face and as a result it appears to be darker but for today we will render it as it is since we are going to have a complete chapter on lighting as per its strength position Etc and also for our first practical session it looks simple and decent enough to render in order to render this image we’ll click here on the render button then click render image and based on the PC specification it will take the required time to render and this is our final output do tell me in the comments about how good your Cube looks and if possible also share the link of its image if you manage to render it now to save this image we’ll click on image here and click save and save it at your desired location and that’s all in our chapter number [Music] two in the previous chapter we tried to understand the interface of blender by moving or basically changing different things and we ended up making this simple looking cube in our first practical session and now let’s start a new chapter our first topic for today will be understanding editors in blender so as we been discussed in our previous chapter editors are basically individual windows or the panels which together make up this blender interface and they basically contain the controls to edit different types of data in blender Now the default screen Arrangement that is the arrangement which appears as default whenever you open a new file it comprises of these four panels or editors namely the 3D viewport editor outliner editor properties editor and timeline editor but these are not the only four editors available and to access more you can click this icon this is called the 3D view editor icon it’s available in all the editors with different images but it’s the first iccon of your editor and if you left click on this icon it displays a list of all the editors which you can access for example if I select this image editor it will open up here and here you can open images while working on your blender file this helps you when you’re working on some blender project and you need to see some reference images by clicking on image and then open you can open your required file since it’s going to be a long but a complete Master course all of these editors that you can see here these will be covered in detail in our coming chapters the next thing is resizing editors so sometimes you might feel that you need to change the size of your editor so for that just place your mouse cursor on the editor or the panel border and it will change to a double-headed Arrow like this now click left Mouse button and drag it to resize accordingly so editors can be changed from here or here depending upon the editor that you want to change and also they can be divided or basically be splitted now to split an editor place your mouse cursor in the corner of any editor panel and it changes to a white cross like this now click right Mouse button and you can split it in two ways vertical split and horizontal split if you select vertical split you can drag this line as per the area you need for the new editor and click left Mouse button to finalize it will duplicate the same editor panel and then you can change the editor type from here and adjust the size accordingly like this now for horizontal split you can place your mouse cursor here and click hor horzontal split and drag the line As for the area required for your new editor and this will create a new editor here it will duplicate the same and you can change it from here to like timeline now the timeline that was here initially will appear here as well and you can resize it will see it completely like this now to close an editor panel you basically have to join two editor panels together and make them into a single one so for this place your mouse cursor in between any of the two editors and then right click and select join areas then you have to drag this Arrow into the editor that you want to close and click left Mouse button to finalize now the two editors are joined into a single one and the other editor is closed now and now we’ll try to do the same thing with this one as well right click and select join areas then drag the arrow to the one you want to close and it will close same with this one and then we’ll resize it and now in order to make this similar to the default Regent blender we’ll try to add outliner editor up here and for that we’ll click horizontal split here and we’ll split it like this and change this to outliner editor and now we’ll resize it so that it looks similar to the default arrangement in blender so this was all about editors now blender also gives you the option of hiding some objects in your 3D viewport and this will be beneficial when you work on projects like this where you basically have a lot of objects in your 3D viewport and if all of them are shown together it might create some confusion for you to hide any object you need to select that object and then in the outliner editor click this I shaped icon against its name and this will hide the object and clicking it again will show the object in the 3D viewport there’s also a shortcut available to hide objects and that is to press h in your keyboard and this will hide the object and to unhide or show it again then you have to click alt plus Edge now the next thing to explore is user perspective and autographic view so by default blender opens in this user perspective View that means that there’s no visible end of this 3D viewport even if you see it from different angles it seems as if this viewport is infinitely large and so it’s a perspective View and to switch to another view that is The autographic View Press five on your numpad now this is the autographic view in which the viewport visibly ends here and it seems to make a right angle with the face so this was the difference in the perspective View and orographic view for most of our time we’ll be working in perspective view only so let’s return back to the perspective view by pressing five on an unpad again now one way to navigate or move around the viewport and blender is to press the middle Mouse button and to navigate like this but there’s one more way in which the navigation is similar to the walk style navigation in games such as GTA so if you play GTA with the keyboard you will use the WD keys to move your character similarly in blender there’s a special mode in which you can use the WD keys to move around the 3D viewport and it is known as walk navigation to access it click on The View menu here and then go to navigation and select walk navigation from here now you can use your WD keys to move around the 3D viewport W is for moving forward a is for moving towards left s is for backward movement and D is for moving towards right and in order to increase the speed of your movement you can press shift key simultaneously along with W SD keys shift W will move it forward in a quick way similarly shift s shift a shift d and the view will be finalized with the left Mouse button click and always remember that when you have to cancel your navigation like you’re navigating like this then before finalizing press the right Mouse button click and it will return back to the position where you were before navigating all these things will get in your mind when you actually practice blender over time so if possible do try to practice all these shortcuts and modes and try to explore them after this chapter ends also I can assure you that following this master course series will Bren up your skills and at the end of this course you will be in a position to make everything that your mind can think of in blender now coming back to our chapter the next topic is workpace so Works spaces are basically the screen Arrangements of editors um for working at specific task like there’s a sep workspace for modeling things a separate one for sculpting shading animation Etc and these can be accessed from here in the upper screen header where you can see layout modeling sculpting these are the workspaces in blender the default one is the layout workspace if you click on modeling or sculpting we observe that the workspace layout changes and since right now we haven’t done modeling sculpting shading Etc so we won’t be discussing each one right now but whenever the upcoming chapters will be released we would be understanding about all these different tools as well now we’ll return back to our default workspace now we’ll see these tools which are known as the widget panel blender if you click here and move around your cursor then you will navigate in the 3D viewport so this is another way to navigate the 3D viewport and this one is for zooming in and out in the 3D viewport which you can also do using your scroll wheel then this one is to move around the view like this and as discussed earlier you can also do this using the shift plus middle Mouse button now this camera icon is for toggling the camera view and the short cut for this as discussed earlier was the zero you can toggle the camera view using the zero key in the numpad now this one is for switching between the perspective and orthographic view if you click this the view changes from perspective to orthographic and if you click it again it returns to the perspective yain and the shortcut for this is five in the numpad the next thing is the preference editor which is basically like the settings menu for blender to open it click edit from here and select preferences and here you can basically change the settings in things such as interface themes viewport navigation input uh saving different files and installing add-ons there will be a separate chapter in this course which will make you understand what exactly the add-ons are and which ones are the best for blender also it is advisable not to change any preference settings on your own unless and until you know the exact consequences of that change when whenever it is required to change anything I will share that with you in the upcoming chapters but yes for today’s chapter we’ll be exploring the themes in the preference settings we will try to change the color of this 3D viewport background for this with the theme selected here we’ll go to 3D view here 3D viewport and scroll down and select theme space and scroll down again and select gradient colors here now click the gradient high off option here to display this Color Picker Circle now to increase the brightness you can use this brightness slider here and this will increase the brightness of the colors now you can select any of the colors like if we move it to Green the color of the 3D viewport editor will also change you may set any color that you like and you can adjust the brightness from here now you can also change the Cosmetic appearance of your interface that is the theme of your interface as per your preference to do that in the same themes preference scroll up and and and select this presets drop down menu you may select any of these themes that you would love to see while working on your blender file or blender project and the default one in blender is the blender Dark theme also blender gives you the option to download themes from some external websites and to install them you can click this install button and select the file but for most of the people it’s not required because blender already gives you a good range of themes to choose from so choose the theme that suits you the best and now we’ll close these preference settings and this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter now coming back to the topic today we are going to start navigating and saving in blender so first of all blender files is saved in your PC with the file extension of do blend and as we even discussed this earlier in order to save your files in blender you have to press control+ s and then it will ask you to choose your desired location it suggested to make a separate folder in your PC for blender files like I have created this blender Master Master course folder where I save the files that I have created during this master course series similarly you can also create a folder in your PC so now I’ll rename this file as chapter 4 and then I click enter and it automatically adds the file extension and now I click save blender file and the file is now saved in our folder now one of the most important things while working in blender is to frequently save your work and the reason is that blender doesn’t have any autosave feature as of now and so if your software crashes or if there is some power failure you will lose all your unsaved work similarly if you want to open a blender file then just press cr+ o and then by navigating through your folders from here you can choose your desired file which you want to open suppose I want to open chapter number two file so I click here and press open and the file is now open so this was the file in which we made the cube and this for the chapter number two file and now I’ll close it and open the chapter number four file like this so till now in this chapter we have learned how to open and save files in blender but what does it exactly mean to save a file in blender just like a text file contains the data of words and letters or an image file contains the data which displays an image similarly a blender file contains a combination of data organized into separate parts or elements so whenever you save a file in blender you are basically saving the elements of that file and to understand this in a practical way click on file here and press append and now I’ll click on the chapter number two file and press upend so it displays a list of the different folders and these are the folders which contain the data of a particular file in blender for example the materials folder here contains the data of all the materials or the colors that you have used in your project and if you go back and select the object folder then it contains all the objects that are present in your 3D viewport of that particular file now you may be thinking what this append option was when I clicked it earlier so basically you can insert elements from one blender file to another using the upend option or the link command the difference between the two is that a pen will take the data from a file and will add it to the other file whereas link allows you to use the data from an existing file to your current file but the data will still remain in the existing file at this stage it might be difficult to understand these but in our upcoming chapters when we will use these tools and commands practically then your concept will get more clear about them and also we will try one example of aend right now so suppose we want to add this Cube that we created in our previous chapter into this file so to do that we have to go to file and press upend here then you need to select the file where it was saved for example I click chapter number two and append and now I will click on collection since it contains basically all the objects that were in your 3D viewport and it will add this Cube here in the 3D viewport of this new file the reason why it’s appearing like this is that there are d duplicate cubes here the previous Cube that was in the default file is also there and the added cube is also here and the lamps are also two the cameras are also two which you can see in the collection here so we’ll delete one light from here and we’ll also delete one camera from here and now I will also delete this default Cube and now if I go to the material preview mode here then we see that the cube we made in chapter number two file is now in our chapter number four file as well and now our final topic for this chapter is importing objects so basically there are many file types of formats which can store a 3D model and blender has the ability to accept most of them now there are many websites from where you can get such 3D models for your projects such as sketchfab.com here you can find a number of free and paid 3D models which you can use in your blender projects we will be discovering this in detail in one of our upcoming chapters but for now we will see an example of importing an object from this website into our blender file so let’s search for a 3D model of an apple on this website and for this I’ll go here and search for apple and I’ll check this downloadable option and this one looks good so I’ll go here and scroll down let’s look at this first and it looks fine so I’ll scroll down click on download 3D model and we’ll choose this usdz format to download it and it will download in a few seconds now let’s go back to blender and I’ll first delete all these objects from a 3D viewport or maybe I’ll keep this Cube and delete the rest of them so I’ll click on this and along with shift I’ll select this camera press X to delete and I am thinking of hiding this object instead of deleting so I press h to hide this Cube now to import that 3D model of Apple in this file we’ll go to file then import and from here we’ll select Universal scene description USD format now I will go to my downloads page and select this apple. usdz then click on import and now I’ll scroll back and press s to scale this down like this similarly you can also try this with other 3D models online and that’s all in our chapter number [Music] four now the most important thing in our 3D view editor is this 3D cursor here so while working in the 3D view Port there are two cursors the mouse cursor which I’m moving right now and the 3D cursor which is by default located at the center of the scene and before understanding the usage of this 3D cursor it’s important to understand selecting deselecting and adding objects in your 3D view editor or your file so in this default blender scene the cube is selected as it’s shown by this orange outline or this yellow outline here and to deselect it click left Mouse button anywhere in the empty space and to select it again click left Mouse button on the cube and as discussed earlier also the shortcut key for selecting all the objects in your 3D view editor is to press a and all the objects would get selected an alternative selection method is the Box selection method and for this I’ll first deselect these objects and now I’ll press B on my keyboard now left click and drag it like this and to finalize the selection I will release the left Mouse button click and now only the cube is selected since it lied within the Box area now whenever you open blender then by default this select box tool here is activated in the tools panel so basically this tool is similar to what we learned in box selection method with this selected you can click left Mouse button and then drag it like this and if you release it then this will select all the objects that lie in the particular box area and if you keep your cursor on this tool and keep holding your left Mouse button then you will see a list of four options if you select The Tweak option here then it basically allows you to select only by clicking on a particular object using a left Mouse button for example if I click on this camera here then this camera will get selected if I click on this cube the cube will get selected now the next option available here is the select box tool which we have already discussed and it basically allows you to make a box and any object within the Box area will get selected now the next one is the select Circle method and in this case the mouse cursor turns to a selection Circle and in order to select an object using this for example this camera make sure that the entire object is within this circle area and for this I will scroll my middle Mouse button to make sure that the camera lies within the circle area and then I’ll click my left Mouse button to finalize the selection and the camera will get selected and the last one is the select lasso tool and it basically allows you to create a lasso area like this and any object that lies within the area will get selected if I try to select this lamp this lamp will get selected and if I try to select this Cube then this Cube will get selected now our next topic for today is adding objects in blender so by default blender scene contains three objects a cube a camera and a light and the camera and the light are the special objects which perform their functions but when you actually render your image they do not appear because camera takes the image and the light adds 3D lighting effect to your scene now if you want to add a new object object in blender press shift plus a and select the mesh list then you can see a list of 10 mesh objects which are called Primitives in blender because they allow you to basically create any model out of them by resizing them by scaling them and doing other operations suppose I select this cylinder here now the cender will get added where my 3D cursor is within the scene and if you want to change the location of your 3D cursor you basically have two options first one is to select this tool which is known as the cursor tool from here and now if you click your left Mouse button anywhere then the cursor will get relocated and another way is to hold shift and click right Mouse button anywhere to position the 3D cursor on your viewport also there is one more way to change the location of your 3D cursor if you press shift plus s then this cursor P menu appears and it basically allows you to snap your 3D cursor to some particular locations we will be using all these in the upcoming chapters while modeling things practically but for now I’ll take an example by taking my cursor back to the world origin and for this I’ll click on this cursor to world origin option and my cursor gets relocated back to the world origin also blender gives you the option to duplicate objects suppose I want to create a duplicate of this cender so the shortcut key is shift plus d and then by dragging my cursor around I can move the duplicate object now if you want to move it in a particular direction let’s say x axis then I’ll press X on my keyboard and its movement will get restricted to the xaxis and suppose I type a number like five in my keyboard then it will move exactly by 5 m in the xaxis and to finalize you can click either enter or another option is to click left Mouse button both of them work in order to move an object let’s say this cube in our scene then one way as we discussed in our previous chapters was to press G on our keyboard and then move around the cube but there’s another way as well and that is by using the object properties panel here so you can change the location of your selected object by entering different values here suppose I type 1.5 m in Z Direction then it will move in the required location similarly if I type three in y direction then it will move by 3 m in the y direction and instead of entering the values here you can also click left Mouse button and then drag like this and the object will relocate as per the values and to finalize it you need to release your left Mouse button similarly you can also rotate or scale your object from here in a particular direction also there are many people who are not comfortable with the metric system and they follow the imperial system more so for such people you can go to scene properties here and then click on units and you can change from metric to Imperial from here and I’m choosing the metric system since I’m more comfortable with that now you might have noticed that when you press shift a then apart from mesh there were many more object types here so we’ll be understanding almost all of them in our future chapters whenever they are required to be used now coming back to the topic these objects in our scene have different names assigned to them which you can check from here in the outline editor for example the selected object is named Cube and this cylinder this is named as cylinder in the outline editor and since this one was the duplicate of this cylinder so it’s named as cylinder. 001 similarly if I create another duplicate out of it then that duplicate will be named as cylinder. 002 also you can rename any of these objects by double clicking here and then typing the name for example cylinder duplicate and then press enter to confirm the name similarly let’s change the name of this Cube and let’s name it box and now I’ll delete all these objects and now I’ll add a special object in blender that is the suzan or the monkey model the reason why blender has this complex model in a list of all simple looking models is that most 3D softwares have a generic semi- complex primitive that they use for testing renders and other things in their software and they can’t do this with a simple Cube or a simple sphere so they need something more complex and that’s why blender added this suzan or this monkey model in this software the next thing that we will see is joining two or more objects together and for that let’s add a cube here let’s move it in X Direction and we’ll also add a UV sphere and let’s move it in X Direction like this now suppose I want to join all these together as a single object so for that I’ll select all these by pressing a and then press cr+ J to join them now they will appear as a single object here in the outliner editor and if if you wish to undo the action then you have to press contrl plus Z and this will undo your last action and if you want to redo any action in blender then you have to press contrl plus shift plus Zed now I’ll delete this and we’ll add a UV sphere we can notice that its surface is not smooth and is made up of rectangular flat surfaces if you want it surface to be smooth then you can do this by clicking right Mouse button and selecting shade smooth this produces a smooth spherical surface which looks better than the previous one also if you want the surface to be flat then you can do this by clicking right Mouse button and going for the shade flat option and now the last and the most interesting topic of this chapter is meta shapes so first I’ll delete this UV spere and press shift plus a and in the metab ball section I’ll select the ball So Meta shapes are described as clay like forms having a rounded shape and the reason why they are special is that they show some strange Behavior when they get close to one another so first I’ll move it in X Direction like this and now I’ll add another metaball and if I try to move it closer to the other one then they try to pull and flow together like liquid droplets and to finalize structure you have to click left Mouse button also similar is the case with other metabol objects such as the metabol cube if you add it and scale this p and move it in Z Direction and if you bring it close to any of the metaballs then it will also behave in a similar way so with the help of these meta shapes we can create some very good Effects by animating and texturing them but that would be covered in our future chapters so now we have learned and understood lots of tools in the 3D view editor and different types of objects and so it’s time for a practical session in order to apply a knowledge practically in the first practical session of chapter number two of this series we made this Rubik’s Cube and in today’s session we’ll be making this simple scene of a table so to begin with I’ll first add a cube and we’ll scale it down in the Z Direction like this I’ll move it in the Z Direction now we’ll scale it up in X and a little bit in y as well so it looks like this and it looks good as a tabl top now for the next part I’ll place my 3D cursor over here by pressing shift plus right Mouse button and now I’ll add a cube here to make it look like a table leg I’ll first scale it up in Z Direction and now we need to scale this down in both X and Y Direction simultaneously and the shortcut key to scale it in two directions say X and Y simultaneously is to press s then shift plus the other direction that is Zed so by using this shortcut we can scale this down in two directions simultaneously and to finalize the scaling we have to click left Mouse button now we’ll also scale this down in the Z Direction like this and we’ll move it down in Z direction also so it looks fine now and instead of making all the legs separately we will duplicate this leg by pressing shift plus b and now I’ll move it in y direction and we should place it here similarly we will select both these legs and we’ll duplicate them and we’ll place them here on the other side of the table so this looks good and now I’ll move this table down like this and I’ll make it into a single object by joining it so I’ll press control+ J and now this converted into a single object and I’ll ch CH it name from here I’ll rename it as table now I think that we should place the suzan model on this table so that it doesn’t look empty and so I’ll first place my 3D cursor here on the tabletop so that the object gets added here and now I’ll press shift plus a and select mesh then monkey or the suzan model and now I’ll resize it and place it on the tabletop and it’s also not mandatory to copy the exact location or the rotation that I am doing you can do it on your own as per your preferences and it looks complete now and it’s time to render it but before that I have to add a camera in my scene so I’ll press shift plus a and I’ll press camera here now if I press zero on my numpad for the camera view we notice that we don’t see the table that’s because the camera is located where the 3D cursor was and the best way to fix this is to select view here and then click on lock camera to view it basically allows you to view navigation within the camera view meaning that if you scroll down then you will zoom out in the camera view as well and similarly if you press your middle Mouse button and navigate then your camera will also move but if this option is disabled then then if you try to navigate then the camera would remain still so it’s important to turn this on if you want to navigate with your camera view and now I’ll scroll down so that the entire table is visible like this before rendering let’s assign the table and the suzan model some colors so I click on the table and I’ll go to the materials tab I’ll click on new and I’ll change the color but first I’ll go to the material preview mode and now I’ll change the color to something like brown I’ll decrease this brightness lighter and I’ll change the color of the suzan model to Yellow now I’ll go to the render preview mode and I see that there’s no lighting so I need to add lights also I’ll press shift plus a and select light then point and here the light will get added at the 3D cursor I’ll move it up in Z Direction and I’ll switch this off the camera the lock camera to view option so that I can navigate properly then I’ll select this light and move it in y direction and down in Z Direction I’ll increase its power from here let’s set it to 50 wat and I’ll also increase the brightness or the power of the light also I’ll add one more light by duplicating it shift d and I’ll move it in y direction now I’ll return to the camera view and if I zoom in although this looks very simple but with amount of knowledge we having right now it looks decent enough to render so now we’ll click on render then render image and so this is the final rendered image if you also tried making it then do tell me in the comment section how it was and that’s all for this [Music] chapter so whenever you open blender then by default you are in the object mode with this default Cube selected and if you want to edit an object then you have to enter the edit mode and as discussed in the previous chapters the shortcut to do that is to press Tab and now we are in the edit mode so so the difference between the two modes is that in edit mode you basically work with the individual vertices to model your shape whereas in the object mode you basically change the properties of this Cube as a whole to model something now by default the edit mode comes in the Vex select mode in which you can select the vertices by using a left Mouse button click and to switch to the edge select mode press two on your keyboard but not from the numpad and now you can select the edges of your object by left Mouse button click similarly you can also enter the face select mode by pressing three on your keyboard and now you can select the faces using the left Mouse button click now blender even has an x-ray mode which you can toggle from here and it allows you to select the hidden vertices edges and faces and there’s a shortcut available for the x-ray mode also and that is to press alt+ Z to toggle it and this one is also available in the object mode you can enter the object mode and then press alt plus Z to enter the x-ray mode now let’s come back to the edit mode so in the edit mode we can apply move rotate and scale to the vertices edges and faces as well suppose I select this vertex and press G to move it around and then I can left click to finalize the movement similarly if I go to the edge selection mode by pressing two and if I select this Edge and I try to rotate it by pressing R like this so the object is now transformed and similarly I can also go to the face select mode select this face and if I try to scale it down and now if I go to the object mode the object is now transformed now I’ll return to the edit mode so there may be some occasions where you need more vertices in your object for creating details and for this blender has subdivision so suppose I have selected this face and to subdivide this face I will click right Mouse button and then select subdivide from here now this face is subdivided into four parts and you can also change the number of cuts from here by increasing the number of cuts or decreasing it and if you want to delete any vertex edge of face suppose I want to delete this face so I’ll select it and press X and now select face and the face will get deleted similarly if I want to delete any Edge so I first have to enter the edge select mode by pressing two then I’ll select the edge and now I’ll press X to delete and I’ll select edges and the edge will get deleted and the reason why the upper face is also deleted is that the edge of that face was connected with the edge that I deleted so since the shape of that face could not be completed so it also got deleted now I’ll return to the object mode and I’ll delete this Cube and now I’ll add a new cube in its place and let’s also add a UV spere let’s move it in y direction now in the object mode you can easily select any object by simply clicking on it with the left Mouse button click but suppose I select this Cube here and if I enter the edit mode and now if I try to select this UV sphere I can’t do that and that’s because edit mode is only for the object that I selected before entering into the edit mode now the question arises how do I edit both the objects together in edit mode and to do this we have to come in the object mode then with the Box select tool I’ll select both of these and now if I enter the edit mode then I can edit both of these objects together now let’s come back to the object mode and if you notice then every object in your scene has a dot in the center and this is the object’s origin or its Pivot Point to understand it let’s try to rotate this Cube we observe that the cube rotates about its Center Point or the pivot point and that’s the use of the object’s origin and you can also change the position of this piver point and to do this first place your 3D cursor at the point where you want your object’s origin to be located so let’s place our 3D cursor over here using shift plus right Mouse button click now to change the position of your object’s origin from the center to where the 3D cursor is located you have to click your right Mouse button while selecting this Cube and then go for set origin and select origin to 3D cursor now your pivot point or the point of this cube is shifted here where the 3D cursor is located and now if you try to rotate it then it rotates like this due to the position of your pite point and you would be using your object PIV point in a number of different situations based on what your project is now the next topic for this chapter is proportional editing so first let’s remove all this and let’s bring the 3D cursor back to the center of the world origin by pressing shift plus C and now we’ll add a new object from mesh and the object we are going to add is the plane now press tab to enter the edit mode and let’s suppose we want to make a mountain using this plane so for that first we need to have more vertices on this plane and so we’ll subdivide it and let’s increase the number of cuts let’s keep it to 10 now to make the peak of the mountain the first thing that comes in our mind is to select one of these vertices and then move it up in the Z Direction like this but as we can see it doesn’t actually look like a mountain the smoothness or the flow is somewhere missing in it and here comes one of the most important editing Tools in blender proportional vertex editing so proportional vertex editing is basically used to create a flow in the shape while you are editing your vertices and to enable it you have to click here in the 3D view editor header and now the proportional vertex editing tool is enabled also the shortcut key to toggle proportional vertex editing is to press o in your keyboard so now let’s undo this editing by pressing control+ Z and now with the proportional editing enabled if I try to move this Vortex upward then you can see that it’s forming a much better shape and that’s because it’s influencing all the vertices around the selected vertex and the circle that you are seeing is the circle of influence and all the vertices within the this circle will get influenced by the change and you can use your scroll wheel to change the size of the circle and now let’s finalize this by clicking left Mouse button so that was about the proportional editing and now is the time for the last and the simplest topic of this chapter parenting of objects so first let’s delete it and now let’s add two different objects let’s say one is a cube and let’s add another object let’s say it’s a cylinder now let’s move it in y direction like this so suppose you want two or more objects in your scene to act as a single object meaning that if I move this Cube then the cylinder also moves with it then we use parenting now some of you might say that you can join them by pressing crl + J and now if I move them they move together so yes it will work but what if I want it to be like if I move the cube then cylinder should move with it but if I try to move the cylinder then the cube should not move and here I will have to use parenting now let’s understand this with the help of an example first I’ll unjoin them by pressing control+ Z and then I’ll deselect them and now let’s select the cylinder and then by pressing shift I’ll select this cube with a left Mouse button click now we have to press cr+ P for parenting and we’ll select object and now the cube is the parent object of this cylinder which means that moving the cube will move the cylinder with it but if I try to move the cylinder then the cube won’t move so basically you have to remember that the object that you selected first while parenting that is the cylinder becomes the child and the object that is selected later that is this Cube it becomes the parent object and to summarize the various Concepts that we have covered till now in this series let’s start a practical session for this chapter in the last two practical sessions we made these two objects and in today’s session we’ll be making this scene so let’s begin with it I have deleted all the objects in my scene and we’ll start with making the computer screen and it’s upper body so let’s first add a cube let’s scale it down in the x-axis and let’s scale it up in the y- axis a bit like this and we should scale it down in x-axis a little bit more now to make it stand we will place a 3D cursor over here but before that there’s one more important thing suppose you want to view the object from a particular Viewpoint like from the top or the front so for this there are certain shortcuts assigned for the front view you have to press one in your numpad it’s appearing like this because the rotation of our object is not right so let’s press R then Zed and 90 and so for the front view you have to press one in your numpad for the back view you have to press C crl + 1 similarly for the Right View Press three in your numpad for left view you have to press crl + 3 similarly if you want to see the top view then you have to press seven in your numpad and for the bottom view it’s control+ 7 I have typed all these navigation shortcuts here if you want you can take a screenshot of this now let’s come back to the front view by pressing one and we’ll place a 3D cursor here by pressing shift plus right Mouse button click I place my 3D cursor over here so that I can make the stand for the computer now let’s add a cylinder here let’s scale this down and let’s scale it up in the Zed axis like this and now I’ll navigate and I see that the position is not correct so by pressing three on my numpad I’ll go to the right view now I press G and Y to move it in y direction and I’ll place it here now if I come back and see it looks fine now let’s return to the front view and now I’ll add a cube at the bottom of the cylinder so that the stand is complete so I’ll first place 3D cursor over here by pressing shift plus right Mouse button and I’ll add a cube now I’ll scale it down in the Zed axis and it looks

    slightly bigger in size so I’ll scale it down in the y- axis and also in the x-axis now even if the basic structure of a computer is ready but still it looks very simple so for this let’s select this PC screen and let’s tab into the edit mode and now with all the vertices selected I’ll use the bevel option and bevel basically makes the edges of your object look smooth so let’s use it to understand it so I’ll press cr+ B and slightly move my cursor away and to finalize I’ll press left Mouse button click and now if I come out of the edit mode the edges now look something like this now I’ll join this entire computer with it stand as a single object and for that I’ll press a to select all and press contrl plus J to join them and I’ll change its name from Cube to computer now if you’re remember we made this table with the suzan model in the chapter number five and I think that we should add this table in this chapter number six project and in this way we’ll also revise the concept of a pending so to append that table we’ll first go to file then append and now we have to locate our file and click on the file name then we’ll go to collection and press on the collection and now the table along with the suzan model and the lighting setup will get added and now I’ll go to the front view by pressing one now I’ll select this computer press G and Zed to move it in that direction and I’ll place it on the tabletop now I’ll select the suzan model and hide it and now it looks good so let’s enter the camera view by pressing zero on our numpad and to adjust it we’ll click on The View here then lock camera to view and now if I scroll back then the whole computer along with the table will come in our view and now let’s enter the material preview mode and let’s change the color of our computer so we’ll go to the materials properties here then click on new and let’s change its color to light blue like this but it screen should be black so I’ll go to the edit mode then if I go to face select mode and select this face only and then click on the plus button here and click on assign then this particular face of the object will have a different color what I’ll assign now so I clicked on new and choose the base color from here to turn it into black I’ll have to decrease the brightness slider and now if I go to object mode it appears something like this now one thing that you might have noticed is that it appears very simple and the reason for that is that we have currently learned only editing objects in blender but to make it realistic and complex we’ll have to learn the editing Tools in blender and that we are going to cover in chapter number seven of this series now let’s go to the render mode to see how it will look when we finally render it and it looks ready to be rendered but we have done one mistake here that we’ll get to know after we click on the render button so let’s render it and this is the rendered image we see that the suzan model is appearing here which means that even if we hide the suzan model while working on our 3D view Port it would still appear in the rendered image now suppose you want to hide the suzan model in your 3D viewport as well as the rendered image so you can do this by clicking on the camera button here so if I click this camera button then it will be disabled in the render also and now if I click on render image then this image is rendered in which suzan model does not appear and so that’s all in this [Music] chapter so the first tool that we will use today is the extrude tool for this we’ll go to the edit mode of this Cube and to enable the extrude tool press on this extrude region icon and now this yellow Gizmo appears which is normal or perpendicular to the face of this Cube so first I’ll go to the face select mode and select the upper face now if I left click and drag this Gizmo or the manipulator we will notice that it it duplicates the face and moves it along the normal axis if I release the left Mouse button it finalizes it but these edges still remain here and thus stay connected to the extruded face and we can also left click and move around the viewport to move the Extrusion along the viewing plane also you can do this with vertices and edges and also with multiple faces together and the shortcut to enable Extrusion is to press e key in your keyboard and the face will extrude along the normal and left click to finalize it now let’s return to the object mode and press X to delete it now I’ll add another Cube here and we’ll enter the edit mode and I’ll disable the extrude region option now suppose I select this face and press e to extrude but instead of left clicking I press the right Mouse button so you might think that the face did not get extruded as I can’t see it here but in reality the face is extruded but it does not have any height and to confirm this with the face selected we’ll press G and then Zed to move this face along the Z Direction and we see that the face gets extruded now let’s undo this by pressing control+ z twice and suppose I want to make a stack of Cubes so for this I’ll press e to extrude then I’ll right click to cancel it and I’ll scale this down like this and I’ll again press e to extrude and move it upwards like this and I can do this multiple times press e and then right click then s and extrude it again so in this way it can be used to form a stack of Cubes now the extrude tool has five modes if you click on this tool for 2 seconds then it will display the list of the five modes the first one is the normal extrude region tool which we have already used so if I press e then it will get extruded like this this and the next one is the extrude manifold if I drag this Gizmo upwards we notice that the edges that were here will get dissolved when we previously used the normal extrude region tool the edges did not disappear but with this mode that is extrude manifold mode the edges will get disappeared or get dissolved and only that’s the difference between the two modes now the next one is the extrude along normal and this one is used when you are extruding multiple faces together to understand its importance let’s first try to extrude two faces in the normal mode that is extrude region mode so let’s select these two faces to select the other face together you have to press shift key along with left Mouse button click and now with both the faces selected if I extrude them then we observe that it is basically extruding in the direction which is average of normals of both the faces but now let’s select the other two faces and let’s switch to the extrude along normals mode and if I extrude it now we observe that both the faces are extruded along the individual normals this is the difference between extrude along normals and the normal extrude region mode in the normal extrude region mode the Extrusion will take place in the direction which is average of both normals and then extrude along normals mode the exion will take place in the direction of the individual normals of the faces and the next one is extrude individual tool this one is really very helpful in making certain faces extend out independently from its neighboring faces basically to understand it let’s select these two faces and choose the extrude individual option from here now if I try to extruded we notice that Extrusion take place in such a way as if both the faces were being extruded individually that is both the faces got extruded along with their individual normals and for anyone who has any confusion in these methods I’m going to summarize them for you see the extrude region tool basically extrudes your face along the normal and if you try it with multiple faces then it will calculate the average of the normal of the faces and it will extrude it in that particular direction the second one that is extrude manifold is used when you want to dissolve the edges while extruding and the third one extrude along normal means to extrude at right angle to the selected face you will be using this mainly in case of extruding multiple faces together and the next one is the extrude individual tool in which the Extrusion take place in such a way as if multiple faces were being extruded individually along their own normals and now let’s explore the last one that is extrude to cursor so first let’s delete this and add a new cube in its place let’s go to the edit mode and select this face let’s go to the extrude menu and select extrude to cursor now if I simply left click anywhere in the viewport then the selected face will be extruded to wherever I click using the mouse cursor and now the most important thing is that in most of the cases like more than 90% of the cases you will be using the normal extrude region tool only to extrude your faces or vertices so even if currently you can’t learn all different extrude modes you do not need to worry because these things will get in your mind only when you practically make something blender and our next chapter is going to be completely on modeling of different objects only so we’ll be using all these tools there also and now let’s come to the next tool that is inser faces so inser faces is used to create new faces inside a selected geometry to understand this first I’ll delete this and add a new cube in its place now let’s go to the edit mode and I’ll deactivate the extrude mode and now I’ll select this pH so to insert this pH press I on your keyboard and move your cursor and left click to finalize so by using this tool we basically created a smaller face on the face that we selected and and it can be used to make many cool things like if I press e to extrude it and left click and now if I press I again to insert this face press e to extrude and again I to insert and I can also extrude this face inwards like if I press e and take it backwards then the face will get extruded inwards and if I want the face to be outwards then I’ll press G to move it and in y direction and it will come outwards like this now the next tool is the bevel tool so this tool basically helps to make the edges look curved or rounded let’s try this with the help of an example so I’ll switch to the edge select mode by pressing two and I’ll select these two edges now to apply the bevel tool press ctrl+ B and slightly move your cursor away and now use your scroll wheel of the mouse to scroll up and this will increase the number of segments now left click to finalize and we observe that these edges now look much curved and rounded and so that’s what the bevel tool does and now the next thing is the vertex or the edge Loop selection so let’s come out of the edit mode and delete this and I’ll add a cylinder let’s tab into the edit mode now I’ll deselect all these edges and suppose I want to select all the edges at the top now so one way to do this is to select one of them and then press shift and select each one individually but this one is too much time consuming and so the shortcut to do that is to press alt and select any one of them and the entire Edge Loop will get selected now the next tool to explore is the loop cut tool so suppose I want to add more Edge Loops in the cylinder to do this I’ll press ctrl+ R and now I’ll move my cursor towards the cylinder now I can use my scroll wheel to increase the number of cuts or to decrease them and to finalize the selection I have to press left Mouse button and now I can move move them based on the location that I want if I want them to be at the center then I have to press right Mouse button similarly if I want to add one more Edge Loop here I’ll press cr+ R and now I left click and if I drag it upwards and then left click again then this position will get finalized instead of the center one and now the last tool is the rip region tool for this first I’ll delete the cylinder and I’ll add a cube in its place now let’s tab into the edit mode and select the vortex mode by pressing one on your keyboard now you can see that these three edges here are connected to each other with this single vertex and to rip it apart with use the rip region tool so to activate this tool we have to press here rip region tool then I’ll select this Vortex and I’ll drag it away in a way that it rips apart similarly I can try it for this one also so it basically opens up the cube by disconnecting the vertices that were joined together and now we have explored all the basic Tools in blender before ending this I want you to analyze yourself if you understood over 60% of all the concepts explained today then it’s definitely very good because the remaining 40% would be cleared when we will model various objects in our next chapter but if you feel that you couldn’t understand 60% then I would request you to either re-watch the video and only understand what I’m showing and telling you or else you can also watch the selected part again where you feel that your confidence was a bit low and so that’s all for this [Music] chapter now in this chapter we’ll be modeling these three objects in blender and in this way we’ll revise the concepts that we have learned in this course till now so let’s first start with this model of chair so let’s begin with it first I’ll delete this default Cube by pressing X now I’ll go to the add object menu by pressing shift plus a and whenever you’re modeling something the first thought that should come to your mind is that which mesh type or object should be edited so that we can model our required object for example if you were to make a model of a planet or sun you would be using a UV sphere because it shape resembles and it can be easily edited to make the required object or the model now for this shair the best object that can be edited is Cube only so I’ll add this in my 3D viewp now I’ll tab into the edit mode with all the vertices selected I’ll scale this down in the Z Direction this will become the seat of the chair so we need many more vertices in order to edit this for this we’ll add some Loop cuts by pressing cr+ R then left click and right click to finalize it and then go here where it’s WR Loop cut and slide and you can increase the number of cuts from here let’s set it to six now again I’ll apply a loop cut in this direction left click and then right click so that it takes the default Center position and increase the number of cuts to six now I want you to understand two basic things first is why I applied Loop Cuts so for editing any object you need multiple vertices and to create more vertices you have to add Loop cuts also always remember that better or more detailed the object you want to create the more number of vertices are required the second thing is that always edit your objects in edit mode only even if you can do basic stuff like scaling in object mode but it’s always advisable to edit only in the edit mode now let’s make the legs of this chair for this we’ll switch to the face select mode by pressing three and we’ll select these four faces so with the shift key hold it select this face this one this one and this one and now we’ll extrude these faces by pressing e and dragging them and left click to finalize and now we’ll press s to set them a little up apart from each other and in this way we’ll also scale up the bottom faces and now to make the back of the chair we’ll select these seven faces for this I’ll select this face and keep pressing control and select this face this will basically select all the faces that lie between these two faces by picking the shortest path in between them and this tool is called the pick shortest part tool let’s practice it once again so I’ll deselect these faces now let’s select this face and keep holding control button and then select the last face so that’s how the pick shortest part tool works now to make the back we have to extrude these faces in the Z Direction and to make them look a bit more comfortable we’ll press G to move them and let’s move them back by a few cm in the X Direction and left click to finalize now we’ll delete these middle faces at the back of the chair so that it looks like this for this press three on your numpad to see the front view of the chair now if I’ll try to delete these faces by the regular method then we won’t get the desired results but still let’s try to do it using this regular method only so that we can understand where it goes wrong so enter the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Z and select these faces here press X and select faces to delete them now turn on the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Z and now we observe that there are these empty spaces in between that were basically created because the cube was empty from inside in terms of volume and to avoid this we’ll use a new tool that is known as Bridge Edge Loop tool but first let’s undo this using control+ Z and to access this tool you have to go to edge here and select Bridge Edge loops and now you can observe that the faces got deleted without leaving any open Edge Loops or empty spaces in between so the tool that we use that is the bridge Edge Loops it basically Works to join a series of adjacent Edge loops and it is an advanced tool which is used for modeling objects and the condition for using this is that the edge Loops should have same number of vertices for example in this case the front face had four edges and the back face also had four edges so when I selected both the faces and applied Bridge Edge Loop tool it worked and joined the two selected Edge Loops now let’s do the same for other faces as well so let’s select this face and with shift key holded I’ll select this pH now go to Edge and select Bridge Edge Loops then I’ll go for this pH and with shift key hold let’s select this face then go for Edge and Bridge Edge loops and now it looks fine now to make it look better let’s select these faces from here and press control key and select this face and we’ll extrude these faces by pressing e and left click to finalize and also let’s scale them up a little bit now let’s switch to the edge select mode by pressing two and we have to select all the edges except the top ones and the best way to do this is to enter the x-ray mode by pressing all plus Z select all these vertices that we didn’t want and now to invert the selection we have a tool called invert selection tool and to use this tool we have to press control+ I so basically it will select all the edges that were not selected and we deselect the ones that we selected and that’s what the inward tool does now we’ll apply the bevel tool on all the selected edges so that they look more rounded curved and a bit natural for this I will Press cr+ B and slightly move my cursor away and left click to finalize let’s increase the number of segments from 1 to three and click anywhere else to deselect and let’s switch off the x-ray mode by pressing all plus Z so now it looks like a real chair so let’s tab into the object mode press right click and shade smooth now we can also render this image but before that let’s apply some colors to it so I’ll go to material preview and go to this material tab here press new and let’s choose the base color from here we’ll decrease the brightness to get some brown color so let’s adjust it now it looks good enough to render so I’ll press zero for camera view now to lock the preview to the camera mode we need to toggle the Side Bar so let’s press n to toggle it and go to view and click on lock camera to view now if I scroll down the chair is completely visible in the camera view so first let’s go to the render preview mode and it looks like there should be more lighting so I’ll select this light and I’ll increase the power of this light to around 5,000 and also let’s create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and let’s move it in y direction and left click to finalize the location also we should add one more light at the back so I’ll press shift plus b again and right click now I’ll press G and move it in X and Y Direction simultaneously by pressing shift plus Z and now I’ll move it at the back let’s move it down in the Z Direction now I’ll press G and X to move it in X Direction now I’ll move it in y direction so you basically have to adjust the lighting according to what suits you or what looks the best to you and also one of our upcoming chapters will be completely based on lighting so we’ll understand everything about the lighting its types and other things in that particular chapter so it looks good now and let’s render it by clicking on render then render image and that’s the final rendered output it looks decent and I hope your rendered image would also have been perfect so now it’s time to create the second object on our list the treasure chest so I’ve created this new file and I’ll t to the edit mode with the cube selected press three for face select mode and I’ll select the top face and let’s bring this face down by pressing G and Zed and left click to finalize and now I’ll press a to select all the faces and let’s scale them down in the y direction left click to finalize but I think that we need to scale it up in the Z Direction so with all the faces selected I’ll press s and Zed and let’s scale them up now I’ll select the top face and scale it up a little bit more and left click to finalize now to make the top part of the chest we’ll extrude this face and left click and let’s scale it down and left click again now let’s bring this face a little bit down by pressing G and Zed and this much looks good and if you’re doing this along with me on your PC then it’s not mandatory to copy each and every step of mind you can change the basic Dimensions like scaling and other things according to what you think will look the best for your model and you might end up making something more beautiful than what I’m making now if he’ll select four faces this one with the shift key holded this one also this one and the last one is this now what we’re going to do is to press I to insert but we’ll press I one more time time to insert each face individually and press left click to finalize now to make this look like a treasure chest we’ll extrude these faces inwards so the shortcut to get the menu of five extrude tools is to press alt e and we’ll select the extrude faces along normals now slightly bring down the cursor till the Extrusion looks good and left click to finalize now it looks like this and now I’ll switch to the select mode by pressing two I’ll select this Edge and with shift he hold it I’ll select this Edge now I’ll use the bevel tool by pressing cr+ B and we’ll increase the number of SE M Ms by using the scroll wheel and left click to finalize and now to work on these faces here I’ll press three for face select mode I’ll select this face and with the shift key holded I’ll select this face now press I to inser and left click now we again going to extrude these faces inwards and for that I’ll press alt e select extrude faces along normals and bring down your curse a little bit left click to finalize the Extrusion and it looks like this now we’ll tab into the object mode and apply shade Smooth by clicking right Mouse buttton and click shade smooth but we observe that this smoothness is too high and blender gives you the option of adjusting the smoothness so first let’s undo it and now click right Mouse button and go for shade Smooth by angle and you can adjust the angle from here now higher the angle of smoothness more is the smoothness applied and I think around 60° would work in our case since it looks very simple we should apply some colors to it so let’s go to the material preview mode and click on the material properties panel now we’ll change its color to dark brown and to make it look better we’ll also change the color of these faces that are extruded inwards so let’s tab into the edit mode now we’ll select this face add new material and click on assign now change the color from here we’ll change its color to dark green so let’s take it to green and to make it dark let’s decrease this brightness slider let’s tab into the object mode and the color looks fine so I’ll apply this color to all the other extruded faces also for this face I’ll select the green material and click on aign similarly for this face and for this face and now we’ll change the color of the top faces so I’ll select alternative faces I’ll select this one then with the shift key holded I’ll select this and this one and also so this one and I’ll create a new material and let’s change it color to gray so I’ll decrease the brightness from here and I’ll increase its metallic nature to around 0.4 so let’s take a look at it in the object mode so it looks like this let’s also change the color of these faces here so I’ll tab into the edit mode select this face create a new material and we’ll change its color to red and I’ll bring down the brightness slider let’s tab into the object mode and it looks like this let’s increase the brightness slider a little bit now we’ll assign the same material to the other side and now to make it look a bit more realistic we’ll tap into the edit mode and press two for it select mode and to select all the edges I’ll press a and then I’ll apply bevel by pressing crl plus b and slightly moving my cursor away and click left Mouse button to finalize now I’ll tab into the object mode and it looks like this now so it looks a bit more realistic than before I’ll add the before and after images and you you can compare the difference between the two and now we need to model a lock to place at the center of the chest for that I’ll hide this object but first let’s change its name to treasure chest and now press h to hide it press shift plus a to add a new object and we’ll add a cube to make the lock press s to scale it down now for the front view you need to press one in the numpad now we’ll zoom in let’s scale it a bit more now to model the top part of the lock I’ll place my 3D cursor over here by clicking shift and right click now I’ll add another Cube here let’s scale it down and let’s scale it up in the Z Direction now let’s get to the side view by pressing three select this Cube and let’s scale it down in the y direction now we’ll select this Cube and let’s place it here so it looks like this now let’s again go to the front view by pressing one let’s tab into the edit mode with this object selected and let’s apply a loop cut let’s take it above and press three for the face select mode now I’ll select this pH so that I can extrude it and complete the remaining portion let’s go back to the front view and press e to extrude and left click Mouse button to finalize let’s add another loop cut and I’ll select this face here by pressing three and selecting this and we’ll extrude this face and now the basic structure of our lock is ready now we’ll return back to the object mode and we’ll select both of them and press contrl plus J to join them together and we’ll rename them as lock and now let’s zoom out and let’s bring it ahead in the y direction so that we can unhide the treasure chest now go to the front view and let’s scale this down a bit let’s place it here now go to the side view by pressing three now let’s move it in the y direction and we’ll also rotate it a bit and now it looks like this and let’s change its color by clicking on new and let’s set the color to Blue now we’ll tab into the edit mode and let’s zoom in now select this Edge this one by holding shift key and this one and also this one and now we’ll apply bevel tool on them by pressing control+ B and increase the number of segments using your scroll wheel and left click to finalize similarly we’ll do the same same with this we’ll select this Edge and this one by pressing shift key and press crl plus b for bevel and left click to finalize let’s come back to the object mode and it looks like this now and now I think that we should render it so let’s go to the rendered preview mode and switch to the camera view by pressing zero on numpad now we need more lights in our scene so we’ll select this light here and we’ll duplicate it and let’s place it here let’s add another light by duplicating and let’s place it here by pressing on this light we can also change its power or basically the strength of brightness I think around 800 should be fine and to lock the camera to view we need to open the sidebar so press n and go to view and select lock camera to view now we can adjust the camera and we’ll zoom in and this looks decent enough to render so I’ll click on render button and this is the final rendered output of a simple treasure chest and some of you might think that it looks very basic or very cartoonish but that’s only because we haven’t studied materials textures yet and since this is going to be a very long course so I have divided it into such a way that we first understand the basics by creating the basic objects around us and then we will slowly go to the advanced level and so now is the time to create the third and the last model for this class that is this grenade so I’ve created a new file and we’ll delete this Cube now I’ll add a UV sphere the reason for adding this UV sphere is that it shape resembles the most with that of a grenade and there’s a small menu here which says add U spere so we’ll click it and from here we can reduce the number of segments or the number of rings and we can also change the radius from here so we’ll change the number of segments to 16 and the number number of rings will also be 16 and let’s change this radius to one now let’s tab into the edit mode and press one for the front view then I’ll zoom in and let’s scale it up in the Z Direction now we’ll delete some of the lower faces but if I select it like this then the faces at the back would not be selected and the solution for this is to enter the x-ray mode while selecting so I’ll select these faces again and also I’ll select the faces at the top by holding the shift key while selecting them and now I’ll tell you one more shortcut to select more vertices if you want if you want to select more Edge Loops then you can do this by holding control and press the plus button in the numpad and this will increase the number of edge Loops selected similarly if I click minus instead of plus then the edge Loops will decrease now we’ll press X to delete them and select vertices now we’ll select this Edge Loop by holding alt and pressing left Mouse button and I’ll turn on proportional editing by pressing o and now I’ll scale it down similarly I also select this Edge Loop and scale it down also I’ll select this Edge Loop and scale it down now let’s switch to the face select mode by pressing three select all the faces and now we’ll extrude all these faces to form a shape like this for this I’ll press alt e and in this extrude menu we’ll select extrude individual faces and slowly move your cursor up so that the faces are extruded and press left click to finalize now it looks like this let’s switch off the x-ray mode and this is how our grenade would look like and now let’s apply the bevel tool here by pressing crl plus b and slightly moving away our cursor let’s increase the number of segments using our scroll wheel and left click to finalize and so it looks like this now now it looks a bit more realistic than before and now we’ll close the edge Ed Loops here so press two for Ed select mode and press alt and select the edge Loop now we’ll use a tool called fill tool to fill the space in between and to access this tool we have to press F and the space will be filled using the fill tool similarly we’ll also go above select this entire Edge Loop by pressing alt and selecting it press F to fill now to make the top of this grenade we’ll extrude this face and let’s scale it down a bit let’s extrude again and again scale it down and now to make this handle above or whatever it is called We’ll add a cube here by pressing shift plus a and select Cube scale this down press G and Z to bring it up let’s scale it down in the Z Direction more now we’ll go to the front view let’s bring it down in Z Direction let’s go to side view by pressing three and it looks perfect from here let’s also scale it down in the y direction now we’ll go to face select mode by pressing three and select this face now we’ll extrude this face and rotate it in the y direction now extrude it again and we’ll rotate it one more time in the y direction and now one more time we’ll extrude it so the basic structure of our grenade is now ready but let’s also scale up this handle from the bottom now it looks better now suppose you want to select only the handle in this object but if you press a then the entire grenade would get selected so the trick to select the handle only is to press l in your keyboard This is the select link tool and it helps to select only the object which has the vertices or the edges connected to it similarly if I deselect everything and and I take my cursor close to the grenade and then I press L then only the grenade part would get selected that is the main body and if I deselect and hover my cursor over the handle and then press press L then the handle of the grenade would get selected and now let’s apply the bevel tool by pressing crl plus b and take the cursor away a little bit left click to finalize and let’s come back to the object mode so it appears like this now we’ll change the colors so first let’s go to the material preview mode now let’s go to the material panel add a new color let’s change the base color to dark green now to change the color of the handle let’s go to the edit mode and press L to select the handle completely now I’ll add a new material and assign the handle this new material I’ll click on new and we’ll change the color to Gray and I’ll increase the metallic strength of this handle so let’s change the metallic nature to around 0.5 let’s go back to the object mode and this is how the basic structure would look like let’s tab into the edit mode again and change the color of this part also so let’s deselect and now to select the entire face Loop I’ll press alt and then select one of the faces similarly I’ll also select this face Loop by holding shift and ALT simultaneously and selecting one of the faces and now I’ll add add a new material and I’ll click on aign and let’s change this color to Yellow let’s decrease the brightness from here and let’s tab into the object mode so it looks like this now let’s apply shade Smooth by angle and let’s change the angle to around 20 so it looks like this now and I think it looks decent enough to render it now and I’ll switch to the camera view by pressing zero on my numpad we need to increase some brightness so I’ll select the lamp here and shift d to duplicate and let’s place it here I’ll add another duplicate lamp and let’s place it here now to lock the ca camera to the view we’ll press n for the sidebar then go to view and lock camera to view now we can navigate using the camera and let’s set our camera here we’ll zoom in a bit and this position looks good so now I’ll click on render and select render image to render it and this is our final output so that’s all in this chapter but before ending this chapter I would like to give you a task try to model the basic things such as cupboard or a refrigerator or any other similar basic object which you can render using your knowledge in blender that you’re having right now and so let’s end this chapter here [Music] so the first Advanced tool that we’ll explore in today’s chapter is the knife tool but before starting that there is one more important thing and that is you would be using these Advanced Tools in not more than 5% of the cases in majority of the cases we would be using the tools which are the basic tools that we have already covered in the previous chapter and in all the other chapters that we have covered so far in this course so you might think why to learn them and the answer to this is simple see if you learning a software the best thing is to master it completely so that you would be efficient in everything or basically every feature of that particular software now let’s come back to the knife tool so the knife tool allows you to create custom Imes in any direction on any particular face of your object and to access this tool with the cube selected we’ll go to the edit mode and here is the icon for the knife tool and if I click on it my cursor changes to a knife now to make a cut using this tool you need to click any of the edges with the left Mouse button click and a green square is created which is basically the vortex and now we’ll click on the other Edge click left Mouse button and we see that a cut is created we’ll also do the same with this Edge press left Mouse button and a second cut is created and to finalize the cuts you have to press enter and now if you go to the face select mode by pressing three let’s turn off the knife tool first we can select these faces individually now and also we can edit these faces separately for example if I select this face and press e to extrude then this particular face that we created with the help of our knife tool will get extruded and not the other faces but always make sure that you start with an edge and end on an edge while using the knife tool to understand this let’s enable this knife tool again and I’ll create some random cuts from here and I left click here here and here so I made some random cuts on this face but if I have to finalize my cutting then I can’t leave it here I have to end it on one of the edges like this can be an edge this is an edge so I’ll click left Mouse button to finalize and to exit it I have to press enter now I’ll disable the knife tool so always remember that while using the knife tool you have to start with an edge and end on an edge now the knife tool has four options which are pretty helpful in modeling complex bodies but to use these options options we must enable the knife tool with its shortcut key only and so the shortcut key for enabling the knife tool is to press K on your keyboard and the tool is now activated and suppose you want to come out of the knife tool before selecting anything here then you can do this with the right Mouse button click now the first option in the knife tool is the midpoint snap for this press K to enable the knife tool so to use the midpoint snap option you have to hold the shift key and now if I hover over any of the edges then it will automatically snap to the center of the edge so if I left click here and with the shift key holded I take take my cursor to this Edge then it will snap to the middle of the edge here and if I left click then it will create a cut here and to finalize the cut I’ll release the shift key and press enter so basically it will help you when you need to work more precisely and the cut has to be exactly in the middle so that’s the use of the midpoint snap option in the knife tool now the second option is the ignore snap option for this press K on the keyboard for knife tool now suppose I want to create a cut not from the edge but somewhere very near to it like from here but it would automatically snap the cut to the nearest Edge if I Tred to create a cut very near to that edge which I don’t want to happen so here we will use the ignore snap option so that it does not automatically snap to this Edge and to enable this option hold control and now if I try to create a cut very near to this Edge it won’t snap to the nearest Edge and the cut is created to finalize release the control button and press enter But as I already told you this tool must start from an edge and end on an edge so it would automatically connect my cut to the nearest vertices so this was the ignore snap option using which you can create a cut which is very near to the edge and it won’t snap out automatically to the edge which is near to it now the next option is the angle constraint first let’s come out to the object mode press X to delete this and add a new cube in its place we’ll tab into the edit mode now let’s go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad and now to understand the angle constraint option press K to enable the knife tool and for the angle constraint press a now if I left click anywhere and drag my cursor then this straight line would appear and if I move my cursor away then this line would rotate at angles of 30° and that’s what the angle constraint tool does it allows you to create precise cuts by giving you the option to cut out specified angles now suppose you don’t want the angle to be 30° but to be like 10° or 45° or anything else for that you can type that specified number for example if I want it at 10° then I can type 1 Z and now if I move it then it will move at angles of 10° now suppose I want to create a cut from this point to this point so I left click on this point here and now I’ll move my cursor there at that point now I’ll left click here also so this would create this precise cut and now I’ll press enter to escape the knife tool mode so the angle constraint option allows you to create a cut at any specified angle you just have to to type in the angle after pressing the a button which is for the angle constraint option and the last one is the cut through option and for this we’ll press k for the knife tool then press C to enable the cut through then press left click from here to here and again click left Mouse button and now we can see that it has created a complete cut even on the faces that I couldn’t see from that angle before and now I’ll press enter to exit the knife tool mode so that’s what the cut through tool does and now we have completed all the options in the knife tool and now the second tool for this chapter is the bisc tool but before that I’ll Tye into the object mode and press X to delete it and I’ll add a UV sphere in its place now for the bisect tool option you have to tap into the edit mode then click here for around two seconds and you will see a menu where it’s WR knife and bisc so we’ll go for the bisc tool and to see what it does we’ll left click here and drag a mouse cursor like this and release the left Mouse button click so it has basically made a loop cut around the UV sphere and you may also notice this Gizmo that is here and if I left click and move it then it would allow me to move this Loop cut or else you can also click on bisect that is written here and from here you can change the location and even the rotation of your Loop cut and if you click on the clear inner option here then you will get rid of the mesh that was opposite to the direction pointed by this Gizmo and if I turn it off and if I click on the clear outer option then we’ll get rid of the mesh which was in the direction where this little Gizmo is pointing and with one of these two options that is clear inner or clear outer selected if I click on fill then it will create a face along the loop that was used to bisect the object and now it’s time for the third and a very simple tool in blender the spin tool for this I’ll delete this UV sphere and we’ll add a cinder here let’s rotate it in x-axis by 90° and press three in the numpad for the side view now we’ll tab into the edit mode Let’s scale it up in y direction now suppose you want to make a pipe out of it that goes from here and like this in that case we have to use the spin tool and to access the spin tool you have to click here now we’ll select the vertices on this side and here you can see a little Gizmo which basically tells you about the direction in which the spin tool will work and also we notice that all the vertices are not selected so let’s select all of these vertices and to change the direction of this pin tool we can click on here X or Y or Zed but for our purpose we would need it in X Direction now we’ll go to the side view Again by pressing three now before using the spin tool we have to place a cursor over the Pivot Point as for the direction in which the spin tool is required to work so we’ll place our 3D cursor over here by pressing shift and right Mouse button and now if I click on any of these plus symbols and drag it like this then the spin tool will begin to work and if I release it and press e to extrude the face then we see that it has made this pipik structure so that’s how the spin tool Works in blender and now the fourth tool on our list is head slide and Vex slide tool for this we’ll tab into the object mode and we’ll delete this pipe object let’s bring back cursor to the world origin by pressing shift plus C now we’ll add a cube here let’s tab into the edit mode and press two for the edge selection mode and we’ll select this Edge now suppose I press G and try to move this Edge then it will move like this but it might be possible in certain cases that I do not want to move it like this but I only want it to slide it along the faces and that’s where the Ed slide mode comes into play for this double press G and now if you try to move the Ed then you will notice that it is not moving away and it is only sliding or basically moving along the faces and that’s how the Ed slide tool works it basically restricts the movement of a particular selected Edge by sliding it along the faces of the particular object which are adjacent to it and to finalize we left click and the same is available for the vortex also so press one for the vortex mode we’ll select this Vortex let’s zoom in a bit and if I press double G then instead of freely moving it it will basically slide it only along the adjacent edges and this is the vortex light tool and you have to press left click to finalize and now the last tool on a list is the string flatten tool so let’s come out of the edit mode press X to delete this so to understand this the object that we are going to add is the monkey or the suzan model now let’s tab into the edit mode and press three for face select mode now select some of the faces from the top let’s select these two faces and to enable the shrink and flatten tool you have to click here so I’ll press on this icon now if I drag this Gizmo upwards we observe that the two faces get expanded or flattened up similarly if I left click and bring this down then we observe that the faces will get shrink and that’s what the shrink flatten tool does moving this ISM more upwards will flatten or expand it and moving this downwards would shrink it and this brings us to the end of all the advanced Tools in blender I hope you like this [Music] chapter now let’s come back to blender and our topic for today to understand is what exactly are the modifiers and what can you do with them see theoretically modifiers are some sort of codes that apply some algorithm or process to an object and thus the properties and looks of the object changes but practically speaking modifiers are simply some editing tools which allow you to do things in seconds which might otherwise take you several minutes and also in a much better way now to access the modifiers you have to click on this tools icon here and this is the modify properties editor and by clicking on the add modifier option you can add any modifier from the lists here so as you can see there are these four categories of modifiers the first one is the edit modifier second is generate modifier then def modifiers and the fourth is physics modifiers as for the first group The edit modifiers it basically includes some Advanced modifiers which do not affect the shape of your object but rather other data such as as Vortex groups but we won’t be discussing about them right now at this point because understanding them would require some more Concepts to be covered in this course so we’ll be discussing these in some future chapter of this course and the next two are the main and the most important modifiers in blender that is the generate and the deform modifiers the generate modifiers contain a list of these 18 modifiers and we’ll be discussing all these in detail in the very next chapter that is chapter number 11 and next the deform modifiers have this list of 16 modifiers which we will be covering completely in the chapter number 12 of this course so so the upcoming two chapters would be covering a total of 34 modifiers in complete detail and now the last one is the physics modifiers which include simulations like fluid clothing Etc and each one of these topics is so complicated that every modifier has to be covered individually in detail so we’ll be covering all these one by one in our future chapters of this course but before ending this chapter let’s try to understand what modifiers actually do with the help of an example so we’ll be taking the example of array modifier for this go to add modifier then generate and then array or else you can also click on the search menu here then type array although we haven’t understood what this array modifier is but we are just going to use it to see what happens on applying a modifier so no worries as this modifier as well as all the other modifiers will be covered in complete detail in the next chapters so let’s click on this generate array modifier and we see that a duplicate of this cube is created and that’s what this particular modifier does it allows us to create duplicates of an object in any number which you can change from the count option here like if I increase the number the number of duplicates of this object will increase and to make some Gap in between the duplicates we can increase this X Factor from here and in this way the distance between the duplicates will increase so with this you can understand how modifiers actually work while you could have just selected the individual object and duplicated it using the shift plus d shortcut the much better or quicker way to do this is to use array modifier similarly all the other modifiers also do operations which help us to save time and edit the object in a very efficient way and so that’s all in this [Music] chapter so in the previous chapter we understood the fundamentals of modifiers and an overview of their categories and in this chapter we’ll be discussing about these 18 modifiers in the generate modifier category we’ll be understanding the working of each one in detail so let’s begin with it now the first modifier to start with is array modifier for this let’s first delete this Cube by pressing X and now we’ll add a monkey or suzan model so to add the array modifier with the suzan model selected go to the modify properties editor click on ADD modifier and in the generate category select array modifiers so B basically what this array modifier does is that it creates copies of the object by placing the copies in an array with each copy offset from the other to increase the number of duplicates or the copies of the object created we can do it using the count button here so we can increase the number of duplicates from the count option here now by default this relative offset option is turned on in the array modifier and the relative offset means that it uses the overall size of the object as a reference for determining the distance of the displacement between the arrayed items which means that if I increase The X Factor then the offset or basically the distance between the duplicates or the copies of the object will increase like this similarly if I increase the Y Factor then they move in y direction like this similarly decreasing them also would move them in y direction like this now suppose I want to move it upwards in Z Direction then I can change the Z factor from here and I will increase it like this now if I go to the side view by pressing three on numpad or maybe contr + 3 and if I zoom in here we can see that each one of these is separated by an equal distance from from each other similarly if I press one for the front view then from this perspective also the distance between each of the copies is same and that’s how the array modifier works now let’s change the Z factor to zero and also the Y factor to zero now there is one very interesting option in Array modifier and that is object offset so basically in this option you can add any other object as a reference and whatever we do with that particular object like rotating or scaling will also apply to these arrayed items for this let’s turn off the relative offset option and turn on the object offset now click on this little Arrow here here we need to add an object which would act as a reference for this let’s add a UV sphere here and let’s place it in X Direction Let’s reselect the suzan model and you can select this UV sphere as the object by clicking on this ey dropper and then selecting the UV sphere now to see the results we have to select the UV sphere and now if I rotate it like this then the array items would also begin to rotate but one thing to notice is that the original object that is this one would not show any Transformations but all the other duplicate objects would show it for example if I scale it then all the arrayed items would also scale up but you will observe that this one scales the most in comparison to this one similarly this one will scale up more in comparison to this one and the same for others so the original one would not show any effect and then the effect keeps on increasing and so that’s all in the array modifier now the next modifier on our list is the bevel modifier but before that let’s clear it all by pressing a and press X to delete and now let’s add a CU by pressing shift plus a and select Cube to see how the bevel modifier Works let’s apply the bevel modifier to this Cube for this we’ll go to add modifier then generate and select bevel we see that the edges of this Cube have been beveled it’s the same bevel that we also apply using the control plus b shortcut when we are in the edit mode but it’s mostly better to apply it using this modifier and the reason for this is that suppose you would have edited this Cube and applied bevel and if you’re working on a big project then undoing that bevel is not possible but in case you have applied this modifier to apply the bevel you can easily remove this bevel effect by clicking on this Crosshair this could remove the bevel modifier and it also works with all other modifiers and that is the biggest advantage of modifier normally in edit mode whatever changes you make cannot be undo after a particular point of time but modifiers always give you the option to remove them unless and until you apply them by clicking on this arrow and clicking apply but in most of the cases you won’t apply them because even without applying it would show you the results similarly you can also apply bevel to the vertices by clicking here and now you can increase the amount from here and you will notice that the vertices are now beveled and you can even change the number of segments from here so let’s increase the number of segments so now a cube appears something like this like a dice so these are the two options available in bevel the vertices and the edges so you can apply any of these based on the shape that is required by you and now the third modifier on our list is the Boolean modifier so the Boolean modifiers are used to create shapes by adding or subtracting one object from the other for this first let’s delete this Cube and add a new cube in its place and let’s also add a UV sphere and move it up in the Z Direction like this now with this Cube selected click on ADD modifier and select Boolean now this has three options intersect Union and difference and by default the difference one is selected in the object we’ll click on the ey dropper and select this sphere in this operation the part of the Boolean object overlapping with this selected object will form an empty space in it or basically that area would get removed from the selected object to see what it does we have to apply it first so we’ll click on this arrow and click apply or else you can also click cr+ a to apply it now if I select this Uvis spere and move it in y direction then we see that this Uvis spere has created an empty space in the cube that is the area which was overlapping between the cube and the UV spere led to the formation of this hollow space and the reason why this effect was shown only in the cube and not in the sphere is that we applied the modifier to the cube and not the sphere the object that is selected while adding the modifier is the object on which the modifier actually performs its operations now let’s Undo It by pressing control+ Z to see what the other operations do now let’s try the Boolean intersect option so what does Boolean intersect did was the part of the cube which was intersected by the Boolean object has been separated as a new object in simple words the area which was common in between the cube and the uis spere got separated as a new object and now let’s try the union operation in Boolean and what this does is that it basically joins the two objects to see this let’s go to the vi frame mode by pressing Zed and sliding towards vif frame now if I deselect them and then if I try to select the cube then the UV sphere will also get selected along with it because they have been joined together and to select only the UV sphere you have to click at the common area that is the intersecting part and then you can select the sphere here selecting the cube will select both of them or basically the union area of both and to select the sphere you have to click on the intersecting part let’s come out of the wireframe mode and this is how the Boolean modifier works just to revise if you apply difference and click on apply and then we move this uis spere in the y direction then we see that a hollow space is created that is the intersecting area got subtracted whereas if I undo it and use the intersect option then only the intersecting part of the cube will remain and the rest of the cube will get deleted or subtracted and in the union operation both of the object will get joined together now the three modifiers that we have discussed till now that is the array modifier bevel modifier and the Boolean modifier these are the most important three modifiers that you would be using in the most of the cases so if you still have any doubts then you can either rewatch that section or you can write the doubts in the comment section now let’s move to the fourth modifier that is the build modifier so let’s delete this first by pressing X and this one also and now we’ll add a cube here first let’s understand what does build modifier do so the build modifier creates the effect of something building linearly over a period of time although any object can have a build modifier but to see a nice effect a high vertex count is required that is your object should have a high number of vertices for this let’s tab into the edit mode Let’s scale it up in y direction and let’s subdivide it by right Mouse button and click subdivide and to increase the number of Divisions click here where it’s written subdivide and increase the number of cuts from here let’s change it to eight and now to see the functioning of the build modifier let’s tab into the object mode click on ADD modifier and select build we see that our object disappeared now to see what has happened click on this play button here which plays the animation for you and you will observe that the object is getting reconstructed and that’s what the build modifier do it creates an animation effect of the object building over time by default it starts from frame one and ends on frame 100 now although we have not covered animation yet but you can understand it in this way that by default 24 frames together comprise 1 second of animation and this animation started from frame 1 and the length was 100 so it ended after 100 frames so the animation was around 4 seconds you might understand it better when we learn animation properly but you can try this effect with different types of objects you just need to select an object apply the build modifier and press the play animation button to see the animation effect now the next modifier on our list is the decimate modifier to understand the debit modifier first we have to delete this and let’s add a suzan or the monkey model here now let’s tab into the edit mode and let’s subdivide so that we can increase the number of vertices in it let’s set the number of cuts to two now we can see that there are a lot of vertices in our suzan model now if I tab into the object mode and suppose I want to decrease the number of vertices or the faces in this model so this can be done by using the decimate modifier so let’s go to add modifier in the generate section go to decimate now this ratio bar here represents the vertices or the faces in your model if it set to one then it means that it has the original number of vertices or the faces in it but suppose I reduce it to like 0.02 then we observe that the number of vertices or the number of faces in this model has decreased drastically to see its effect in the edit mode we have to apply this modifier now if I tab into the edit mode we observe that the faces have been triangulated that is the number of vertices forming the faces is just three so it triangulated the faces and reduced the number of vertices and the faces of our model and that’s what the decimate modifier do although in most of the cases you won’t require the use of this modifier however if you are modeling something and in between you feel that the number of vertices or the number of faces should be reduced then you can use the decimate modifier and now the next modifier on our list is the Ed split modifier which basically allows you to split an object apart by selecting vertices edges or faces to see how it works let’s delete this and add a cube in its place now go to add modifier and in the generate modifiers select xplit now we have to apply this modifier for this you can either click on this drop arrow and then select apply or else you can also use the shortcut control+ a to apply this modifier now to see its effect we have to tab into the edit mode now if I select any one of the vertices and try to move it we observe that it basically got ripped apart or in other words selecting The Vortex will allow the corner to be lifted or moved now it’s very similar to the rip region tool that we explored in our previous chapter now suppose I select this vertex and press G to move then the same will happen to this also similarly all the other vertices will also show the same effect now if we undo by pressing cr+ Z and press two for Ed select now if I select this Edge and press G and try to move it then we observe that this Edge also got ripped apart and so this is what the edge split modifier do you can see here that selecting The Edge would basically open this face like we open the lid of a box similarly if I press three for face select mode and select this face and try to move it then we observe that it basically got separated from the remaining object however this pH Still Remains the part of the object even though it is separated so this was all about the Ed spit modifier let’s tab into the object mode now and now the next modifier that we’ll explore is the mask modifier first let’s delete it by pressing X and let’s add a UV sphere now the Mas modifier allows you to limit what part of a mesh displays in the 3D view editor or what part renders and the part of the mesh is defined by a Vortex group let’s understand this with the help of example of this Uvis spere for this first tab into the edit mode press one for Vortex select and now we need to create a Vortex group now you might think what exactly is a vertex group so vertex group is simply a group of some vertices suppose I select some random vertices here then click on this triangle icon which represents the object data properties and here you can find the option of vertex group if I click this plus icon then it will create a new vertex group and if I want these vertices to be a part of this group I’ll click on assign and now if I deselect these vertices and suppose I want to select the same vertices again so with this vertex group

    selected I’ll click on select and those particular vertices will get selected so basically this group consist of all these vertices now let’s apply the mass modifier so we’ll go to the modifier properties editor click on ADD modifier and in the generate select mask now in the vertex Loop option here we’ll add these vertices so click here and select the group this group represents the group of these vertices and if we now go to the object mode we will see only that part of the sphere which was defined by the vertex group and if you want to reverse the selection then you can click on this double-headed arrow and now we will see the part of the sphere which was not defined by the vertex Group which means that the part of the sphere that was defined by The Vortex groups is not being displayed and we can see the remaining portion of the sphere and this is what the mass modifier do it allows you to limit the part of the mesh which it would display in the 3D view editor or the part of the the mesh which will be rendered so that’s all in this modifier and the next modifier in our list is the mirror modifier for this let’s first delete this and now let’s had a UV sphere in its place now the mirror modifier allows the construction or the deformation of a mesh on one side of a center point to be duplicated or mirrored on the opposite side to understand what it really means tab into the edit mode and let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on numpad now we going to delete half of the vertices of this UV Sphere for this let’s turn on the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Z so let’s select these half vertices now press X to delete and select vertices now this is the half UV sphere so if you go to the object mode and let’s turn off the xray mode and now if I ask you how can you complete this UV spere so the best way to do this is to use the mirror modifier so let’s click on ADD modifier then go to generate and select mirror now our UV sphere is completed so basically what it does is that it duplicates one side of the mesh to the other side based on the axis that we have selected here in this case we have selected the x-axis so it created a duplicate along the xaxis of our viewport so you can select your access from here based on your particular requirement now suppose I go to the edit mode and if I select some of these vertices and try to edit them like if I press G and move them then we observe that the vertices on this side also show the exact Transformations that we did on the vertices of this side basically it creates a symmetry on both the sides so whenever you are making something which requires exact same symmetry on both the sides of your object then you must use the mirror modifier so now let’s tab into the object mode and the next modifier in our list is the multi-resolution modifier now the multi-resolution modifier can only be understood after we have learned sculpting and blender so we won’t be covering it right now in this session now the next one is the remesh modifier for this let’s delete this UV sphere so to understand remesh modifier we have to make a structure like this in our scene and so we’ll add a cube and to make a hole like this in our Cube We’ll add a cylinder in our scene and then apply the Boolean difference modifier so let’s scale it down in the X and Y Direction by pressing s and then shift plus Z now we’ll select this Cube and go to add model ifier then in the generate section we’ll first select Boolean and in the object we’ll search for cylinder and we’ll apply this by pressing cr+ a now if I select the cylinder and if I delete it then our cube with the ho is ready now now let’s go to the edit mode and now we’ll see how the Remish modifier works for this go to add modifier then generate and select remesh now if you’re making something which requires detailed modeling then you can’t work with such low number of vertices now some of you might think that you can apply the subdivide to increase the vertices so if you right click and apply subdivide then you will notice that the word veres are not properly added in our object for example in this area at the top of the face there are no vertices added and that’s why we use the remesh modifier so for this we’ll change the mode from Vel to Sharp and now if I go to the object mode and then apply this by pressing crl + a and now if I go to the edit mode again we see that the number of vertices have increased significantly now the reason why I went to the object mode before applying the modifier is that you can only apply a modifier to an object when it’s in the object mode and not in the edit mode so now you must have understood that the Remish mod modifier increases the number of vertices in your object for detailed modeling and evenly distributes them in your mesh and if I undo it by pressing cr+ Z two to three times then you will observe that there are some options here and the most important one for our use is the octy depth the higher the octy depth more will be the number of vertices but do not increase it to something like seven or 8 if your PC cannot handle it so it’s always advisable to keep the number to around four or five for best results especially if you have a moderate PC now let’s go to the object mode again and press crl plus a to apply it and then go to the edit mode again and the number of vertices are increased now the next tool to discover is the screw modifier for this let’s go to the object mode and delete this now we’ll add a circle by going to mesh and selecting circle now let’s tab into the edit mode and press G to move it in y direction now you might observe that this pivot point of the center point of this circle is still at the 3D cursor and has not moved that’s because we move the circle in the edit mode and not in the object mode and the reason for doing this is that it will act as the center of the screw that we will make by using the screw modifier now we’ll add the screw modifier to this circle so let’s to add modifier then generate and select screw and you can also change the axis from here where it’s written XY Z by default it sets in the Z Direction but you can change it by clicking on y or maybe x in x Direction it looks something like this like a donut but we’ll keep it in Zed axis and you can also change the orientation of the screw by rotating the circle so if I press R then y to rotate it in y direction and press 90° so that it rotates by 90° and press enter then it looks like this and we can even scale down the circle and press left click to finalize now this looks good to form a screw now the screw modifier has many options here the angle option will change the angle of Revolution so let’s set it to around 300 and the screw option will change the offset along its axis or basically the length of the skew and iterations means the number of times this would repeat itself for example I’ve kept the iteration to 22 so that it would keep on repeating itself 22 times but suppose I keep it to around 10 then it would repeat itself 10 times and if I reduce its length by decreasing the scw value then now it looks like a screw so basically this modifier generates a spiral shape by revolving a profile or an object around an ax and now we’ll tab into the object mode and here we have this option of access object to understand this we have to add another object in this scene so we’ll add a cube select this scw again and to add this Cube as the access object we’ll press this ey dropper and select this Cube now this Cube has become the access object for our screw which means that this Cube will now Define the screw axis for example if I press G to move it then you can see how the screw axis is changing itself basically the radius and the position of the screw is changing by moving this Cube this is because this screw is taking this axis object that is this Cube as its reference similarly if I rotate this Cube like this then the screw also rotates with it and that’s all in the screw modifier and the next modifier on our list is the skin modifier so let’s delete all of them by pressing a and then X and let’s add a plane and let’s tab into the edit mode now the skin modifier works the best with stick like structures to understand this let’s delete one of these vertices by pressing X on our keyboard and now you can see that there’s no face but three vertices here these three vertices are forming two edges but without forming any face because they’re not connected to each other now let’s select this vertex and we’ll extrude this vertex by pressing e and then y to move it in y direction and left click to finalize and let’s move it to next direction also now it is a system of four vertices that are joined with each other but are not forming any faces and the skin modifier will create a 3D shape out of them to understand it better let’s tab into the object mode and apply the skin modifier for this I’ll go to add modifier then in the generate we’ll select skin modifier so the skin modifier uses the vertices and the edges to create a skin surface which helps to Define the shape of the object in a better way as you even saw in this case that we just had four vertices in the edit mode but after playing the skin modifier it turned it into a complete mesh object and now suppose I add a cube and let’s move it upwards in the other direction and if I apply a skin modifier in this Cube then let’s see what will happen so I’ll go to add modifier and in the generate we’ll click on skin so as I already told you that the skin modifier Works only on the stick like structures so it considered only the edges of this Cube and so it formed this skade like structure now here is this option of bran smoothing and if I increase it then it will smooth the geometry of the object and that’s all in the skin modifier and now is the time for the 13th modifier of this chapter the solidify modifier first let’s delete all this by pressing a and then X now to understand how the solidify modifier Works let’s add a cylinder in our viewp and now we’ll diab into the edit mode and press three for face select now let’s select this face and press X to delete the face now what I’m trying to do is to make a cup from this cylinder but if I tap into the object mode You observe that this cylinder is very thin it it requires some thickness to be added to it and that’s where the solidify modifier helps us so let’s go to the modifier Tab and let’s add a modifier we’ll go to generate and select solidifier now to increase the thickness of this cylinder go to the thickness option here and you can increase it and now you can see that our cylinder has gained some thickness so basically what the solidify modifier does is that it converts thin wall objects into solid objects like earlier it looked like this that is very thin shape but after applying this modifier it looks like this now it has gained some visible thickness so whenever your object is very thin and you need to add some thickness to it you must use the solidify modifier for that now the next modifier on a list is a very important one and it is the subdivision surface modifier so we’ll use the same cup object to see how the subdivision modifier works for this let’s add the modifier in the generate section we go to subdivision surface and here you can see that our object looks like this but one thing to notice is that on this cylinder object there are two modifiers applied although we have not finally applied them but you can still see them in the modify properties editor and one more thing to notice is that that the subdivision modifier is appearing below the solidify modifier in our modifier stack basically the modifier at the top takes precedence over the modifier that is below it so in this case the solidify modifier will take precedence over the subdivision modifier and if you want to change the order of the Precedence then you can click here and left click and then you can drag it and in this way you can change the order of your modifiers so we’ll place it below the solidify now let’s come back to the subdivision modifier so the subdivision surface modifier basically subdivides the surface of an object by adding vertices edges and faces and it helps to give the surface of the object a smoother and rounded appearance and all these things are important while you are editing a very detailed object but you might see here that the cup is not perfectly rounded and to improve this you have to change the levels viewport number from here let’s set it to three or four and now you can see that the cup is much more rounded than before similarly if I increase it to four then it shape is improved much more than before now this levels viewport means the number of subdivisions it will show in our viewport however if you will render this then you won’t get the same results because the render number is not the same as the levels viewport number so before rendering you must also increase the render number to around four so that you can get the same results viewport means the display that you are seeing right now and render means the final image that is obtained after you click on render and then render image so now the next modifier is the triangulate modifier and to understand it we have to delete this cup and let’s add a suzan or monkey model now right now you can see that each face of this model is made up of four vertexes here but suppose you are in a situation where you want each face of your model to have just three vertices and for this you can use the triangulate modifier so let’s go to add modifier and in the generate section we’ll select the triangulate and now you can see that each face of your model has three vertices now so basically what the triangulate modifier does is that it reduces the number of vertices of each face in your model to a lower number now you will be using this modifier in very rare circumstances only or basically after you have applied subdivision on your mesh model and there is some fine detailing in your model and you want to keep it consistent while you’re exporting it or rendering it then you will require this modifier but in most most of the cases you won’t require it so now let’s move on to the next one which is the volume to mesh modifier so to understand it let’s delete this and let’s add a taus object in our 3D viewport so a Taurus object looks something like a ring now in simple words the volume to mesh modifier means that it turns volume to mesh so at the first place we need to have a volume in our scene but as you can see that this tus is just a mesh object and not a volume to add some volume to this mesh press shift plus a and go to the volume and select empty we will use this empty volume to add some volume to the taus object and to do this with the empty volume selected go to add modifier and in the generate go to mesh to volume now the mesh to volume means that it will give some volume to a particular mesh that we’ll select here so in the object click on this eye dropper and select the Taurus object now to see if our Taurus object has gained some volume or not we’ll hide the Taurus object and this camera button here indicates that even if we have hidden this but it will still appear in our final render so far now I’ll turn off the renter display also now you can see that even after I turned off the display for Taurus you can still see a slight volume of the Taurus object and we can increase the density of this volume from here so if I increase it to four then it looks better now and in this way our Taurus object has gained some volume and now to give it some texture I’ll click on ADD modifier and in the deform we’ll select volume displays to give it some texture and then click on new and now you can see that it has some texture it now has a cloudy texture on it now to understand what the volume to mesh modifier does let’s add another object by pressing shift plus a and let’s add a UV sphere it’s not mandatory to add a UV sphere sphere you can add any other object now with this UV sphere selected go to add modifier and now we’ll add the volume to mesh modifier we see that our sphere has disappeared and now in the object if I click on the eye dropper and select this volume then you can see that the new mesh that is the UV sphere takes the shape of a volume and this is what the volume to mesh modifier do the object on which this modifier is applied will take the shape of a particular volume but again you won’t be using this modifier very often but it’s always better to understand the fundamentals of these modifiers that you won’t be using much often and so now let’s move to the next modifier of this chapter that is the weld modifier for this I’ll delete this and let’s unhide the taus object and press a and X to delete them now everything in our scene is cleared so let’s press shift plus a to add a cube in our scene now tab into the edit mode press one for the Vex select mode and right click to subdivide it and we’ll increase the number of cuts to three and now let’s tab one for the front view now what I’m going to do is to basically cut this Cube into two parts for this I’ll turn on the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Z and I’ll select the vertices on the second half always remember that whenever you are doing this thing never select the vertices in the middle because deleting them would leave you with less than half of the mesh and you don’t want that to happen you need exact half mesh and so for this always select only the second half of the mesh now I’ll press X to delete vertices and now we have half of this Cube press a to select all and let’s make a copy of it by pressing shift plus d and right click and let’s rotate it in Z Direction by 180° and move it in X Direction now suppose I want you to merge the vertices at the center with each other so how do you do this so one way to do this is to to select this vertex and with shift key hold it select the other Vortex and then merge them by using a particular tool known as the merge tool and to use this tool you have to press M on your keyboard and this will open a merge menu from here select merge at Center and this will merge the two vertices at the center point and this can be used to merge all these vertices together one by one but merging them individually would take a lot of time and here you can use the weld modifier so let’s turn off the x-ray mode and let’s undo this merging by pressing crl plus Z and go to add modifier and in the generate section select weld now what this modifier will do is that it will merge all the vertices that are falling within this distance from each other so if we slowly increase the distance then at one point you will notice that our mesh will get completed as the vertices have been merged and now let’s tab into the object mode and we see that our cube is completed so as its name suggest the weld modifier basically does the welding of the vertices of a particular mesh and now the last modifier for this chapter is the wireframe modifier and it’s a pretty cool modifier and a simple one so we’ll delete this Cube and let’s add a new Cube to see what the vi frame mode does go to add modifier and in the generate section select wireframe so basically the wireframe modifier converts a solid display as seen in the solid viewport shading to stick or wireframe display or to increase the thickness of these sticks you can go to this thickness option here and increase it and now it looks like this so it’s an interesting modifier that you can use if you want to make stick like structures from your mesh and so this brings us to the end of this chapter since we have covered all the modifiers in the generate modifier section so do tell me in the comments if you like this chapter or not [Music] so in the previous chapter that is chapter number 11 we discussed about all the 18 generate modifiers and in this chapter we’ll be discussing about these 16 modifiers of the deform modifier category we’ll be understanding the working of each one so let’s begin with it so deform modifiers basically help us to change the shape of an object without adding any new gemetry to it and the first modifier after clicking on modify properties editor and then going to add modifier and selecting D form is the Armature modifier and armatures are used when you’re modeling your character and rigging it therefore we will explore this aricha modifier in a future chapter of this course when we understand about character creation and the next one on our list is the cast modifier but before applying the cast modifier let’s tab into the edit mode of this Cube and let’s add some vertices to it by subdividing it so I’ll click on subdivide and let’s go to the subdivide menu and increase the number of cuts to around four now tab into the object mode the reason why I did this was that the cast modifier works better when your object has a high number of vertices so let’s go back in the object mode and go to add modifier and in the deform section select cast is now looking somewhat like a sphere even though it’s not perfectly spherical but it still looks like a sphere and that’s what this cast modifier do it basically deforms the Primitive object such as the cube that we selected here and changes its shape to the shape that is mentioned here since here the shape selected is a sphere so the cube in our scene is deformed to turn into a sphere and to make it into a perfect sphere you have to increase the factor from here and if I click on it and enter one then you can see that our object looks like a perfect sphere now but if you increase the factor Beyond one then you can see that our object is forming a very odd shape which we don’t want so we’ll change the factor to one and it will perfectly change its shape to a sphere similarly there are also other shapes available here if I select cylinder here then it will change to a cylinder now let’s try to create a simple animation using this cast modifier to do this I’ll delete this and let’s add a suzan or the monkey model in our scene now go to add modifier and in D form select cast modifier now let’s change this factor to zero and at Zer you can see that our model has the original appearance and you might notice that after this Factor value there’s a small dot here and this dot is used for animating stuff so if I click on this small dot it will basically add a key frame at the frame number one here and if I drag this to increase the space of the timeline and take this timeline cursor to around 100 and now if I change the factor value to one and if I again click here then basically what it does is that it will assign the frame 100 this Factor value of one so if I go on frame zero then this Frame will have a factor value of Z and if I drag it then you can see that the factor value is increasing and at frame 100 the factor value is one so if I go to frame zero and press space to play the animation then you can see that our suzan model is transforming into a shape like a sphere so you can use this cast modifier to make a simple animation that shows your object deforming into a shape like a sphere or a cylinder or a cuboid and that’s all in this clast modifier and the next modifier on a list is the curve modifier but before that let’s delete it by pressing X and add a cube in our scene now for understanding the curve modifier properly you need to have a knowledge of the curves also but currently in this course we have not covered curves but still we’ll try to understand the basics of the curve modifier in this chapter so press shift plus a and click on the curve section here and select this bzier curve from the list now we can’t see it in our scene so press G and Y to move it in y direction now it appears like this now we’ll select our Cube and tab into the edit mode Let’s reduce its size in The Zed Direction and scale it up in the X Direction and right click and select subdivide and we’ll increase the number of cuts to around 9 or 10 and let’s tab back into the object mode now select this curve and to increase its size press s on your keyboard now select this Cube click on ADD modifier and in D form select curve modifier now in the curve object here you have to add this curve so click on the ey dropper and select this curve now you can see that our Cube object is deformed and if I now select this curve and tab into the edit mode and if I deselect you can see that this curve has two vertices and if I select one of it and if I press R to rotate it then you will notice that there are same Transformations being applied on this Cube also and this is what the curve modifier do basically this curve modifier uses the shape of your curve to deform your mesh object and you will understand this in a better way when we’ll cover the Curves in blender in the upcoming chapters so now let’s tab back into the object mode and now the next modifier to explore is the display modifier so press a and X to delete all and now let’s add a plane in our scene by pressing shift plus a and in mesh select plane let’s tab into the edit mode and let’s subdivide it and increase the number of to 8 or maybe 16 now what I’m going to do is that I’ll select some of these vertices some random vertices and make a Vortex scope now we studied about creating a Vex group in our previous chapter so click on this icon which will open the data properties editor and in the Vex group section click on this plus icon to add a new vertex group and click on assign this would create a group of all these vertices in this Vortex group now if I go to the object mode and if I click on the add modifier and after that if I go to dform and select display we see that the entire plane object object is displaced upwards and you can control this with the strength option here but this is not the real use of this modifier because you can use it to displace your vertices in a Vortex group as per a particular texture to see what it really means click on this Vortex group option and select this group so basically what it did is that it displays the group of vertices that we created and with the string tool you can change the displacement of these vertices now suppose I go to this texture tab here and if I create a new texture and let’s change its type to noise now you might be thinking that we have not covered textures yet we don’t know what texture is so you don’t need to worry about that because we’ll be covering textures completely in our upcoming chapters but for now let’s just see what happens on applying a texture and so now let’s go to the modify properties editor and if I now try to change the strength then you will notice that the vertices are getting displaced as per the texture we have applied let’s set this mid level to zero and now you can try testing this strength option for those of you who are new to this blender software and have not worked with textures yet it might be difficult to understand this display modifier but later on on when we will cover textures completely in this course then you will completely understand every concept of this display modifier properly and now is the time for our next modifier that is hook modifier and this one is a simple modifier so let’s press X to delete this and let’s add a new cube in our scene now tab into the edit mode and to understand what a hook modifier is we have to select one of these vertices and to apply this hook modifier there’s a special shortcut available press cr+ h and from this menu select hook to new object now if we go back to the object mode we notice that apart from this Cube there is this m empty object also created now this empty object does not have any volume it just exists in our scene and if I select this Cube then you can see that this hook modify has been applied to it and to see what it does select this empty object and if I try to move it then we notice that the vertex that we selected will also start displacing with it and all this is happening in the object mode and if I left click then my object will get deformed and that’s the use of the hook modifier the hook modifier allows you to manipulate or animate selected vertices of a mes while in the object mode the vertex with which this empty object was hooked will also move when you press G and try to move it and that is the complete use of hook modifier and the next one on our list is the leian deform modifier so press a and X to delete all now this Le modifier is a very interesting and a very useful modifier so let’s understand it by adding a cube in our scene tab into the edit mode and right click to apply subdivide and let’s increase the number of cuts to three or maybe let’s increase it to something like eight and now to see how the liation modifier works we need to connect hook to this corner vertex for this with this corner a Vex selected I’ll press cr+ h for the hook menu and I’ll select hook to new object now this vertex has a hook attached to it similarly I’ll do the same with this one also press crl plus h and select hook to new object and with this one also crl plus h and select hook to new object so I’ve done it with three of my corner vertices of this face now if you want to select any individual hook then you have to press crl plus h and go to select hook and select that particular hook for example if I select this hook then this one got selected similarly I press crl plus h again and I’ll select the second hook and cr+ H for the third hook also and here you can see in the modify section that there are three hook modifiers applied for the three individual vertices and now we’ll create a group of these three hooks by pressing contrl + G and then click on assign to new group and now if I go to the modify section and click on ADD modifier and in dform I’ll select lapian deform now I’ll scroll down and in the anchor weights we’ll select that group of hooks let’s tab into the object mode and now we’ll click on bind so let’s see what it does if I select this hook and press G to move it then I observe that the object is also getting transformed and similarly if I select this hook and try to move it then it also does the same thing that is the object is getting transformed here also and this is the use of the leian deform modifier so in this way you can use these hooks to deform the cube or any other object that you want to animate and that’s all in the laian deform modifier and now the next one that we’ll see is the lce modifier by using the lce modifier you can easily deform your object especially if it has a large number of vertices so press a and X to delete the setup and let’s add a sphere in our scene by pressing shift plus a and select UV sphere let’s move it in X Direction like this the reason for choosing this UV sphere is that this UV sphere has a high number of vertices which is a basic requirement of using the lattice modifier now to use this lce modifier we need to add a lattice in our scene so press shift plus a and here you can find the lce object so click on lattice and this is what a lattice looks like now we’ll select our UV sphere click on ADD modifier and in the dform select lattice now in this object section click on this eye dropper and select this lattice here now this lce has been assigned to this sphere so we’ll select this lattice and let’s move it in X Direction like this and let’s scale it up now with this lce selected if I have into the edit mode and now if I select one of its vertices from here and try to move it you will notice that the UV sphere will also show the Transformations and this is how the lattice modifier is used basically if you will notice all the deform modifiers will help you to change the shape or structure of your object or your mesh very easily like in this case with this lattice object you just need to select your vertices and move them around and you object will also transform and so that’s all in this lce modifier and the next modifier on our list is the mesh deform modifier so the mesh deform modifier deforms your mesh with a cage mesh and it is very similar to a lattice modifier but instead of being restricted to the regular grid layout of a lattice a cage can be modeled to fit around the mesh object being deformed and to see what it really means let’s go to the object View and press a and then next to delete all objects and now let’s add a suzan or the monkey model in our scene and to make a cage around it let’s add a cube tube let’s turn on the x-ray mode to see both the objects properly let’s tab into the edit mode with the cube selected and scale it up in X Direction so that it completely covers the monkey or the suzan model and let’s subdivide this Cube two to three times so that it would be easy to deform our monkey or the suzan model now select the suzan model go to add modifier and in the deform section select mesh deform now we need to add this Cube as the object here so click on this eye dropper and select this Cube and you have to click on bind it might take one or two seconds based on your PC and then it will show unbind here which means that both the objects are binded with each other and the mesh deform will work now so let’s select this Cube tab into the edit mode and select some of the vertices from the top face and now if I try to move them let’s see what happens so I’ll press G and try to move them and you can see that our suzan model is also deforming and this is what the mesh deform modifier does it allows you to create a cage around your object and then you can easily adddate your object shape or structure with the help of the vertices of this cage because whatever transformation you do to this cage or basically its vertices or edges the same Transformations will also apply to the suzan or the monkey model or whichever object you have added in your scene and now it’s the time to explore the next modifier that is the shrink wrap modifier as the name suggests the shrink wrap modifier takes a mesh and shrinks it down basically wrapping the mesh around another object and to practically see how it works let’s go to the object mode turn off the x-ray mode press a to select all and X to delete and let’s add a new UV sphere in our scene also We’ll add a plane move it upwards in the Z Direction enter the edit mode with this plane selected and let let’s scale it down and let’s apply subdivision two to three times and return to the object mode now to see the effect of Shing trap modifier properly we need to assign some colors to these objects first let’s go to the material preview mode with this plane selected go to the materials panel click on new and assign any random color to it so let’s assign it blue color now we’ll select this sphere and let’s also assign it a color so let’s assign it yellow color now to make it surface smooth we’ll right click and select shade smooth now select this plane go to the modifiers option click on ADD modifier and in default for select shrink wrap and we observe that nothing happens that’s because we have to choose our Target object on which This Plane would wrap around so click on this eye dropper and select this sphere and now you can see that the plane is wrapped around the sphere in a way that it’s not even properly visible to fix this we need to increase the offset a little bit so let’s change this offset to a very small value like 0.012 and now the plane is properly visible and you can see that the plane is now wrapped around the sphere and that’s how the shrink wrap modifier is used so you can basically use the shrink modifier whenever you want to wrap one object over another and now let’s explore the next modifier that is simple deform modifier so let’s return to the solid mode by pressing Zed and move your cursor towards solid press a and X to delete all now let’s add a cube in our scene tab into the edit mode and let’s scale it up in the Zed Direction and let’s apply subdivide increase the number of cuts to eight I have taken eight Cuts just randomly you can even increase the number to 10 or decrease it to six or anything now the modifier that we are going to use that is the simple deform modifier it basically takes the origin Point as its reference by default that is where this 3D cursor is located and to ensure that it’s applied properly we need to move this Cube upwards in the Z Direction like this now let’s come out of the edit mode now we’ll go to add modifier and in deform section click on simple deform here you can see that it has created a strange effect on our Cube since the twist option is selected here so it has twisted our cube in the X direction to see the effect properly we can change this angle from here and we can even change the axis from here let’s keep the axis to Z axis and let’s increase the angle like this so it will create this beautiful twist effect on our object so at 360° you can see that our Cube has completely twisted and this is how it looks let’s try the other options also like this Bend option so you can change the angle from here like this and even the axis from here so let’s set it to x-axis and if I decrease the angle then you can see that at zero our object look like this but if we increase the angle then our object will begin to bend and this is extremely useful if you want to animate your objects and want to show them like bending or twisting then this tool is very useful let’s try the taper effect let’s change the axis to Y and let’s increase this Factor so you can see how this is creating a tapering effect on our Cube similarly if I go to the stretch option and change the axis to zed axis and increase the factor then you can see that it is creating a beautiful stretch effect on a cube so if you want to animate your stuff and it involves twisting bending tapering or stretching then you can use this simple deform modifier and then you can do it in seconds and now let’s come to the next modifier that is the smooth modifier to understand it let’s delete it first and let’s add a monkey or the suzan model now what the smooth modify does is that it smoothens the mesh object by softening the angles between the adjacent faces and this even shrinks the size of the original object to see how it practically works with this selected object go to add modifier click on deform and in the deform section select smooth and if I zoom in you might notice that there’s no much visible effect on it but if I change the factor to zero you can see how it originally looked and now if I change it to one we can see that its size has shrinked and it face is much smoother now you can even increase the smoothness further by increasing this factor from here but if you try to increase it too much then your object will be destroyed and it won’t be helpful so keep the factor to around one or two to see the best results and now the next modifier on our list is the smooth corrective modifier now this modifier is mostly used to smooth the mesh during character creation process and so it requires the knowledge of character modeling as a result we won’t be covering it in this chapter right now and so let’s move to the next one that is the smooth laian modifier for that I’ll delete this suzan model now the smooth liation modifier is used to smooth a mesh which has become irregular after its vertices have been manipulated during detailed modeling and to understand this practically let’s add a plane in our scene enter the edit mode and subdivide it two to three times so that it gets more vertices now to understand the smooth Le modifier we have to make its surface irregular first so select any random vertex turn on proportional editing by pressing o and move this Vortex upwards and scroll up your mouse wheel to reduce the circle of infl Ence and we left click to finalize and now if I go back to the object mode you can see that the surface of this plane is very irregular now and to smoothen this surface we can use the smooth liation modifier so go to the modify properties editor click on ADD modifier and in the deform section select smooth liation now to remove this irregularity or basically smooth it you need to increase this Lambda factor from here and now you can see that our surface of this plane has become much more regular than before and if I further increase it then it becomes much more regular and this is the use of the Le smooth modifier in simple words you can understand it in this way that it helps to smooth an irregular surface of any mesh and now the next modifier on our list is the surface deform modifier and to see how it works let’s delete this and add a cube in our scene tab into the edit mode Let’s scale it up in y direction like this and to increase the number of vertices we’ll subdivide it two to three times now return to the object mode and the surface deform modifier will require another object in your scene which will be used as a Target and any transformation that you will do to that object will also be seen on this object surface for example if I add a plane in my scene and rotate it in y direction by 90° tab into the edit mode and scale it up like this and let’s also scale it up in y direction and we should increase the number of vertices in this plane also so let’s subdivide it two to three times now let’s go back to the object mode and let’s apply the surface deform modifier to this Cube so I’ll select this Cube here go to add modifier and in deform category select surface deform now we have to set this plane as the target object so click on this ey dropper and select This Plane and to bind both the objects you have to click on this bind button now if I select this plane and tab into the edit mode and now if I randomly select some vertices and try to transform them like moving them in upward Direction like this then we notice that a cube is also getting transformed in the same way also if I try to rotate it then this Cube will also show the same Transformations similarly if I scale it up then also this cube is deforming and that’s the use of the surface deform modifier basically the surface def4 modifier is similar to the mesh def4 modifier that we previously discussed the only difference is that the controlling mesh that that is the plane in this case does not have to surround the object and this is the use of this modifier let’s go to the object mode now and the next one is very interesting and it’s the war modifier to understand it let’s delete all this press shift plus a to add a plane in our scene now let’s tab into the edit mode and to increase the number of vertices we’ll apply subdivide let’s increase the number of cuts to around 16 and increase its size like this now we’ll come out of the edit mode and to use the war modifier you need to add two empty objects in your scene for this press shift plus a to add object and in the empty select plain axis let’s duplicate it by using shift plus d and move it in Z Direction like this one of the empty objects should be at the bottom and the other one should be upwards in the Z Direction now let’s select this plane and apply the modifier so in dform category we’ll select the warp modifier now you can see that there are two options here one is object from and the other is object two so we’ll assign one of these empty objects to object from and the other one to object two so let’s click on this ey dropper and select this one that is the empty object as the object from and click on the ey dropper of this object two and we’ll select the other empty object and now you can see that something has happened here so basically the warp modifier allowed you to deform your mesh object in object mode by manipulating the target objects that is the empty objects that we have added in our scene to show what it means I’ll select this empty object and if I try to move it you will notice that our plain object is also deforming basically the working of this modify is such that it starts from the object that we have entered in object from that is the one at the 3D cursor and it will show the deformation till the object two that is the object that we have added in this object two section and you can even change the strength from here and this is the W modifier so selecting this empty object and moving it will deform it and if you select this plane and change the strength then also you can see the changes or the transformations in your object and now is the time for the last modifier of this chapter the wave modifier and it’s an amazing modifier and a very simple one to learn so let’s start with it so I’ll press a and X to delete all and let’s add a plane in our scene go to the edit mode and let’s subdivide it let’s keep the number of cuts to 16 and let’s scale it up also return to the object mode and now we can apply the wave modifier so click on ADD modifier in deform section select wave modifier and you can see that the object is now transformed but that’s not enough if you press on this play animation button then you can see that a plane is showing a wave animation and from the wave menu here you can even change the height of your wave like this let’s reduce it similarly you can also change the width of your waves and also the narrowness of your waves like this and also if you go to the time section here you can even change the speed of your waves for example example if I increase it to the maximum level then it will be very fast and if I reduce it to something near zero then you can see that the speed of our waves has reduced and that’s all in the wave modifier and we have now covered def modifiers in this chapter but before ending this chapter there’s something to tell you the purpose of creating these two chapters that is this chapter and the previous one is not that you will memorize each and every modifier blender but to make you understand the fundamentals and the working of each modifier but if you want to learn each and every modifier in blender which again is not really mandatory you will require a lot of practice for that and to start with you can add and select random objects in your blender scene and try applying different modifiers to see what happens and from the next chapter we’ll be starting with materials textures and [Music] nodes from this chapter we’ll be beginning our journey of exploring materials textures and nodes and all this would be covered in the upcoming 15 chapters of this course the reason for having so many chapters is to understand all aspects of materials textures and notes in blender and in this introductory video we’ll begin with these topics that will help us to understand fun fals of node components so let’s begin with it now by default blender opens in this layout workspace and blender gives you the option of a separate workspace for working on materials textur the notes and to access it you have to click here where it’s written shading workspace and from here you can change the material of your object but in this course we won’t be working in this way we’ll be having a better interface to work on materials and to create this you have to go back to the layout workspace now if I take my cursor over here then if I right click it will give me two options vertical split and horizontal split so I’ll click on horizontal split and now I can drag this line and I’ll take it to around half of the scene and I finalized it with a left Mouse button click now let’s adjust it a little bit and we’ll change this to the Shader editor and here we’ll see the output so click on this icon here and select Shader editor and here these blocks are known as notes or notes components in blender and basically by using these you will be making your materials in blender for example if I want to change the cubes color I’ll zoom in click on the base color and I can adjust the color of my Cube from here for example if I want to set it to Blue I’ll drag it to Blue but you won’t notice any change here and that’s because we are in the solid mode right now and to see the materials in blender you have two modes one is the material preview mode that you can access from here in which you can see how your material is looking in blender and the other one is the render view which is basically the fourth option from here and it basically shows you how your 3D object would look like when it is finally rendered now the way your final render would look depends on which render engine you’re using so blender basically has two main render engines to see what they are you have to click on this render properties icon here and from from here you can set the render engine now here you can see that there’s a list of three render engines the default one is the EV the second one is the workbench and it shows the same thing that you see in the solid mode so we won’t be using this because it won’t show any materials on our object and the third one is the Cycles now the Cycles Render engine is the most important render engine out of the three that’s because the quality of output in this render engine is the best as compared to the other two and due to this reason it even takes a lot of time to render even a single image in Cycles but that largely depends on the specifications of your PC if your PC is good enough to handle it it might take less time but if you are having a lowend PC then it might take some more time to render in Cycles but the final quality will be amazing but the other engine that is the EV it doesn’t take much time to render it hardly takes 4 to 5 Seconds to render but its quality is a bit low as compared to the cycle sender engine in this course currently we’ll be using the cycle sender engine while working on materials textures and notes and this is just an overview of the render engines we’ll be discussing about the render engines separately in some future chapter as well now the way the material on your object looks also depend upon the lighting of your scene a poor lighting can have a bad effect on how your material looks so right now we’ll be learning about the basics of lighting and there are two ways by which you can properly lighten your scene one is the three-point light and the other one is using hdris let’s see the three-point light system first as the name suggests in this system there are three lights one is the key light which is the main light the other one is the fill light which basically fills your scene with light and the third one is the back light let’s explore the key light first for this I’ll delete this default Light press X to delete now you can see that there are no lights in my scene so I’ll press shift plus a select light and I’ll add the area light let’s move it up in Z Direction and let’s scale It Up by pressing s and this light should be such that it faces the front of the cube for this I’ll move it in y direction bring it down in Z Direction like this and to make it Point towards the front face of the cube I’ll press R to rotate and X to rotate in X Direction and now I can rotate it like this and left click to finalize now if I go to the camera view by pressing zero on numpad there is still not much like light and you can change this from the object data properties here you can change the power of light from here so I’ll increase it and we’ll change the location and rotation of this light so that both the faces have proper lighting for this let’s zoom out press G andx to move it in X Direction and let’s rotate it in by Direction like this let’s come out of the camera view by pressing zero on numpad again and let’s try to adjust the lighting properly for this I’ll press 7 to go to the Top View Press G and adjust it like this now I’ll press R to rotate it and I want to rotate it only in X and Y Direction so I’ll press shift plus Zed so that the rot remain restricted in X and Y Direction only and let’s finalize it here let’s go to the camera view by pressing zero and now both the faces have a proper lighting we can further increase the power from here and maybe I should increase the power to something around 700 or maybe 550 and this one looks good and now we’ll add the second light in our scene that is the fill light for this press 7even to go to the top view with this light selected press shift plus d to duplicate and we’ll move it here let’s change its Rotation by pressing R and shift plus Z so that it doesn’t rotate in Z Direction and let’s finalize it here since it’s not the main so we’ll reduce its power to around 300 let’s go back to the camera view and let’s move this light a little bit in Z Direction like this and now let’s add the back light for this we’ll again go to the top view by pressing seven on numpad press shift plus d to duplicate it and move it at the location behind this Cube left click to finalize and now we’ll rotate it also so that the light Point towards the cube and not away from it so press R and shift plus Z and rotate it 180° I entered the number from the numpad and then pressed enter to rotate it 180° let’s move it here just behind the camera and the object and and its power should be very low like 100 or 50 wats because it won’t be visible and only slight effect will be visible while rendering so we’ll reduce it power to something around 100 and let’s go back to the camera view let’s bring this back light down in the Z Direction like this and now it’s done but you might feel that this lighting system is a bit complicated and the solution for this is using hdris which is the second method of lighting and for this we’ll select all these lights first let’s come out of the camera view with shift key holded I’ll select this light and this one also press X to delete them and now if I go to the camera view again you will see that there are no lights in our scene now to add an hdri in my scene I need to download it first and there are many websites to download it for free but there are four to five good ones and I’ll drop their links in the description for now I’ll be downloading an hdri from this poly heaven.com website and here you can find a large number of hdis for your blender projects for free and you can find a good variety also on this website for example if I go to this studio category here you can see that there are lot of hdris here which will basically lighten up your scene as if there was a studio around your object similarly there are hdris for Skies IND scenes artificial lights Etc which you can download and use for your blender files suppose I select this hdri and from here you can download it you can even change the resolution from here if you want 2K or 4K or 8K or 16k the higher the resolution the more power blender will use so let’s set it to 4K and let’s click on download now we’ll return back to blender and to add the hdri in your scene in the world properties click on this yellow dot against the color and select environment texture click on open and now you have to open that specific file that you have downloaded as the hdri so I’ve selected the file and I click on open image now you can see that the hdri is now added in my scene and it is creating this lighting effect and that’s what an hdri do it will automatically create a Balan lighting effect in your scene without the use of adding any lights in your scene similarly you can also try adding other hdris by downloading them from different websites and trying them in your scene now if I select this Cube you will notice that these will again appear here but right now let’s delete them by pressing X on our keyboard and now our object has no material the reason for deleting is that we’ll be creating a new material on our own and before adding any material we need to add a map to it and the map basically defines a pattern which the object material would show to understand it press shift plus a and you will see a menu here to add a map we’ll go to input and the most common one is the texture coordinate so I’ll select texture coordinate from this list and then you can left click to finalize its position now you can see here that there are seven different ways to map like generated normal UV Etc and each one is a different way to tell the material how should we map our pattern but we need to connect it with some kind of pattern for this I’ll press shift plus a go to texture and this is the list of all the textures in blender we’ll be exploring each one in detail later on this course but for now let’s select this magic texture and left click to finalize its position now always remember that you have to connect the dots of same color with each other for example any of these purple dots can be connected to this purple dot of vector since they are of same color so suppose I left click on this generated one and if I drag it near to the vector they will be connected but we won’t see any changes here because we need to add a Shader that we’ll put on the surface of this material so press shift plus a go to Shader and here you can find a list of of so many shaders but the most commonly used is the principled bsdf Shader so I’ll select this and let’s add it here let’s zoom out a little bit and if you want to navigate here then you can press your middle Mouse button and drag like this now we’ll connect the color from here to this base color in the principal bsdf and what it basically do is that it will give a color to this texture but you might be thinking why can’t we see any texture or any material here and the answer to this is that there’s no output option here for this press shift plus a go to output and we’ll add material output because we working on materials right now so I’ll select this and left click to finalize it now there are two main ways to connect the material with the colors and textures one is the surface and the other one is the volume in most of the cases you will be using this surface one so we’ll connect this bsdf with the surface and now you can see here that a cube has a basic texture and a color this one that is the magic texture helped to add a texture to our object and the principal bsdf added a base color to our object that is the white color and the output one generated this output for us and now it’s the time to learn how to apply materials to different objects for this let’s delete this Cube by pressing X and let’s add a new cube in our scene and to apply a material or a color to it we have to go to the shade editor click on new and we’ll change the base color from here and let’s set it to Red now let’s add a few more objects in our scene so I’ll press shift plus a and let’s add a UV sphere move it up in Z Direction and let’s create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and to change the color of this UV sphere we’ll again go to the Shader editor click on new and change the base color from here let’s change it color to Yellow now to apply the same yellow color to this Uvis spere also we’ll select this go to the material properties editor and click on this icon here you will see a list of all the materials that are assigned to the various objects in your scene so we’ll select this yellow color and this yellow color will get assigned to this UV sphere also now suppose I want to change the color of these spares to the red color of this Cube now one way is to select this UV sphere click on this icon and then select it from here but there’s a better method to do this and it’s called the link materials method for this we’ll select this sphere and with the shift key hold it select other UV sphere and at last we’ll select this Cube Now using the link materials tool the last selected objects color will apply to the others for this press c cr+ l and this link menu will appear and from here select lick materials and now you can see that the color of this Cube has been assigned to the UV spheres as well and that’s the use of the link materials tool and now our next topic is to explore the three common maps in blender so basically Maps tell us about where the material is to be placed on an object and we going to see the three most commonly used maps for this let’s delete this by pressing X and let’s add a new cube in our scene click on new for a new material so first we need to add an input node for this press shift plus a and in input select texture coordinate and left click to finalize and now we need to add a texture for this press shift plus a go to texture and let’s add a brick texture and left click to finalize let’s connect the color to the base color now you can see that even though the texture look good on the top it doesn’t look so nice on the sides on this side it’s not generating a complete brick texture and this side is completely black and the reason for this is that the brick texture supports only x and y axis and not the Zed axis and we can even change the appearance of this texture and to do this we have to change the par damers in this brick texture node for example if I set the offset to zero you will see that the texture looks like this and to see the difference that it made Let’s undo it so when the offset is 0.5 you can see that the brick texture is starting alternatively to understand what I mean let’s zoom in and now you can see that this brick face is not complete but the second one is complete similarly the third one is not complete at the beginning and the fourth one is complete that’s because the offset is set to 0.5 but if I set it to zero then you will notice two things one is that the faces are uniform now and the other thing is that the texture on this face has disappeared now let’s try changing some other parameters you can see here that the faces are very small and to increase the size of these faces go to the scale option and let’s set it to something like two and now you can see that the number of faces have reduced but the size has increased and another way to change the size of these brick faces is to change the value of brick width and row height from here for example if I set the brick width to one then this width is now equal to 1 M or 1 unit and if I change the row height to one also then this height here is now 1 M or 1 unit and because both the width and height are equal it now makes square faces now suppose I want nine squares on the top for this I’ll change the scale value to three changing the scale to three means that we now want three faces in both the X and Y directions and all these faces are square since the width and height here are the same now some of you might have noticed here that we have not connected this texture coordinate with the brick texture earlier we used to connect generated to Vector but now if I connect generated to Vector then you won’t notice any difference here and the reason is that we should not use generated in this case let me explain it properly there are two basic cases where you should not connect the socket of this generat to the socket of vector these little colored dots are called the sockets so what are the two cases when you should not use a generated socket the first one is that the object doesn’t show any pattern on the sides or basically any texture on the sides and the second thing is that if I try to scale this Cube suppose I press s and Y to scale it in y direction like this then you will notice that the faces of this brick texture are no more squared shape the texture is also scaling up and to fix this we have to use the object socket so left click on this object socket and connected to Vector now we see one of our problems is solved that is the faces are now uniform but still the second problem is not solved that is the side faces are still black and to solve this problem we have to use UV now UV is a map that tells how every side of your object should look in your scene and to access it we have to add a UV

    editor in our scene for this take your cursor here and this double-headed Arrow will appear now right click and to split this area we have to select vertical split now we’ll drag a cursor here and left click to finalize and to convert this into a UV editor click on this icon and select UV editor but we can’t see anything here to fix this with your cursor hovering over the 3D view Port press tab to enter the edit mode and now you can see the faces here every Square on this UV map is a face of this Cube and now since we are using the UV editor we have to connect the UV socket to the vector so left click on the UV socket and drag it to the vector now the UV is connected to vector and it appears like this the texture is not looking good and to fix this we have to increase the scale value and now it looks something like this now let’s try to use this UV Editor to change this texture for this with a mouse hovering over the UV editor press a this will select all the vertices of the face in our UV editor and now if I try to rotate it by pressing R you will see that the texture is also rotating and that’s how you can change the texture of your object by using the UV editor and you can finalize the texture by clicking left Mouse button also you can select any of these vertices and if I press G to move them then you can see that the texture on this face is also transforming as per the movement of this Vortex so you can use this UV Editor to change this into anything that you like so you can try experimenting different things to create different types of texture by using this UV editor and also this UV editor solved a problem of not being able to see the texture on the sides now all the sides of a object has a visible texture on it and the UV editor is also used for applying image textures on your object and for those of you who don’t know what an image texture is basically we have an image on our system and we bring it to blender and apply it on our object then that image is stretched and it applies to all the faces of our object now let’s see how can you download some image textures online so if you go to google.com and search for texture images let’s go to the images option and here you can find a number of texture images suppose I select this one let’s visit this website and this website offers you many image textures for free so let’s click on this one and you can download it for free and now the image texture is downloaded so let’s return back to blender and to bring the image in blender we’ll press shift plus a here go to texture and from this list we have to select image texture and to add the image click on open now this window will appear and you have to choose your file from the required location and click on open image now you can see that even though the texture is added here but you can’t see it on your object because it is not connected to this principal bsdf and to connect them click on this color socket and we’ll join it to the base color select this one and with the shift key holder select this one let’s move them a little away now we’ll select this one and let’s sck it here now you can see that our object has this wood texture on it from the image that we applied here but we should also add an input here so we’ll bring the texture coordinate here and even though the UV is connected to this brick texture right now but if I click on this UV and connect it to Vector it will connect to the image texture also and now if I go to this UV editor and press a and try to rotate it or scale it then you will notice that the changes that I make here are also visible on the object here and so you can use this image texture to apply any image as a texture on your object and so that’s all in this chapter now there are two important things to tell you the first thing is that if you’re learning material textures and notes for the very first time then it might be possible that you might have doubts in some Concepts right now and the solution for this is to re-watch the video or maybe that specific part where you feel that you have some doubt because for most of the people it’s not possible to understand all such Concepts which are so complex at the first time and also you can write your doubts in the comment section and I’ll reply to [Music] them the first thing that we are going to do in this chapter is to explore different ways of adding color to our material but first let’s add a Shader editor here for this place your cursor here right click and select horizontal split we’ll drag this line and left click to finalize click on this icon here and select Shader editor now this is the default material assigned to our object but we’ll try something new this time so click on this principal bstf press X to delete it and let’s add a new one by pressing shift plus a go to Shader and let’s select emission Shader and we left click and place it here now to see the output let’s connect this emission to the surface let’s go to the render View and what this emission Shader does is that it will make your object emit light that means if I select this light and press X to delete it then we won’t need any external light in our scene but right now the render engine is set to Eevee by default so let’s go to the render properties and change the render engine to Cycles to see a better effect of this emission go to the World Properties by clicking on this globe here and by clicking on the color we can change the color of our scene to make it completely black left click here and bring this slider down now you can see that our scene is completely black and there are no lights but if I go to the camera view by pressing zero our object is still visible and that’s because it is emitting light with the use of emission Shader I can also change the color of this light from here suppose I select something like blue or green then it will emit light of that specific color but let’s set it to White right now and it looks very simple so let’s add some texture to it so with your cursor in the Shader editor press shift plus a go to texture and and let’s select magic texture let’s place it here now the magic texture has two connecting options the first one is color and the other one is f a which stands for Factor this FC that is the factor one is basically for the values and to be more particular it’s for the values that are between 0 and 1 there might be some exceptions but in most of the cases this Factor value is for values between 0 to one we’ll understand it later in this course but for now let’s connect this color to the emission color now if you want to change the texture of the colors you can do this by using this Distortion value for example if I set it to zero then the colors will disappear as it would mean that there is no Distortion and no colors in your object but if I take it to something like three then it will add many colors to our object basically a higher Distortion means more colors and a more complex texture assigned to your object and lesser Distortion means that there are less colors and a lesser complex structure is assigned to your object but there’s one problem with Distortion at a value of one it generates this texture along with these colors but if I change the value to around two the texture along with the colors is changed but it might be the case that you want the same texture but different colors in your object but changing the distortion would mean changing both the texture and the color so if I want this texture and some other colors in our object we have to use another node component which is called the color ramp for this I’ll press shift plus a go to converter and select color ramp let’s place it here let’s move the magic texture and place the color ramp here until now this node is not connected with any other node now this color ramp has a value of 0 to 1 so if I select this pointer here here it shows the position value of zero and if I select this pointer then it shows a position value of one so the color ramp has a value from 0 to 1 now I’ll connect the factor of this magic texture to the factor of color ramp and for the output I’ll take this color and connect it to the color of emission and now our object is black and white so the magic texture is creating this texture on this object and the color ramp will control which color should appear on this object the emission node will make your object emit light and the material output will help you to generate the output of this cube with the texture color and the emission now let’s try to add some colors to this Cube for this click on the first pointer then click on this black area and to view the colors drag this brightness slider upwards and now the colors are visible and let’s change the color to Blue and now you can see that there’s some blue color on our object let’s click on the second pointer click on this white area and let’s change the second color so if I set it to Red then you can see that our object has red and blue color that’s because one of the color selected is blue and the other one is red now suppose you want to add some more colors for this press on this plus icon here select this pointer and let’s change the color from here so let’s change it to green color now you can see that our object has blue color green color and red color let’s make this red color darker so I’ll click on this and drag this here now there are the these three colors on our object suppose you want more red color on your object than the other two colors for this left click on this pointer and drag it like this and now you can see that the amount of red color has increased similarly if you want more blue color so left click on this blue pointer and drag it like this now the blue color has increased on the texture of our object and this is how you can add various colors to your object which has a texture assigned to it and you can try different variations from here to give the texture of your object an exciting look and now that we have learned how to add colors to our material let’s also understand about the textures like when to use which type of texture and what happens on applying some specific kind of textures even though there will be a separate complete chapter on Textures alone but still let’s try to understand the basics of adding texture or some pattern on our material or the object right now so I’ll delete this color Ram by pressing X and let’s also delete this magic texture and let’s begin with the brick texture first so I’ll press shift plus a in the shade editor go to texture and select brick texture let’s place it here and right now you can see that our object doesn’t have any kind of texture or any pattern applied to it it is only emitting light because of this emission node so to apply this brick texture to this Cube we’ll connect this color socket of the brick texture to the color socket of emission so press left click and let’s connect it here and now you can see this brick texture on our Cube we even discussed about the basics of this brick texture in our last chapter and we also observed that although this brick texture is applied perfectly on the top but it’s not so perfect on the sides and we even fixed it by using the UV maps in blender but in this chapter let’s understand when to use this brick texture in blender so if your object has a lot of squares or rectangles with some edges around them then in most of the cases it’s good to use the brick texture for your object for example if you’re creating a tile wall then you can use this brick texture to create tiles on your faces and to make all these faces uniform we have to decrease the offset from here at offset value of zero all these faces will uniformly start from the same point and will end on the same point but if the offset is set to 0.5 then they look something like this they’re basically starting from alternate points one is complete and other one is not complete but let’s undo it so that we get uniform faces and right now these tiles or the faces are rectangular in shape but if you want them to be squared shape then you have to change the width and height from here if both the brick width and the row height are equal then the faces will be squared shaped so if I change the row height to 0.5 then all these faces will be squared shaped now now suppose we want to rotate this texture in a particular angle like for example 45° for this we need to add another node here and it’s the mapping node so I’ll press shift plus a go to vector and select mapping let’s place it here and let’s zoom out for a better View and if I connect this Vector to the vector of brick texture then my object will turn black and that’s because we have not added any input node here so to add an input node press shift plus a in the shade added select input and we’ll add texture coordinate let’s place it here and we’ll connect the default generated socket with the vector socket here so I’ll left click here and connect it to the vector and now you can see that the texture is visible so to rotate this texture by a specific angle we need to change the rotation values here suppose I want to change the rotation by 45° then I’ll go to this Z axis rotation and type 45 and press enter and you can now see that the texture is rotated by 45° in The Zed axis now suppose you want to change the thickness of these edges here for this you need to change the value of size right now it’s set to 0.02 suppose I increase it and set to 0.1 then you can see that the edges are thick now and if you want to make them smooth then you can change this motor smooth value right now it’s set at 0.1 but if I increase it to something like 0.5 then you can see that the smoothness has increased and suppose you want to remove all the edges completely for this you need to decrease the motor size to exact zero and now you can see that the edges have completely disappeared from our texture so that’s how you use the brick texture on your object now let’s try another texture that is the warai texture for this first select these three press X to delete them and we’ll add the war texture by pressing shift plus a going to texture and select War texture let’s add it here and to connect this node with the emission node left click on the color socket and connect it to the color socket of the emission and now you can see that it generates this colorful geometric pattern type of texture on our object and you can use these parameters to edit your texture so suppose you want more of these shapes on your texture for this you can increase the scale value right now it’s five but if you increase it to something like 20 then the texture changes to something like this and you may also notice that that the shape of all these patterns is very random like all of them are of the different shapes and that’s because the randomness value here is set to one but if I change this value to zero then you can see that all of them have the same size and all are square shaped now that’s because their Randomness has been reduced to zero one more thing to note here is that right now we are not exploring each texture in detail there will be a separate chapter where we’ll discuss everything about the textures and we’ll explore the common textures that we use but right now we just trying to see how do you add different patterns to your material and so basically by using different types of texture and adjusting the parameters from here you can add different types of patterns to your material and now that we have learned about the basics of adding patterns or basically texture to our object so now it’s the time to look at the structure of our material or in simpler words we’ll try to create some 3D effects on our material and in blender we can do that by creating bumps on our object by creating bumps on our object it will give our texture a 3D appearance and to do this first I’ll save this file and I’ll close this file and create a new blender file so that we can start from the beginning so here I have created a new blender file and we’ll add a Shader Editor to the top for this let’s place our cursor here right click and select horizontal split now we’ll drag this line here and press left Mouse but now click on this icon and select Shader editor now we have the Shader editor at the top and the 3D viewp put editor at the bottom now giving a texture to your object basically means creating fake Heights and bumps and that to without changing the geometry of the object and we’ll practically understand it by using a height map here but first let’s go to the render view now we need to add some texture to object first so I’ll press shift plus a go to texture and let’s add the noise texture so so I selected this and let’s place it here now before connecting them together there is one more thing to change that is we need to change the render engine to Cycles so go to the render properties and change the render engine from EV to cycles and now let’s connect this color socket to the base color and this texture appears on our object but as you can see here that this entire texture or this pattern is completely flat on the surface and to give it a 3d effect or basically to create bumps on it we need to add a bump node here for this press shift plus a go to vector and select bump let’s place it here now to connect this node we have to connect this purple colored normal socket with the normal socket of the principal bsdf so let’s connect them together and to connect the texture with it we’ll take this Factor socket and let’s connect it to the height and now you can see that it has created some sort of bumps on our object however if you’ll notice closely especially at the edges then these bumps are very flat they don’t look that realistic and this can be fixed by changing the parameters of this noise texture so if I try to increase the scale like this then you will observe that this texture looks a little better similarly if I increase the detail then it looks way too much realistic than before and to see some more changes let’s try to change this Distortion value here currently it’s set to zero but if I increase it to one then our object appears like this so basically by changing the scale detail and Distortion you can give your texture a better look so you can try experimenting with these values and see which one looks the best according to you now to change the strength and the color of these bumps you have to change these parameters in the bump node so suppose I decrease the distance from here and set it to zero then the object won’t show any bumps or any 3d effect that is because the distance is set to zero but if I slightly increase it to something like 0.1 then then you will notice slight bumps on your object and higher the distance more will be the bump size and you can even control the intensity of this black color of your bumps for this you have to change the strength value from here so now I have decreased it and now you can see that the black color has reduced so higher the strength more will be the black color of your Bump and if you lower it then the black color will reduce right now let’s set it to one and so that’s how you add bumps or basically give a 3D look to your object’s material and you can even change the roughness of your texture from this roughness parameter of your noise texture currently by default it say to 0.5 but if I reduce it to zero then you can see that all the roughness is gone and the texture has a very smooth appearance and also remember that lower the roughness higher will be the reflection on your surface which means that at zero roughness your object surface will have maximum reflection but suppose if I set the roughness to one then you can see that the roughness of this texture has significantly increased but for creating realistic renders in most of the cases you will be setting the roughness to somewhere around 0.5 only because at roughness of 0.5 you can see that the texture has a very realistic look on the object now to revise all the concepts that we have covered till now and also to understand some more concepts of texturing let’s try to make this simple looking brick wall texture in blender for this let’s first delete this Cube by pressing X1 keyboard and let’s add a new cube in our scene to add a material to it click on the new material button here now to add a brick texture to this Cube go to the Shader editor and press shift plus a now in the texture we have to select the brick texture let’s place it here and if I connect the color socket with the base color of the principal bstf you can see that this brick texture is generated here but it’s black and white in color currently we’ll be working on the texture on the top face of the cube only so let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad let’s zoom in and suppose you want to change the color of these bricks or these faces and the edges in between them for this let’s understand about a new node which is the mixed color node to add it here I will press shift plus a go to color and select mix color let’s place it here now this will allow you to change the color of these faces and edges in between so I’ll connect the factor socket of brick texture with the factor socket of the mix color node and to generate the output that is the color I’ll connect this result with the base color socket of the principal bstf but right now you will see nothing because we have to change the colors from here so let’s select this color a and change the color to Red so basically the color a represents these brick faces and the color B represents the edges in between them let’s try to change the color of these edges also so I’ll go to color B and let’s make them dark green color so I’ll bring this brightness slider down like this so that it looks realistic now this was one way of doing this but there’s another way which is more often used by people and that is to use the mix Shader this one was the mix color note and the one that we are going to use right now is the mix Shader so with this selected press X to delete it and by pressing shift plus a we’ll go to Shader and let’s add the mix Shader let’s place it here now what I’m going to do is that I’ll take this material output and let’s shift it here now we’ll directly connect this mix Shader with the output so click on this Shader socket and connect it to the surface to see the changes here we have to connect this bsdf socket with the first Shader socket here now to see the texture on a Surface we have to connect this brake texture with this mix Shader for this select this Factor socket and and connected to the factor socket of the mix Shader now you can see that the texture has appeared here and to change the color of these brick faces you have to click on the base color here and let’s change it to red color and this is how it looks now now suppose you also want to change the color of these edges here for this we have to create a duplicate of this principal bstf and connected to the mix Shader so left click to select this principal bsdf and to duplicate it we have to press shift plus d let’s place it down here and to connect both of them we have to connect the bstf with the Shader socket number two the first Shader socket is connected to this one and the second one is connected to this let’s click on the base color first change the color to white and to turn it into gray we have to bring down this brightness slider like this so let’s try to understand this in a better way we added a texture here that is the brick texture and connected it to the mix Shader then we needed colors on our texture so we added these two principal bsdf and also connected them to the mix Shader and for the output we use this material output node now if you look closely then it looks very simple and that’s because we have not added any 3D effects like bumps to our object so let’s try to do that first let’s place it here let’s bring it here and this one also now this one is for the red colored bricks and this one is for the edges Now to create bumps on it we have to press shift plus a go to vector and add bump let’s place it here and we’ll connect its normal to the normal of this principal bstf and let’s also try to add a wave texture so that it looks much more realistic so I’ll press shift plus a go to texture and let’s add this wave texture let’s see what kind of impact it creates I’ll connect the factor of this wave texture to the height to connect them together now you can see that some straight lines have appeared on our object and I can control them from the parameters here for example currently it scale value is five but if I increase it like this then the number of lines are also increasing also they look very straight but in real life the textures are not so perfect and for this you have this Distortion parameter so let’s try to change it we’ll increase it and you can now see that they’re no longer straight and to make it look a bit more realistic we can increase this detail from here currently it’s at two but let’s set it around 8 so that it could give it a much realistic look than before now let’s revise what all we have done here till now first we needed to add a brick texture so I added this brick texture and connected it to the mix Shader I used the mix Shader because I needed two different colors on this texture one was the red color and the other one was the gray color for the edges then to make the brick faces look more realistic I added this wave texture with this bump and connected it to this one because it was controlling the material of our brick face that is the red color similarly if I have to create some 3D effects on the edges then I have to do this using this principle bstf because it is giving the material of this dark gray color to the edges so now suppose you want to add some noise texture to your edges and to create a bump effect on these edges for this press shift plus a go to vector and add bump let’s place it here and connect the normal to the normal of the bstf let’s also add the noise texture by pressing shift plus a go to texture and add noise texture let’s place it here now connect the factor socket to the height socket of the bump and now it looks like this but you can see here that the edges look very smooth or basically very shiny which makes it look unreal to fix this we need to add some detail currently the detail parameter is set to two and it can go to maximum of 15 so let’s increase it to the maximum and now you can see that it looks way too much better than before it has added some detail and and roughness to it which makes it look realistic so that’s all in this chapter and yes if you have not understood how different textures work then you need not worry because in the upcoming chapters we are going to explore all the important Textures in complete detail currently we are only understanding how these node components are connected with each other and what change can you expect by either connecting them or by changing these [Music] parameters in this chapter we’ll be covering all these topics to understand the node components in blender so let’s begin with it so let’s first St a Shader editor so right click here select horizontal split and let’s split the area into two parts left click to finalize click on this icon and select Shader editor let’s go to the render view also and I’ll change the render engine to Cycles so whenever you’re working on a material you have to start with a map or basically an input node and so in this chapter first we’ll see how these Maps work by using a separate XYZ node for this we have to add an input node here so press shift plus a go to input and select texture coordinate and let’s place it here now these are the seven maps that are available in this texture coordinate node and now we have to add a separate XYZ node for this press shift plus a go to converter and from here you can add the separate xard node let’s place it here the reason for adding this is that we’ll be connecting this texture coordinate with the principal bsdf through this separate XYZ node and in this way we’ll see how we get different results by using different Maps here on our objects material so first let’s try this generated one and let’s connect it to the vector and now if I connect this x socket with the base color color you will notice some changes here now in most of the cases you should connect the sockets of same color together but it won’t give you any error if you connect different color sockets together also so right now I’ve connected this x socket with the base color and we get this result let’s see what does it mean but before that you need to understand one thing and it’s that the black color always stand for the value of zero and white color always stand for the value of one so now if I see this Cube then we notice that it changes its color in the X direction from black to white that’s because we use this x socket here so basically here in the beginning it has a value of zero and so it’s black colored and as it moves further in the X direction that is at this end it has a value of one and so it’s white colored similarly if I connect the Y socket to the base color you will notice the same with Y axis as well initially in the y- axis it is black colored and as you go forward in the y direction then it turns into white that is the value of one also if I use the Zed socket and connected to the base color then you can see that at the lowermost end it’s black colored and as you move upwards in the Z Direction ction it turns white that is from value of zero to value of one but this thing will change if I change this generated to object so I’ll select this object socket and connected to the vector now the object Map works in a slightly different way instead of going from 0 to 1 it works from Min -1 to 1 since the Z axis is selected here so at the lowermost point its value is minus1 at the middle it’s zero and at the top it’s one now always remember that if its value is minus one or basically anything less than zero then also it will appear as complet completely black only when you move from 0 to 1 you will notice the change of color from black to white so basically the generated map has the value from 0 to one and the object map has the value from minus1 to 1 and we can even verify this by using a math node so first let’s see what a math node does first I’ll select these and let’s move them here press shift plus a go to converter and add math node and let’s place it here so first let’s understand what this math node is actually blender allows you to use a math node in order to do some math mathematical operations on the values that are coming from input and it has many options available here so if I click on this drop- down then you can see that there’s so many functions here like add subtract so basically you can use these to perform a particular mathematical operation on any particular number or maybe two or three numbers as well for example if you want to add two or three numbers or basically the values then you can use this add function or similarly you can also use the subtract multiply and other things we’ll be exploring this in detail while covering the geometry nodes but currently let’s select the absolute function from here now for those of you who don’t know what absolute function is in mathematics it is a function which basically takes the value of a number as an input and if the number is negative then it converts it into a positive number and if it’s zero or positive then the value will remain same for example if I take minus5 and apply the absolute function on it then the output that it will give will be equal to 5 but if I apply this function on a positive number like six then it would return the same number as the output since it is positive so as I told you that when you’re using this object map with the Zed axis then at the lowermost point the value will be minus one in the middle it will be zero and at the top it will be one and since I applied this absolute node here so it took minus one as the input which was at the bottom and converted it to one which makes it look white now but at the middle the input value was zero and when the absolute function is applied over zero then the result would also be zero so it looks black also on the top the input value was one and after applying the ABS absolute function the value will still remain one since it is positive and in most of the cases you will be using either the generated one or the object one out of the seven Maps also sometimes you will be using UV when you have to do texture mapping on your object with the help of an image which we learned in our previous chapter but mostly you would be using generated map or the object map and now that we have covered the concept of these important Maps there’s one more thing to tell you it might be possible that you would be facing some difficulty in understanding the function of each of these nodes especially if you’re exploring these materials textures and notes for the very first time in blender and that’s completely fine because currently you should not focus on the complete functionality of each and every node because see there are over 100 nodes in blender and I’ll be covering all of these nodes in the chapters related to Geometry nodes in this course there we’ll be understanding each and every note in complete detail So currently your focus should be only on understanding what are the different options available to create different types of materials what happens on connecting different types of things together what results you can expect here hair and other similar things and with this we have established a solid foundation in node components of blender after understanding the concepts explained in these three chapters that is this one and the previous two you now have the Essential Knowledge that will be needed to build upon in the future chapters so that’s all in this chapter from the next chapter we’ll begin with the understanding of textures and we’ll understand these four Textures in complete [Music] detail currently in this chapter we’ll go through these four Textures in blender in complete detail so let’s begin with it first let’s add the Shader editor here for this right click here and select horizontal split and let’s divide it into two parts left click to finalize click on this icon here and select Shader editor now the first texture with which we’ll start is the brick texture for this go to the Shader editor and press shift plus a go to texture and select the brake texture let’s place it here now to connect this brake texture with the principal bstf take this color socket and connected to the base color of the principal bsdf let’s go to the render View and by default the EV render engine is turned on so I’ll go to render properties and select Cycles now you can see this brick wall texture here to see it properly let’s go to the top VI we pressing seven on the numpad and let’s zoom in so the first basic thing that you can make with this brick texture is this brick wall but you can also make a tile wall with the use of this brick texture for this we have to focus on two things the first one is that the brick width and the row height should be equal and it’s even better to set both of them at a value of one so I’ll select this brick width type one and press enter let’s also go to the row height type one and press enter enter so basically it changes the width and the height of our tiles in our texture but if you notice closely then it starts from alternate ends for example the first tile here is incomplete but the second one is complete similarly the third tile is also half and the fourth tile is complete and that’s because the offset here is set at 0.5 but if I change it to zero then you will notice that all the faces start from the same end that is all of them look uniform now but right now it looks very simple so suppose you want to rotate this texture by an angle of 45° and to do this you have to add a vector mapping node here for this press shift plus a go to vector and select mapping let’s place it here to connect this Vector mapping to The Brick texture take this Vector socket and connect it to the vector socket of the brick texture now both of them are connected but we need an input node here so press shift plus a go to input and select the texture coordinate let’s place it here and we’ll use the generated map so let’s connect it to the vector now this is the input which I connected to the mapping node because we want to transform this texture like rotating it or maybe scaling it then this break texture is providing this texture on our object we use this principal bstf for basically shading our object and the material output provides you this output that you are seeing in the 3D view Port now to rotate this texture in a particular angle let’s say 45° so you have to go to the rotation and since we have to rotate in Z Direction so I’ll go to zed type 45 and press enter this will rotate the texture by an angle of 45° now you might have noticed that this brick texture gives you two options of coloring the color one is set at white color and the color two is set at gray color and you can see these colors on your texture on this face as as well but how do you control the impact of these colors for this you have to use this bias parameter currently it’s set at zero but if I change it to its lowest value that is minus one then it will show only the color one on all the faces similarly if I set it to its maximum value that is positive 1 then it shows only color two on all the faces and at the default value of zero it displays both the colors on our texture now you can even change these colors from white and gray to some other colors for example if I go to the color one and change it to something like orange then it will show combination of both the colors that is the slight orange color and the gray color that is color two let’s select this color two also and let’s change it to something like blue or purple and now it appears like this so you can try a combination of different colors to see different types of color textures on your object now the next option here that you can see is the scale option and it helps you to change the size of these brick or tile faces currently it’s set at five but if I increase it then you can see that the number of faces or the tiles have increased and their size has reduced similarly if I decrease it like this then the number has reduced but size has increased and let’s set it to the the default value of five also you can change the size and color of these edges here or basically the motors by default it color set to Black which you can change from here so if I select it increase the brightness with the help of this brightness slider now you can see that the color has turned to something like gray similarly if I take it to Red then these edges will turn reddish brown in color also you can change this size from the motor size option here by default it’s set at 0.02 but if I increase it to something like 0.1 then you can see that the width or the size has increased to change it to the default value let’s press cr+ Z for R do now the texture on the top looks good but if you look at the sides then it’s not what we were expecting and to fix this go to this texture coordinate and instead of generated connect the UV map to the vector then go to the edit mode by pressing tab select the UV option from here and click on Cube projection let’s return back to the object mode and here you have the brick texture on all the faces of this Cube so that’s all in the brick texture and now the second texture on our list is the Checker texture for this I’ll add a new Cube but first let’s move it in y direction like this and left click to finalize the position now press shift plus a go to mesh and let’s add a cube now we need to add a material on this Cube so in the Shader editor click on the new material and to see how the second texture of this chapter that is the Checker texture works then in the Shader editor press shift plus a go to texture and select the Checker texture let’s place it here and to connect this texture with the principal bstf take the color socket and connect it to the base color of the principal bstf now you can see here that as the name suggests it creates this check texture on our Cube and in most of the cases you will be using this to create Maybe the kitchen tiles or a chest board or something similar and you can even change the color of these cubes here and in this texture every alternate Cube has the same color meaning that if this face one has a black color then the face next to it will have a different color but then the next face will again have the black color and the same happens with all the other faces and you can even change the color of these faces to change the colors go to this Checker texture click on the color one and from here you can change the color by default one of the colors is set to White and here in the color two you can see that the second color is by default the gray color let’s go to to the color one again and let’s change its color to Red now you can see here that the color of these alternate faces have changed from white to Red similarly if I go to the color two and if I increase the brightness from here let’s change it to Blue then your texture will appear like this now so you can add various colors as per your specified requirement in this texture and you can even change the size or the number of faces that should appear on this texture and for this you have to use this scale option if I increase this scale option then you will notice that the number of these faces on the texture will increase but the size will reduce similarly if I scale this down then the number number of faces will reduce but the size will increase individually by default the scale value is set at five so let’s change it to five and now this is all we have in the fundamentals of this Checker texture so moving ahead the third texture on our list is the gradient texture but before exploring that let’s move it in the y direction and left click to finalize the position now instead of adding a cube this time let’s add a UV sphere press shift plus a go to mesh and select UV sphere but here we need to improve the lighting so that the other part of the face is also visible so select this light here press shift plus d to create a duplicate and to move it only in the X and Y Direction press shift plus Z and now it movement will get restricted to only the X and Y Direction and so let’s place it here and left click to finalize you can position this lamp anywhere depending on the effect of lighting on your objects now let’s focus on this UV sphere so I’ll select this and we need to add a material here so press the new material button and now is the time to add the gradient texture for this press shift plus a go to texture and select the gradient texture let’s place it here now connect this color socket to the base color and you will notice some changes here so the gradient texture tells your object to transition between one color to the other and to be more specific than in this case between black and white color but if you closely notice then the colors applied are really not very perfect even if I applied the shade smooth then also the color is not perfectly showing the transition from black to white to fix this we need to add a color Ram so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color Ram let’s place it here and with the help of these pointers you can change the extent of these black and white colors on your object and also its appearance suppose I take this first pointer that is the black one and if I move it like this then you will observe that the darkness is increasing on this side or basically the amount of black color is increasing on this side similarly if I take the second pointer that is the white one and I left click on it and if I drag it like this then you will notice the same with the white color as well now the black and the white color are clearly distinguishable in the texture of this UV sphere now let’s try to add some different colors to see the transition for this first select this first pointer here that is the black one let’s reduce its effect by dragging it like this and now to change its color click here to see the colors here we have to first increase the brightness with the help of this slider so I’ll increase the brightness and let’s change the color to Blue now I have assigned blue as the first color of this gradient texture so you can see that with the help of this gradient texture it shows a transition on this UV sphere from blue color to white color similarly if I take this second pointer here drag it in this direction and to change its color click here and let’s change the color to red and now you can see how amazing this looks with the help of the gradient texture your UV sphere is having a material which shows transition between blue color to red red color and similarly you can try this with other colors also and you can even do this with more than two colors to do this you have to click on this plus icon and now a third pointer is added at the middle so with this third pointer selected I’ll go to this color and let’s change it to yellow and now you can see that it’s showing a transition from blue color then in the middle it’s yellow and then to red color and this is how the gradient texture works you can even adjust these Colors by moving these pointers like this and it will increase or decrease the impact of those particular colors so you can use this to create some amazing gradient textures and blending also you can adjust the position or the rotation of these Colors by connecting this gradient texture with a mapping node for this press shift plus a go to vector and select mapping let’s place it here now I’ll take this Vector socket and connect it to the vector socket of the gradient texture but this is not the result that we were expecting and I have told you this reason every time I use this mapping node and that is to connect the mapping node with an input node for which I need to press shift plus a then in the input select the texture coordinate let’s place it here now connect the generated socket with the vector socket and the texture reappears and now you can use these location rotation and scale values to affect how these colors or the texture appears on your object for example if I try to change the rotation in the y direction and if I increase it like this then you will notice that the texture will also change also you can use this location to change the appearance of the texture for example if I change the location in the X Direction then we notice that this completely turns into red color similarly if I take it in negative of X Direction then we see that it completely turns to blue color but since we want the gradient texture to appear properly let’s change the location in X direction to zero and let’s also change the rotation in the y direction direction to zero and now it looks like this again and the last one that is the scale one is very useful in the gradient texture so if I take this x Direction scale and if I try to increase it then you will observe that the blue color has reduced if I scale it up in the X Direction and if I reduce it again then you can see that the blue color will slightly increase so you can use this scale option to adjust how your texture would look in most of the cases you will be using this scale option only to alter this gradient texture here and so this is all in the gradient texture now the fourth texture on our list is the magic texture so now we’ll add a new cube in our scene press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube let’s move it in y direction and let’s place it here let’s give it a material by clicking on the new button here and to apply the magic texture press shift Plus in the Shader editor go to the texture and select the magic texture let’s place it here now this magic texture is used to create some repetitive patterns for example if you are making a wallpaper or maybe texture for some fabric in all these cases you will require a pattern which is repeating itself many times and so you should use the magic texture in these cases now to see its effect on our Cube let’s take this color socket of the magic texture and connect it to the base color of the principal bstf and here you can see that the magic texture is applied and it gives a random pattern of colors to our object’s material and you can alter these colors and the patterns with the help of these parameters like the depth scale and the Distortion for example if I change the scale value then it appears like this and I can even change the depth value to get more variations for example by default it is set at two but if I change it to something like four then we can see that we get variations in the color earlier it was blue and green but now you can see that it’s mainly pink and yellow colored so you can get some Variations by changing the depth value also if I change it to three then you will get these colors for now let’s keep it to the default value of two now you might think that it looks very simple like there’s no complexity in it and to fix this blender gives you the option of this Distortion value by changing this Distortion value you can basically Blend or mix these patterns more and more which will give it a complex look by default it is set at a value of one but if I increase it then you can observe that the texture is no more simple so you can set this Distortion level as per the level of complexity that you want in your objects pattern or basically the text now one important use of this magic texture is to create fabric textures and to do this basically you have to set the scale at a very high value and reduce the Distortion so let’s try to do this and before that I need to add an input node also so I’ll press shift plus a go to input and select the texture coordinate let’s place it here now I’ll take this object socket and connect it to the vector I’ll decrease the Distortion to its default value of one and it is appearing like this right now to convert it into a fabric like texture we have to increase its scale value to a very high level currently it’s set at 11 but if I increase it to something like 60 and if I zoom in now then you can see that it looks a bit like some fabric or some clothes and to see its effect more properly we can add a bump Vector node in the Shader editor so press shift plus a go to vector and select bump let’s place it here now to connect this bump node with the magic texture I’ll take this Factor socket and connect it to the height socket here now I’ll take this normal socket and connect it to the normal socket of the principal bstf and now you can see that it looks way too more realistic like it might take some time to render but after rendering you can see that it very much looks like a texture of a fabric now you can even combine different types of textures together to create some stunning materials for example let’s try to make this tablecloth by combining the magic texture with the Checker texture that we learned in this chapter so with this Cube selected I’ll go to the Shader editor and let’s add a checker texture for this press shift plus a go to the texture and select the Checker texture let’s place it here now see the reason for choosing the Checker texture is that it will create checks on our Cube like we have on this Cube here so you can understand it like the Checker texture will give the color and this magic texture will make it look like a real fabric so I need to connect the Checker texture to the principal bstf using this color socket so I’ll take this color socket and connected to the base color of the principal bstf now here is a black and white Checker texture combined with a fabric like texture which is due to this magic texture we can even change the color of these squares to give it a more realistic look so I’ll select this color two and let’s set it to red color let’s also increase the brightness from here and it looks like this now and now it looks like real clothe fabric so this is all in the magic texture and also so this brings us to the end of this chapter today we discussed about the fundamentals of the four important Textures in blender that is the brick texture the Checker texture the gradient texture and in the end we explored the magic texture and even combined it with the Checker texture to get this [Music] result in this chapter we’ll be exploring the fundamentals of these four textures so let’s begin with it for working on the materials I would need a Shader editor so I’ll take my cursor over here right click and select horizontal split I’ll drag this line and place it here and left click to finalize now to convert the upper area into the Shader editor click on this icon and select the Sha editor now the first texture that we’ll explore today is the noise texture but for exploring the noise texture we’ll not use this Cube so I’ll press X to delete it and let’s add a monkey or the suzan model so I’ll go to mesh and select the monkey model now to give it a new material I’ll go to the Shader editor and click on the new button Also let’s change this to render preview by clicking on this icon and by default the render is set to Eevee so I’ll go to the render properties and change it to Cycles but I see that there’s not enough Lighting in my scene so I’ll zoom out select this Lam let’s create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus p and I need to move it only in the X and Y Direction not in the Z direction for this press shift plus Z and now it won’t change its position in the Z Direction Let’s place it here in front of the suzan model and left click to finalize now let’s zoom in to seat properly so before understanding the noise texture first let’s give it a simple color and try to change the parameters in the principal bstf so I’ll go to the base color and let’s give it a dark blue color so now it looks very simple and to make it look better one thing that we can do is to select this monkey of the suzan model right click and select shade smooth now it surface is smooth and here you can see that the principal bstf gives you the option to adjust the metallic strength or the roughness of your model by default the metallic strength is set at zero and the roughness is set at 0.5 now if I try to reduce this roughness and take it to zero then all the roughness is gone and the object is very smooth and shiny now also suppose you want your surface to be a little metallic so you can go to this metallic parameter and increase it and now you will notice that the surface of your object now has a slightly metallic look but I think that to make it look realistic the roughness should not be zero we should increase it a little bit so let’s keep it to a value of somewhere around 0.2 and let’s also reduce the metallic strength so let’s keep it to somewhere near 0.1 and now it looks like this the reason for doing all this before discussing the noise texture is that it would help us to see the effect of the noise texture properly on the this material so to add the noise texture we have to press shift plus save go to the texture and select the noise texture let’s place it here now you can see here that there are two sockets for the output the factor socket and the color socket in nice texture in most of the cases you will be using this Factor socket to connect the nodes while using the noise texture but also in some cases you will be using this color socket let’s first connect this color socket to the base color of the principle bsdf and now we see some texture on our object it looks like a gradient of Many Colors and it basically depends on the values in these parameters of the noise texture for example the first parameter here is the scale so if I increase the scale then we observe that it basically increase the noise created on our object or basically the noise created on this texture and the next option here is the detail option by default it is set at two but if I decrease it then simply there is less detail on the texture which means that the colors are not blending with each other and the colors are more like patches on our object but if I increase the detail from here then you will notice that the colors are blending with each other other and the object texture now has a very realistic and a detailed look so by using the scale and the detail you can adjust how your texture would look like on your object on the basis of its size or the blending and the next parameter is the roughness so as the name suggests the roughness parameter defines how rough your object’s texture would look by default it is set at 0.5 but if I increase it to its maximum value of 1 and if I zoom in then we see that the colors are completely Blended and the object’s material looks something like a marble or some Stone and also there is more tailing in the noise texture but suppose I take this roughness value and reduce it to its minimum value of zero then now all the roughness is gone and the object looks very smooth and shiny and you can see that all the colors are very much visible now and it has very low detailing also so adjusting the roughness creates a lot of impact on how your material would look like but to create realistic renders in most of the cases you will be using a roughness value of approximately 0.5 or 0.7 something near these values so let’s keep it to 0.5 only and also we have this Distortion value here by default it is set at zero and let’s see what happens if I increase it so I’ll slightly increase it and if I zoom into seats effect then you will notice that the texture now has some band-like patterns which were not present before so more the Distortion more unnatural your object’s texture would look for example when the Distortion was Zero then see it gives a very natural look like the colors are blending with each other and it looks kind of realistic but as you increase it it seems as if the texture colors are creating a pulling effect and forming these band or ring like structures which really gives it a very artificial look and while using this noise texture mostly you will be setting the Distortion to the default value that is zero so these are all the options and results when you connect your noise texture with the principal bstf through this color socket but as we discussed earlier you can also use this factor to connect it to the principal bstf now suppose you want to cut this node or basically the connection and to do this you can hold the control button and now if you right click and drag it like this then this knife will appear and if I release it then the node connection is no longer there and you can use this to break any kind of node connection now one thing to notice here which is not connected to this noise texture or the materials is that the structure of this suzan model is not very perfect like if I zoom in you can easily see the imperfection in the structure of eyes and the ears and to fix this you have to use a modifier which is the subdivision modifier if you remember we covered all the generate and defa modifiers in our previous chapters and we discussed this subdivision modifier in detail there so to apply it I’ll go to the modifier section click on ADD modifier and in the generate category I’ll select subdivision surface and now our suzan or the monkey model looks perfect so I’ll zoom out and let’s come back to the noise texture now you can use this Factor socket in the noise texture to connect it to anything like roughness or the displacement or a color ramp anything so first let’s see what happens if I connect this Factor socket to the roughness socket of the principal bsdf and we notice some changes here and to see the changes properly let’s Undo It by pressing control+ Z now now before connecting the noise texture with the roughness of the principal psdf our object look like this it’s very smooth shiny and highly unrealistic like mostly in real life you won’t see objects that are too much shiny or smooth but if I redo by pressing Control Plus shift plus Z then the roughness is fixed now or basically the object is no more unrealistically smooth or shiny it now has a balanced material on its surface also if you notice closely by zooming in then we can see that it has also added a little bit noise on the surface to see it properly we can use this scale option and if I increase the scale then now you can see it properly so the noise texture has added noise to the object surface giving it a very realistic look so you can use this noise texture by connecting it to the roughness if you want your object to have some noise on the surface and to give it a very realistic look and in this way your object material won’t be too much shiny or too much smooth making it unrealistic and with the help of this texture you can also create a texture with noise or basically these patches of different colors at different locations to see how this works we need to add a color ramp here so I’ll press shift plus a go to the converter and select color ramp let’s place it here now I’ll select these two left click to move them and release to finalize the position now to connect this color ramp with the noise texture I’ll take this Factor socket and connect it to the factor socket of the color Ram now to break the node connection between the noise texture and the principal bsdf hold down the control key and if I click the right Mouse button and drag it and now if I release it then we no longer have the connection now to connect this color ramp with the principal bsdf I’ll take this color socket and connect it to the base color of the principal bsdf and here is our texture you can notice these black patches or the noise on a suzan Model the reason why it appears like black and white is that in this color ramp there are two pointers one is black and the other one’s white and we can even adjust these colors so I’ll click here and let’s change the first color by increasing the brightness and let’s change it to light blue similarly I’ll select the second pointer that is the white one and to change its color I’ll click here and let’s change the color to Yellow now you can see that this suzan model has yellow color on its surface and some blue patches so whenever you’re modeling something which requires a texture with a lot of noise and patches of different colors like this then you can use this noise section connected to the color RAM and it will give you an output like this now one of the best uses of this noise texture which is also my personal favorite is using noise texture to add emission light to our model for this we have to open this emission drop down and we have to connect our noise texture with this emission color through this color Ram so I’ll take this color socket and connect it to the color socket of the emission and also I need to break the node connection of the color ramp with the base color so I’ll hold the control button and right click and drag like this but we can’t see any change here that’s because first we have to increase the emission strength from here by default it is set at zero but I’ll increase it to 0.8 and now to change the colors I’ll select the first pointer and click here now I need to make the first pointer very dark so I’ll take this brightness slider and decrease it all the way down and for the second pointer I’ll move it like this and also the first pointer let’s move it like this and now you see some texture appearing on your object even though it’s not perfect but you can see that the base color of your model is blue and it has some noise on it which is yellow colored and is emitting light to see this light properly you can increase the strength to a higher value like

    five or six and let’s also reduce the scale from here currently it’s set at 54 but let’s lower it down to a value like 20 or maybe 25 let’s also increase the roughness this will give it a more realistic look and let’s also increase the detail so I’ve set the detail to 8.3 and to adjust this yellow color try to adjust these pointers at the position where they look the best if I take this black pointer and move it towards the yellow one then the area of this yellow noise or basically the emission will reduce and you can also change the color of this emission we have set it to Yellow but if I click on it and change it to Red then it looks like this so you can use the noise texture connected with the color RAM and then connect it to the emission to create textures like this and now it’s the time for the second texture which is the musk grave texture so let’s move it in the X Direction and let’s place it here now to understand the musk grave texture let’s add a UV sphere in our scene press shift plus a go to mesh and select UV sphere to give it a material click on the new button so just like every other texture if I go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to texture and search for the musk grave texture then I see that there is no such texture present here and that’s because previously in blender there used to be a separate texture which was known as the musk texture but when blender released this 4.1 version it removed the the mus grave texture from its software but still we can use it by altering the noise texture let’s see how it happens so I’ll press shift plus a go to texture and let’s add the noise texture let’s place it here and before applying the textures let’s first right click and shade smooth now we have to remove this principle bstf because it’s not required in the musk texture so with this selected I’ll press X to delete now take this Factor socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output now you can slightly see these patches here on this object but see this is not how the Musk texture actually looks and to see the real Musgrave texture go to this noise texture and uncheck this normalized box and this is the mus grave texture you won’t be using this texture very often but still it’s good to learn it because might be in some case you would need to add this musg grave texture and so it’s good to understand it now you can also alter its appearance from the roughness detail and the scale values here so if I reduce the roughness from here and let’s also reduce the detail from 2 to one and now it looks like this so you can adjust these parameters as per your requirement and also you can make some pretty equal textures like this one for this you have to take this roughness value to its maximum level and also increase the detail to something around 16 and now it has a very realistic texture so whenever you feel the need of adding a musk grave texture just add this noise texture connect it to the material output uncheck the normaliz box and change the parameters from here now it’s time for the third texture of this chapter that is the warai texture so I’ll move it in the X Direction like this and left click to finalize so let’s add a cube in our scene by going to mesh and selecting the cube to give it a new material in the shade of editor click on the new button now press shift plus a go to texture and select the warai texture let’s place it here now take this color socket and connect it to the base color of the principal pstf so the Warner texture creates this colorful pattern on an object but this is the simplest thing that you can do with this Warner texture and you can see here that there are three different ways to connect Warner texture with other nodes so suppose I take the distance and connect it to the base color socket then I get this very faint gradient as a texture on my object but yes you can adjust the scale from here so if I increase it then it looks like this and also another important parameter is the randomness so if I take it to zero then the pattern has no Randomness it is completely uniform it’s just repeating itself in a single line but if I increase it to its maximum value then now it is completely random similarly if I again connect the color to the base color then you can alter this pattern by using this scale option so if I increase it then it looks like this and similar is the case with Randomness also if I take it to zero then there is no Randomness just that there are some square faces with different colors in a straight line repeating it self and if I increase the randomness to the maximum then the pattern has various faces of different shapes and colors and similarly if I connect the position to the base color then we get this beautiful gradient light texture on our object and you can also alter this with the help of this scale option so if I reduce the scale then the texture would look like this and if I increase it to a very high number then this gradient would look very smooth so you can use these three different outputs as per the requirement while using the waro texture so you can use this waro texture whenever you want to create a gradient texture like this or maybe a colorful pattern with different shapes like this so in these cases you can use the Warner texture to create your object’s material and so this is all in the fundamentals of this Warner texture and now let’s move to the fourth texture of this chapter which is the wave texture now the wave texture node adds procedural bands or ring with noise Distortion to understand it practically let’s add a new Cube by pressing shift plus a go to mesh and select a cube let’s move it in X Direction like this and left click to finalize now let’s give it a material by going to the Shader editor and clicking on this new button here now to add the wave texture press shift plus a go to the texture and select the wave texture let’s place it here now if I connect this color socket to the base color then we observe that some bands are generated on our object now let’s look at some options here the first one is the bands and the Rings suppose I select the Rings I can’t see much difference here to see a wave texture of rings on all the faces go to this second option and change the Rings direction to spherical now here we have spherical rings as texture that are radiating like this from here and you can also use these values like the scale value to increase or decrease the scale and also you can use this Distortion value to make the pattern irregular so if I increase it then the Rings would appear like this also to make it look a bit more realistic you can increase the detail from here so these are the three main options available in the wave texture now let’s change the pattern to the bands again and here in the band Direction you have the option of diagonal so previously the texture was running straight like in the X Direction but now the texture is applied diagonally on the object also you can go to the wave profile here and change it to saw and now the texture appears like this similarly if I go to the triangle profile then the texture looks like this so it depends which one to select based on your requirement right now let’s set it to the default sign and suppose you want to rotate this texture so for this I’ll go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to vector and add the mapping node let’s place it here and connect the vector to the vector of wave texture but as I even told you in the previous chapters that you need to add an input node here so I’ll press shift plus a go to input and select the texture coordinate let’s place it here let’s connect the generated map to the vector like this and here we have the texture now suppose I want to rotate the texture in a particular angle let’s say 45° in Z AIS so I’ll go to the rotation in Zed axis type 45 and press enter this will rotate the texture by an angle of 45° in The Zed Direction similarly you can also use the rotation in other axis and other angles to change how your texture would look even though you can also use the scale values here but it’s better to use the scale values in the wave texture and so this is all in the fundamentals of this wave texture and now we have covered all the four Textures in this chapter and let’s summarize them the first one was the noise texture where we connected this noise texture with a color Ram then we connected it to the base color roughness and in the end we also connected it to the emission to create some cool effects the second one was the mus grave texture but because it no longer exists in blender 4.1 we used the noise texture to create this Musgrave texture and yes the special thing in this was we deleted the principal bsdf and directly connected the noise texture to the material output and also remember to turn off the normaliz in order to get the this Musgrave texture then the third texture was the warai texture where we got this colorful pattern of different shapes and also a gradient when we connected this position to the base color like this and the fourth one was the wave texture which gives us two options the first one is the bands and the second one is the Rings we have selected the bands right now and if I select the Rings then it looks like this and to rotate this we added this mapping node and connected it to the texture coordinate and the wave texture so that’s all in this chapter [Music] so in this chapter we’ll be discussing about how do we add images like these as textures on our object so in order to give this Cube any type of texture we first need to add a Shader editor for this I’ll take my cursor over here right click and I’ll select the horizontal split I’ll drag this line to the center and left click now to convert this into a Shader editor click on this icon here and select the Shader editor now the next thing to do is that we’ll go to the render View and since the blender has EV render engine turned on by default I I’ll go to the render properties and switch it to cycles and now we need to get some image textures for our object so for this I have opened a browser and see there are many websites which offer you free image textures for blender and I’ll drop the links in the description currently the one that we are going to use is ambient c.com so I’ll search for it and this is the ambient c.com website and the best part about this website is that you will get lots of free materials textures and hdis from here and that to under the creative common license for those of you you who don’t know what a creative common license is it basically means that you can freely use it for commercial purposes without the need of paying any fees or giving any credits to anyone so this one is a good website I’ll drop the link of this website in the description and suppose you want to get a brick texture for our object for this let’s click on this explore all assets and here you can find lots of textures like this one is a brick texture this one is a wood texture this one is a ground texture with slight patches of grass this one is a marble texture so you can get any texture from here and even the hdri is like these and to search for any type of texture you can do that here so suppose I type brick and press enter then it will show me all the brick textures that are available on this website so we’ll select this one for our object so I’ll click on this and here you can see that there are so many options to download it and all these depend on the file type and its resolution the 16k is the highest and also the PNG will take more sizes compared to the jpg so if you want the best quality then you should go for 16k and currently I’ll be downloading the 8K file and and you can download any of these either the jpg or the PNG for now let’s download the 8K PNG file so I’ll click on it now I have downloaded this here and since it is a zip folder so before using this in my blender file I need to extract it first so I’ll click on extract all and click on extract and now this folder is created and if I open it and now it has all the files and the images for the texture like the roughness displacement and all the other files and now let’s see how to import them or add them in our blender project so we are back on blender and to apply that image texture to this object go to the shade editor press shift plus a go to texture and select the image texture let’s place it here and to open that image texture click on the open Button now you have to browse and open that particular folder where the texture is present and from all these images you have to select the image which ends with color.png or if you downloaded some other texture then it might end with c.png or the JPG file so I’ll select this and click on open image and to see the changes here we need to connect this image texture to the principal bstf so let’s take this color socket left click and connect it to the base color of the principal bstf and here is the brick texture applied on our object but it doesn’t look very impressive and to fix this we’ll go to the Shader editor and we have to add an input node so press shift plus a go to input and select the texture coordinate let’s place it here and we have to connect this to the image texture so I’ll take this object socket and connect it to the vector socket now you can see that the texture looks good on the top it kind of looks perfect here but if you look at the sides then it doesn’t look so nice because this is not the texture that we were expecting to be applied on the side we expected it to be same as that on the top face but you can easily fix this by going to the image texture and here in the second drop down menu you can set the image projection by default it is set at flat and that’s where it appears like this but if I change the image projection from Flat to box then the brick texture is applied perfectly but there’s also one more way to do this and in fact it is better than this one which is to use UV maps for this let’s go to the projection method and let’s change it to Flat go to the texture coordinate I’ll take this UV socket and connect it to the vector socket now even though the texture appears on all the faces properly but its scale is not correct which means we need to adjust it by going to the UV map for this we need to add UV editor in our scene so I’ll take my cursor over here right click select vertical split drag this line over here and left click to change this into the UV editor click on this icon and select the UV editor now in this 3D view port with this object selected I’ll enter the edit mode by pressing Tab and here if I zoom out in the UV editor then we have this UV map here so to adjust it I’ll press a to select all in the UV editor and now I can press s to scale it and you will notice the changes in your 3D view editor also so let’s scale it a bit more left click let’s also adjust it by pressing G and let’s take it down like this and left click to finalize and we can even fit this entire image in this face so let’s scale it up again left click and press G to move it like this and now it looks perfect let’s come out of the edit mode by pressing Tab Key in the 3D view editor and now we can close this UV editor so with my cursor over here I’ll right click and select join areas now I’ll take this pointer over here and left click to see the texture properly let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad now if you see this image closely we’ll notice that it’s completely flat and to fix this we need to add some PBR images now the PBR images are these images that came in the zip folder that we downloaded these PBR images will Define the roughness or the displacement and various other things which will give this texture a completely different look so the first one that we’re going to see is the normal and to add it here I’ll select this image texture and create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and let’s move it here but this image texture has this color file added and we need to add the image of the normal map for this click on this icon to open the image then you have to go to that particular folder and here in this folder we have two normal files one is normal GL and the other is normal DX so you can add any of the two it won’t make much difference for now let’s add the normal GL and click on open image now in this node with the normal image go to the color space and change to non color the reason for doing this is that the normal map does not have any color it only creates a bump effect on our object it does not give any color to our object so that’s why we have to change the color space to non-color but if you look at the previous image texture which was the color image the color space was set to srgb because this image had the color which got assigned as the texture on our object now we need to connect this normal to the principal bsdf through this normal socket but for this we need to add a normal map in the Shader editor for this I’ll press shift Plus say go to vector and select the normal map let’s place it here take this color socket and connect it to the color socket of the normal map now I can take this normal and connected to the normal of the principal bsdf let’s zoom out for a better view let’s move this slightly but we don’t see any changes here for this first I’ll take the UV of the input node and connect it to the vector and also you have this option of strength here so if I increase the strength you’ll begin to notice some changes in the image texture you will notice that higher the strength more realistic your object texture would look now this is because the normal mapping here adds a 3d effect to our image texture and that’s where it look much more realistic than before and now the next thing that we can add here is the roughness for this I’ll select one of the image textures and create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and let’s place it here to give it the roughness image I’ll click on the open image select this roughness PNG and click on open image also I need to change the color space from srgb to the non-color now we can connect the roughness to the principal bstf by taking this color socket here and connecting it to the roughness of the mle psdf you’ll notice some changes here but first let’s also connect the UV of input node to the vector here and now you can see that some roughness is added to our image texture you might not see a significant change in the quality and that’s because roughness basically depends on the lighting of your system and now the next one that we are going to add is the displacement for this I’ll select one of the image textures and create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and let’s place it here now I’ll go to open image and select the displacement. PNG and click on open image now we need to connect this displacement image to the normal of the principal bsdf to see its effect but for this we need to add a bump node here so I’ll press shift plus a go to vector and select bump let’s place it here now I’ll take this color socket and connect it to the height and right now the normal socket of the principal bstf is connected to this normal image but we want to connect the displacement with the principal bsdf through the normal for this I’ll take the normal socket of the normal map and connect it here in the bump node then I’ll break this connection between the normal of the normal map and the normal of the principal bstf by holding the control key dragging right Mouse like this and now I’ll take the normal of the bump node and connect it to the normal of the principal bsdf now you notice some changes here but before observing the changes let’s go to the texture coordinate that is the input node take this UV and connect it to the vector of the displacement also change the color space of the displacement to the non-color and now we see here that a lot of detail is added to this texture you can notice slight cracks shadows and a lot of detailing and to adjust this 3D or the bump effect added you have to go to the bump node and here you have the option of the strength so if I reduce the strength the effect will get reduced so let’s keep it to a value of somewhere around 0.5 and now it looks like this so all these nodes here basically give your texture a very realistic look previously it looked like this and right now you can see that it has changed a lot and that’s the use of all these PBR images and now we have to move to the last one that is the ambient occlusion and after understanding this one we’ll revise all of them one more time to get a better understanding so to add the ambient occlusion I’ll select one of the image textures and we need to create a duplicate of it so I’ll press shift Plus B let’s place it here go to open image and we’ll select the ambient occlusion click on open image again now this ambient occlusion basically adds fake Shadow to your object texture to see how it works we first need to change the color space to the non-color and now we need to add a mixed color node here for this I’ll press shift plus here go to color and select the mixed color let’s place it here now the ambient occlusion will work with this color. PNG node which assigns color to your object which means that we need to break the node connection from here take this color socket and connect it to the color B of the mixed color then take this color socket and connect it to the factor and to connect this entire note system to the principal BF I’ll take this result socket and connect it to the base color we don’t notice any change here to see the changes here first let’s take this UV and connect it to the vector now to see some colored Shadows here you have to go to the color a and suppose I change this to blue color you will notice that some blue Shadows are added here and this is what the ambient occlusion does as I told you it adds fake Shadows to your object’s texture and if you select a particular color from here then the shadow of that particular color will appear on the object texture similarly if I go to the color a again and change it to green color then you’ll notice the green lighting and shadows like this so it’s a very powerful image map which you can use if you want to give some colored Shadows to your object texture and now it’s the time to revise all the images or the image maps that we have covered in this chapter so the first one that we started with was this color.png it basically gave this simple brick texture to our object but since it looked flat we had to add these other PBR images to our texture so first we added this normal which gave it a 3D and a realistic look then we added this roughness which gave the texture some kind of roughness and then we added this displacement which gave the texture this 3d effect or this bump effect that you are seeing and then the last one that we discussed was this ambient occlusion which provided these fake colored Shadows to our object texture and so this is all in this [Music] chapter so to understand about the working of Vortex paint let’s first first delete this Cube by pressing X and we’ll add a suzan or the monkey model in our scene so let’s select the monkey model now here we have the suzan or the monkey model but right now if we go to the edit mode then we can see that the number of vertices of the suzan model are very less for this we’ll add a modifier by going to the object mode then to the modifier properties and we’ll add the subdivision surface modifier click on ADD modifier go to generate and select the subdivision surface let’s increase the levels viewport to three and now it looks very smooth also if I apply this modifier by clicking on this drop- down menu and apply and now if I go to the the edit mode you can see that the suzan model now has a high number of vertices so let’s go back to the object mode now and to use the vertex paint you have to go to the vertex paint mode for this you have to click here where it’s written object mode and then select the vertex paint now before understanding how to use this vertex paint there’s one more important thing to show you so I’ll go to the object data Properties by clicking on this green icon here and here you have an option of the color attributes so if I click on it you have something here which is named as attribute and all the data that you change in this Vortex paint mode is saved here in the attribute now now coming back to the vertex paint let’s first see how we can use this vertex paint to add some smudge or some dirt to our object for this I’ll go to this paint option here and here you have an option of the dirty vertex colors so if I select it and now you’ll notice that your object has become a little dark or basically some dirt has been added to it but you can see here that this monkey has dirt only on some faces and suppose you require the dirt or this Darkness on the complete monkey or the suzan model so for this you have to go to this drop- down menu of dirty vertex colors and here you have an option of normalize so if I uncheck this you will notice that now this dirt or the darkness is spread all over the monkey head but if I go back to the object mode we can’t see the smudge or the dirt effect on it in fact even if I go to the render View and we need to add some lights in our scene so I’ll select this light here and create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and let’s move it in the y direction and let’s also move it in the X Direction like this and now you can see here that it does not show the changes that we did in the vortex paint and that’s because we have not assigned any particular material to it to give it a new material we have to add a Shader editor here so I’ll take my cursor over here right click and select horizontal split let’s divide the area into two parts and left click now to change this into the Shader editor I’ll click on this icon here and select the Shader editor now to give a new material to it I’ll select this and click on new and here you have the default material assigned to the suzan or the monkey model but as I already told you all the changes that we did in the vortex paint mode are saved here in the attribute and so we need to connect this material of the suzan or the monkey model to this attribute to see the changes here and to do this you have to go to the shade editor press shift plus a and in the input you have this attribute so I’ll select this and let’s place it here and now before connecting them together we first need to change the render engine by default it is set to Eevee but we’ll go to the render properties here and change it to cycles and now to connect them together I’ll take this Factor socket and connect it to the base color and here you see that it has completely turned to Black color that’s because we have to assign the specific attribute that we had in this object data properties to this attribute node to do this you have to go to this name option here and type attribute and press enter and here you can see that you have your suan or the monkey model with the smudge or the dirt effect added to it but in most of the cases you will be using this Vortex paint to change the color or paint some specific part of your object for example if I change the object mode to the vortex paint and now suppose I want to paint the color of these eyes so for this I’ll first go to the solid view here and right now you can see that it’s showing the dirt added to it whose data we have stored in this attribute and to remove this I have to click on this minus icon here and here we have our default suzan model so to paint these eyes I need to add a new color attribute here I’ll click on the plus icon here and here we have the option to change its name so I’ll change its name to eyes and this color would define the color of your suzan model so I’ll change it to white color by clicking on it and increasing the brightness with the help of this brightness slider and then I’ll click on okay now to set the color that we want you have to click on this white color here and let’s change it to red color and now I can zoom in and if I left click and drag my cursor like this then you can see that the eyes of this monkey model are being colored red similarly I’ll go to the other eye click left Mouse button and drag it like this and the color of this eye will also change so now our monkey model looks like this let’s also change the color of this nose to red color so I left click here and drag it like this and now this is our suzan or the monkey model and now if I go to the render view you can see that our model is completely black that’s because in the Shader editor we still have that old attribute connected with the principal bsdf but since we have deleted it so it has turned to Black color so to change the name I’ll click here and type eyes and remember that it is case sensitive which means that you have to take care of the capital and the small letters so now I’ll press enter but here you can see that the eyes are not red colored they are colored separately but still they are not red colored like we painted in the vortex paint to fix this go to the shade editor press shift plus a and we’ll add a mixed color node so I’ll go to color and select the mix color let’s place it here and now I have to connect this attribute to the mix color but before that I need to break this node connection so I’ll hold the control key click right Mouse button and drag it like this now I’ll take this color socket and connect it to the color B then I’ll take this result socket and connect it to the base color and now you can see that the red color of the eyes and the nose have appeared on this suzan or the monkey model and you can even change the color of the remaining monkey model with the help of this color a so if I select this and change it to light blue colored then you can see here that the part of the model except for the one which we painted is now light blue colored so you can use the vertex paint option whenever you want to paint color on the surface of your object and one more important thing to remember is that while using the vertex paint you are not changing the color of these vertices in fact you are applying a mask on it to understand it you can see this image where the selected object has the same default color of the material but we have added this colored mask over it with the help of Vortex paint and now let’s also try it with some other part of this object let’s say the head of this monkey model so I’ll go to the solid view again and I’ll add a new color attribute for it so I’ll press on this plus icon and I’ll change the name to head and the color is set to white color so I’ll click on okay so the color of the eyes is stored in the ice color attribute and now whatever new changes that we’ll make will get stored in this head attribute so I’ve selected the head attribute now and I’ll change the color from here let’s change it to green color let’s adjust the view properly and now if I left click and drag my cursor like this then the green color is being applied over the head of the monkey model so the eyes attribute here has the data of the red colored eyes and nose and the head attribute has the data of this green colored head now if I go to the render view again and let’s change this to object mode we can see that the green color of the head has not appeared here and that’s because we have not added the head attribute in this Shader editor for this I’ll select this attribute and create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus b and let’s place it here now I’ll change the name by clicking on the name option and I’ll type head and press enter to confirm and to connect this to the remaining node system I need to create a duplicate of this mix color also so I’ll select this and we’ll create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d let’s place it here and we need to adjust it so I’ll take these two and left click to move them take this mix color and let’s place it here now to connect this head attribute to the remaining note system I’ll take this color socket and connect it to the color B of this mix color now to get the data of both the eyes and the head I’ll take this result socket and connect it to the color a of the mix color now I’ll break the connection between the older mix color and the principal BS TF by holding the control key clicking right Mouse button and dragging like this now I’ll take this result socket and connect it to the base color and here you can see that the data of both the attributes is now applied on the suzan model and suppose you want to change the strength of these colors for this you can increase the value of this Factor here this one will help you to control the strength of this green color and this one will help you to control the strength of this red color so if I increase the factor from here you will see that the red color has increased and if I change it to its default value and go to the other one and if I increase its Factor value you will see that the strength of the green color has increased but right now I’ll be setting them to the default value of 0.5 so this was all in the vortex paint even though you’ll be using this Vortex paint option in very rare situations like modeling some character or painting something specific on a particular object but still it was important to understand it and this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter so in this chapter we’ll be learning about a very useful node in blender which is called the object info node and the first question before starting anything is what exactly is the use of this object info node so the object info node is used to add different colors to different objects while you’re still using the same material and to understand it practically we’ll open our blender file and let’s delete this default Cube by pressing X now let’s press shift plus a go to mesh and let’s add a UI sphere and now to give it some material I need to add a Shader editor in my scene for this I’ll take my cursor over here right click and select horizontal split now I’ll take this line in the middle and left click to split the area into two parts to convert this upper area into the Shader editor click on this icon here and select the Shader editor now to give it a new material click on this new button and here you have the default material applied to the UV sphere now let’s go to the render View and by default the render engine is Eevee so I’ll go to the render properties and change it to Cycles now if I go to the material and click on the base color to change its color we can set the color of this object from here so I’ll change it to red color right now and now if I create some duplicate of this UV sphere by clicking shift plus p and moving it in y direction and left click to finalize similarly I’ll create two or three more duplicates by pressing shift plus d moving mov in y direction like this and let’s create two more this side also shift plus d again and moving in y direction and now the last one shift plus d and let’s move it in y direction again so now we have five duplicates of this U spere which have the same material that is the material with the name material. 001 so all of them assign the same material and so they showing the same red color but suppose you want all these uis speres to have the same material but different colors meaning that the metallic the roughness and all the other things should be same but only the color should be different and for this you can use the object info node so to add the object info node I’ll go to the shade editor press shift plus a go to input and select the object info let’s place it here and here you can see that this object info node has six options of output and in this chapter we’ll be covering these two options because they are the most commonly used and currently we’ll be starting with this random output option so this random output option basically assigns random colors to your object like one of them will be blue colored one of them will be yellow colored and all of them will still have the same material that is the material1 see the material is identified not only by its color but also by its metallic nature or the roughness and all the other things like emission also for example if I increase the metallic nature you will notice that all these UV spheres now look very shiny and have a metallic surface but to give them different colors I’ll be using this object info node and to set those different colors I’ll be using a color Ram so I’ll press shift plus a go to converter and select the color Ram let’s place it here now I’ll take this object info note and move it here and since there are five different hu spheres we have to create five different colors but currently there are only two pointers by default in the color ramp one is this black colored and the second one is this white colored to add new pointers click on this plus icon here now there are three pointers and I’ll add two more and now we have five pointers and I’ll change their position so that they look equally placed away from each other so I’ll place this one here and I’ll take this third pointer and adjust it in the middle and you can even change the position from this POS option which stands for the position so if I select this and to place it in the middle I’ll type 0.5 and now it’s in the middle similarly I’ll also select this one and I’ll set the position at 0.75 now I’ll select the second pointer here and change its position to 0.25 now they’re perfectly placed away from each other at equal distances and to set different colors I’ll select the first pointer here click on this black area to change the color and we’ll increase the brightness with the help of this brightness slider now suppose I set the first color to blue color and to see the changes here I’ll go to the object info take this random socket and connect it to the factor and in the color Ram go to the color socket and connect it to the base color it appears like this because one of the pointers is blue colored while the others are either gray or white colored but let’s first set different colors on each pointer so I’ll select the second pointer here go to the color menu increase the brightness and let’s change this color to green color similarly I’ll select the third pointer and let’s also change its color by going here and I’ll increase its brightness again and let’s change it to red color similarly with the fourth pointer and I’ll change its color to Yellow so I’ll take this to the yellow color similarly with the last one I’ll go to this color option and let’s change it to pink color now it appears like this because the colors at different pointers in the color Ram are not constant they are blending with each other and to make them constant click on this drop down menu where it is written linear and select the constant and now you can see here that these UV spares are having different colors except for these two UV spares which are having blue color and that’s because we have selected the random output here which means that it will randomly assign these colors to any UV spheres and in any number meaning that the UV spheres will have random colors and some of them might have some common color as well and you can even adjust these Colors by moving these pointers in different directions like when I just move this last pointer then the color of this UV sphere changed from yellow to Pink and that’s how the random output for this object info node works now the second output socket that we’ll discuss here is this object index socket so if I take this and connect it to the factor I see that all of these UV spheres now have the blue color assigned to them and that’s because we have to assign each UV sphere a separate object index number manually in blender for this you have to go to the object properties here then you have to click on the relations and here you have an option of pass index now the pass index means the same as object index so different objects can have different pass index values and based on these values they will be assigned different colors here so suppose I take the first one and change the pass index value to one then I see a color change here but we’ll observe it later on first I’ll select the second one and let’s change the value to two similarly the third one and let’s change the value to three again fourth one we’ll assign the value four and fifth one we’ll assign the value of five now all of them are having the same color that is the pink color and the reason for this is that the object info transfers the value to the color ramp in between 0o and one only but right now we have set value in the pass index or the the object index which is greater than one so it is restricting all the values to a value of one meaning that the object info is sending the output that all of these UV spheres have the object index value of one and not the respective values and since the color ramp also works from 0 to 1 where we have assigned the blue color to zero and it gradually increases here and at the position of one we have this pink color and as a result all these UV spheres now have the pink color assigned to fix this we need to add a new node here which is the math node so basically I’ll use the math node to change the output that is generating from the object info node and to see how this works I’ll press shift plus a go to converter and select the math now I’ll place it in between both these nodes and left click to finalize and now they connected together since I need to reduce their value from numbers like 1 2 3 4 5 to a value between 0 to 1 I need to divide them so I’ll go to this drop down menu and here you have lots of functions that we’ll discuss in this course in the future chapters but right now we’ll select the divide and in the value option you have to enter the number of UV spheres in your scene since we have five objects so I’ll enter five and press enter and here you see that you have objects with five different colors with the same material assigned to them and this is the use of this object index socket in the object info node so whenever you are modeling something where you have a large number of objects which need to have material with same roughness or the same metallic nature or basically the same material but you want them to have different colors then you can use this object info node to assign them some random colors so this was all in the object info node although this was a very short chapter but it’s one of those powerful tools which you must know while learning blender and so this brings us to the end of this chapter [Music] till now in this course we have understood about the blender interface all the modeling Tools in blender and we even discussed about all the modifiers in complete detail and in the recent chapters we explored the note components tried to create some textures and even understood about the working of some node systems and now we are ready to create our own materials with all this knowledge and so in this chapter we’ll begin with understanding the basic shaders and we’ll be creating these materials in blender now before starting with the creation of our materials there’s important thing to discuss with you which is also the first topic of our chapter and it is the node Wrangler add-on so the node Wrangler provides various tools that will help you to work with nodes quickly and efficiently but to use it we have to enable it from the blender preferences so click on the edit menu on the top and select the preferences now here in the blender preferences you have so many options but we’ll select the add-ons and we have to search for the node Wrangler so I’ll go to the search bar and type node and here on the third number you have the node Wrangler add-on to enable it you have to check this option and now the node Wrangler add-on is enabled so I’ll close this blender preferences now and now to see how exactly this node Wrangler add-on helps us we have to give it a material and for this we need to add a Shader editor here so I’ll take my cursor over here right click and select horizontal split let’s take our cursor over here and left click to split the area now to change this into the Shader editor click on this icon and select the Shader editor now we have the default material assigned to our Cube for example if I want to add some image texture to my Cube then one way to do this is to go to to the shade editor press shift plus a then you can go to the texture to add the image texture and suppose you want to rotate or scale your texture then you would need a vector mapping and also you would have to add an input node which is a texture coordinate but you don’t have to do all this if you have the node triangular turned on which means that if I select the principal bstf alone and press cr+ T then it would generate all the notes that are required for image texture so instead of adding each one separately you can use this shortcut of control+ P to add the entire node system for image texture and this is one of the US es of the node dangler add-on now before making our first basic Shader we need to do some changes the first thing is that we’ll delete this default Cube by pressing X on the keyboard and let’s add a UV sphere so in the add menu and in the mesh I’ll select the UV sphere let’s move it upwards in the Z Direction like this and left click to finalize right click and apply the shades smoth and now we need to add a plane below the UV sphere which will basically become the base so I’ll press shift plus a go to mesh and select the plane to adjust it I’ll tab into the edit mode now we’ll go to the top Q by pressing seven on the numpad and we should scale this up in the y direction for this press s and then Y and scale it up like this left click to finalize let’s also scale it up in the X Direction by pressing s and then X and scale it up like this and left click to finalize and now our scene looks like this but we would also need a face at the background and for this I’ll go to the edge select mode by pressing two then I’ll select this Edge and to make a face at the background we need to extrude it up in the Z Direction so I’ll press e and z to move it up in the Z Direction and left click to finalize now it looks like this to make it look realistic we should change the angle here to something like a curved angle for this we’ll use the bevel tool on this Edge so with this Edge selected Press ctrl+ B move the cursor slightly away and to increase the number of segments you can use your scroll wheel so let’s add some more segments and left click to finalize and now it has a perfectly curved angle and now we can come out of the edit mode by pressing the T key again so if I go to the camera view by pressing the zero on the numpad it seems that we have toed adjust our camera position to do this press n to open the properties toolbar click on The View option and select the lock camera to view we learned about using this in our previous chapters so if you haven’t watched them yet you can check the link in the pin comment now to move my camera view I’ll hold down the middle Mouse button and if I drag it then the position of this camera would change so I’ll keep it here to move it upwards I’ll hold the shift key and the middle Mouse button and move it up like this now I’ll adjust it in such a way that we have the scene of this UV sphere with the base and the background in front of the camera view so this view looks perfect and I’ll finalize it so I’ll uncheck the lock camera to view option and to make it perfectly align with the object and the entire scene click on this item option here then select the camera you can select the camera from the scene collection here also and here you can see that you have the location and rotation of this camera so here the location in the X direction is very near to zero and to make it perfectly aligned with the object and the scene I’ll set it to exact zero now I can use the location in the y- AIS so I’ll adjust it here similarly you can use the location in The Zed axis to move upwards or downwards so I’ll set it here now in the rotation part the rotation in the x is set to 75 but to make it perfectly aligned we’ll change it to 90° and press enter now we’ll change the location in the Z AIS with this option and I’ll reduce it and I’ll finalize this one now here the rotation in the y direction is very very close to zero so I’ll change it to zero and press enter also in the Zed axis the rotation is very close to zero so I click on it and enter the zero value so the main main thing here is to keep the rotation value at either 90° or 0° and then you can adjust the location of your camera using the Y and the Z axis like this so here I have finalized this position of my camera now to prevent your camera from being accidentally moved or rotated at some angle you can lock these values here to do this click on this lock icon here and now the location of xaxis is locked at 0 m I’ll also do this with the other parameters like the location in all other axis and also the rotation so now with the camera selected if I press G and try to move it you will notice that nothing happens that’s because we have locked the editing of the location of our camera so basically the camera is now locked in our scene similarly I’ll also select this UV sphere and we lock its transformation from here as well so we’ll click on this lock icon to lock the editing of the location similarly for the rotation also and for the scale value as well also we’ll select the plane at the back and we’ll also lock its transformation and yes to apply lock on all these values together you can press the left Mouse button and drag your mouse like this now all the transformations are locked for all our objects except the light in our scene and if you look closely then you will see these straight lines at the back which are appearing on this plain object to fix this with the plane selected click right Mouse button and select shade Smooth by angle and now it appears smooth and now we can go to the render view to see how it looks so I’ll click on this icon here and here we have the rendered view of our object but currently it’s showing only the scene lights and that’s why it appears like this but blender also have some default hdris which you can access by clicking on this drop down menu and unchecking the scene World option and to change the hdri you need to click here and here you have different type of hdis and to know about each hdri you can simply clip your cursor over it and it will display you the name of that hdri this one is named night. exr meaning that if I apply it then it will give me a lighting setup that you would expect to see if you kept your object somewhere outside during the night time similarly there are others also like this one is the interior Studio lighting this one is the forest lighting currently I think that we should work with the interior lighting setup so I’ll select the fourth one and this one looks perfect for our seam and now is the time to adjust the lighting so if I zoom out and select the lamp here with a left Mouse button click I can move it by pressing the G key and you will see the influence of this light on your object and the surroundings as well so I think that we should place it here so I left click to finalize its position and to get a better view of its location you can go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and now if I’ll move it then the light would move only in the X and Y axis so we’ll keep it here in front of the UV sphere and left click to finalize the position and to add some more lights I’ll create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and I’ll place it here left click to finalize the position and let’s go back to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad I’ll zoom in to adjust the view and we can even change the color of these lights for example if I select the light here by left clicking on it and if I click on this green light icon here I have the properties that I can change for this light so if I go to the color option and change it to something like pink you will notice the reflection of some pink light on this side of the UV sphere and right now the render engine is set to Eevee by default to change it to Cycles go to the render properties here click on EV and from this top down menu you can choose the Cycles Render engine and for a better rendering do make sure that this D noisy option is turned on in the viewport as well as in the render and now we’ll give a simple material to this background so I’ll select this plain background go to the Shad editor and click on new material and I think that the color of this background should be a little dark so I’ll go to the base color and let’s turn this into gray color for this I’ll take this brightness slider and bring it down like this this much looks perfect and also you have various options like metallic strength and roughness so we’ll increase the roughness to around 0.9 so that the surface of the background is completely rough and right now you can see that the area which is outside the camera region is also being showed to us in the viewport and it’s always better to hide this area and the biggest advantage of doing this is that you would be saving some of your rent time while being in this 3D viewport and to do this you have to select your camera click on this camera icon to edit the properties go to the viewport display option here you have an option of passive part out and if I increase it to one then now we’ll see only the area that we have to render and not the surroundings also one more thing that we need to do is to select this UV sphere and if I tap to the edit mode and press one for the vortex select mode then you can see that the number of vertices on this UV sphere are very small in number and to make better models with nice shaders and materials you should have a model with high number of vertices for this I’ll go back to the object mode and we’ll apply the subdivision modifier over it so I’ll go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate we can find the subdivision surface and you can even save this as your default startup file meaning that whenever you will open blender you will have your Shader editor here and a 3D viewport here with this UV sphere and a background at the back along with the entire lighting system that we having right now basically everything that you can see in your blender file right right now will be added to your new file by default whenever you open blender and for all our upcoming chapters related to materials textures and notes we’ll be starting with this layout or the interface only so to save this as the startup file click on the file option at the top go to defaults and here you have the option of save startup file so I’ll click on it and then it will ask for a confirmation to save the startup file so I’ll click on it again and now the startup file is saved it might have asked you to save or to name your file if you didn’t save your file before so now whenever you you open a new file in blender you will see this layout by default in your blender scene and now the next topic for today’s chapter is creating a material Library so with this UV sphere selected I’ll go to the shade editor and click on new material now we have the default material applied to our UV sphere and now let’s explore the various options in the principal bsdf the first option that you have here is the metallic strength so if I increase it to its maximum value of one you will see that the object’s material now has a very highly metallic look meaning that its surface is now very shiny and reflecting and the second option here is the roughness so if I reduce the roughness to its minimum value of zero you will see that the object surface of the material is now highly smooth that’s because we have reduced the roughness to zero so basically metallic strength would control how shiny and reflecting your object surface is and the roughness would control how smooth your object looks lower the roughness more smooth the object will be and higher the roughness value lesser will be the smoothness of the object surface and you can see here that it no longer even looks like a metal it simply looks like a rough ball with no smoothness at all and to make this material look like a realistic metal you should keep the roughness to somewhere around 0.3 or 0.4 so let’s keep it to a value of 0.35 and now it looks like a realistic metal and always remember that if your PC is not too fast then regularly save your file by pressing cr+ s so that you don’t lose your work due to some crash or any other error because right now we are in the render View and moreover we have turned on the cycle surrender engine and the cycle surrender engine uses more power and memory to create the renders but one thing that you can change if you’re having a lowend PC is the sample number basically when I change my view you can see some sample numbers here basically a high number of samples means a better quality but with slower render times and so it also takes more memory and power so if you’re having a low end PC and you want to reduce the number of samples go to the render properties here and from here you can decrease the number of samples in the 3D view Port so you can keep it to a lower number like 128 or anything like even 100 or 50 would work fine but these are the number of samples that you will see while you are in the 3D viewport only but when you finally render your image it will still have a high number of samples and to reduce those samples you can go to the render option here and here you have the option of Maximum samples by default it is set to 496 but you can lower it to a value near 100 or 200 if you’re working on some simple projects and right now I’ll be keeping them to the default value and now coming back to the materials we’ll try to create the Chrome material in blender so first I’ll change the name of this material by clicking here and I’ll type Chrome now to make the Chrome material I have to reduce the roughness to a very low value but it should not be zero because that would make it unrealistic so let’s reduce it to a value of something like 0.05 and now it looks like this and now I can save this material by creating a material library in blender and in order to do this you have to go to the edit option click on preferences and now from this list you have to select the file paths and here you have an option of asset libraries and this is where you will be sa saving all the materials that you create so that you can use it even in some other blender files and here you can set the path of that file so if I click on this folder icon here then you can browse all your files and folders here and select a particular location where you can create a folder to save all the materials now when you have selected that location and you want to create a new folder click on this icon and I’ll change the name to materials and press enter now click on accept and again click on accept now you will have the New Path assigned to your asset libraries and if I close this and if you want to save the material in that folder go to this file option click on save as browse that particular location where the folder is saved and I’ll open the materials folder and from here I can change the name of this file and I’ll name it material 1 m81 and click on save as now we have saved the file at that location but to save this chrome material in our asset Library we have to go to this scene collection here click on the drop- down then you will see that there are two options one is sphere and other is modifiers and if I select the spere option and click on this drop drop down here you have the Chrome material saved so if I click on it and then right click here you have an option of Mark as asset so if I select this you will see this icon of a stack of books appearing along the material name which means that this material is now saved in our asset library and to check this we’ll change this Shader editor into the asset browser to do this click on this icon here and here in the data you have the option of asset browser so if I select this you will see some default assets added to your asset library and one of them is this scrome home material that we just saved so whenever you are working on a blender file and you want your object to have this specific material then you can simply open this asset browser select this chrome material and by left clicking on it and dragging like this you can assign it to your object right now our UV sare was already having this material so you can’t see the changes but if I left click and drag it to the background then you can see that the background material has also changed to the Chrome material for now I’ll press crl plus Z to undo and this is how you use the asset library in blender it’s a really very useful thing if you work on big projects and you want the same materials or some same Assets in more than one scene and to see only those assets or materials that you have yourself added to the asset Library click on this drop down menu where it’s written all and select the user Library here you will see only those assets and materials which you created on your own and saved them in the asset browser right now we have saved only the Chrome material so it’s showing the Chrome material here and now the next topic for today’s chapter is creating some more metallic material just now we created this chrome material and now we’ll be learning about creation of some more metallic materials for this I’ll change this into the shade editor Again by clicking on this icon and select the Shader editor now this UV sphere has this chrome material assigned to it but to create more materials I will have to create a duplicate of this UV sphere so I’ll select this press shift plus d and right click to cancel the movement now you can see here in the scene collection that you have this spere and this is the duplicate that is created for now I will hide this previous spere by clicking on this I icon and here we have the duplicate UV sphere in our scene to give it a new material we first have to remove the existing Chrome material to do this click on this cross icon and now click on the new material and here in the principal bsdf if I increase the metallic strength to its maximum value of one and reduce the roughness slightly then you can see here that the object surface has a material which is similar to that of a stainless steel and here you have some more options like the subsurface transmission specular so if I select the specular here you will find the anisotropic option and if I increase it to its maximum value of one you will notice some changes here it is basically stretching the highlights or the reflections on your object surface or we can also say that it is adding a brush effect on the surface of the object you might have seen a brushed aluminium surface and this material surface looks very much similar to it and here you have this anisotropic rotation option so if I change this you will notice that this anisotropic effect is now being rotated on the object surface so if I finalize it here you can see that this pink highlight here are due to the pink light that we added in our scene and these white highlights are due to the Reflection from the white light that we added in this direction also right now the surface is slightly more reflecting and smooth and to reduce this I’ll go to the roughness and increase it let’s keep it to a

    value of something around 0.25 and now it kind of looks like a brushed metal or brushed aluminium so now we can save this material also in the asset library for this I’ll go to the Shader editor then we’ll change the name from here and let’s rename it to brushed aluminium and now if I go go to the scene collection and click on the drop- down menu of the selected UV spere and then if I click here then we can find the brushed aluminium in this list and if I select it and right click we have this option of Mark as asset so I’ll click on it and now this brushed aluminium material is saved in our asset library to view the asset browser click on this icon and from this list you can select the asset browser now here the user library is selected and you can see that we now have two different materials in our asset library or the material Library one of them is the Chrome metal and the other one is the brushed aluminum so if I take this chrome material left click and drag it on my UV sphere then the UV sphere will get assigned the Chrome metal similarly if I left click on the brush aluminium and drag it on the UV sphere it will get assigned the material of the brush aluminium and now to create another material I’ll turn this into the shade editor Again by clicking on this icon and selecting the Shader editor now I’ll select this UV sphere and we’ll create a duplicate of it and right click to restrict the movement now we’ll go to the scene collection this is the hidden sphere which we use for creating the Chrome material and to hide these things you can click on this drop down arrow similarly this is the second UV sphere which we use for creating the brushed aluminium material and we’ll hike this one also so I’ll click on this I and to collapse this I’ll click on this drop down arrow now this third sphere that is the sphere. 002 will be used to create the third material of this chapter for this first I’ll remove this material from it by clicking on this cross icon and we’ll give it a new material and again we’ll be creating a different type of metal so we’ll take the metallic strength to its maximum value of one and by default the color of our metal is white and to change this I’ll go to the base color and this time I’ll change it to gray color so for this I’ll use this brightness slider and bring it down and this much looks good so I’ll finalize it and to give it a better look I’ll reduce the roughness from here and now it looks perfect and finally it looks like a dark metal also if you want to make it even more darker you can go to the base color and further reduce the brightness from here but I think that I should keep it somewhere in the middle of the brightness slider and this much looks good and now let’s rename this material and I’ll name it as dark gray and press enter and now to save this material in the asset Library go to the scene collection click on this drop- down arrow then click here on the drop- down arrow and here you have the material of the dark gray metal I think that we should change the name to dark gray metal instead of dark gray so one way is to go over here left click and then change the name but you can also do it in the scene collection here for this I’ll double click and now you can edit the name from here so I’ll type metal and press enter to confirm now to save this material in the asset library right click and select the mark As asset and to view the asset browser here click on this icon and select the asset browser and it’s showing only these two materials because it is not refreshed and to refresh the browser click on this refresh icon and now you can see that you have all the three materials in your asset Library this one is the dark gray metal this one is the brushed aluminium and this one is the Chrome metal and now we’ll be creating another material which is the gold metal to do this I’ll go back to the Shad editor and now we have to create a duplicate of this UV sphere so I’ll select it shift d to create duplicate right click to cancel the movement and to hide the previous UV sphere I’ll go to the scene collection and click on this I and let’s collapse this by clicking on this drop- down arrow button and to give it a new material I’ll first remove the existing material and click on the new button here now the gold metal is very metallic and shiny as a result I’ll take the metallic value to the maximum value of one and to make it shiny I have to reduce the roughness to a very low value currently it’s set at 0.5 but let’s reduce it to a value of somewhere around 0.1 now to set the gold color one way is to go to the base color and change it to something like yellow or orange and it might even work in most of the cases but if you are very specific about the gold material then you can see that you have some options here this one is the RGB where you can influence the color by adjusting the red color and the green color similarly the blue color so by increasing or decreasing these values you can create different types of colors then the second one is the HSV which is the default one and the third one is the HX which uses the hexadecimal values to set your colors so every color has an HX value assigned to it and to know the heex value of gold you can search it up on Google and when I searched for it it showed me this value D4 af37 so I’ll type it here D4 af37 and press enter and now this material has the perfect gold color in fact you can use this for any kind of material or any kind of metal that you are making in blender you just type the metal name on Google and add H EX in front of it and then you will get the color code or the hexadecimal value of that particular color or the metal and now let’s change the name of this material to Gold so I’ll type gold and press enter now to save this in the asset of the material Library I’ll go to the scene collection again click on this drop down arrow then click here and here here you have the gold material so after selecting it if I right click and go to the mark As asset option then this gold material is now saved in the asset library to view the asset browser here click on this icon and select the asset browser now we’ll refresh it and here we have all the four materials that we have made till now the first material that we created in this chapter was this chrome metal the second one was this brushed aluminium the third one that we created was this dark gray metal and the fourth metal that we created just now was this gold metal and now it’s the time to move to the last topic for this chapter which is creating gloss based materials so now we’ll change this to the Shader editor again click on this icon and select the Shader editor now I’ll select this UV sphere and we’ll create a duplicate of it to create the glossy material so I’ll press shift plus b and then right click then I’ll go to the scene collection here and I’ll hide the UV sphere which was used to create the gold material and let’s also collapse this by clicking on this down arrow and this one also Now to create the glossy material on this UV sphere first I need to remove this gold material so click on this cross icon and to give it a new material click on the new button and now we have the default material assigned to UV spere now the most important thing while creating glossy materials is that the roughness of this material is completely zero so let’s go to the Shader editor and in the principal bsdf I’ll reduce the roughness to zero and now if you look at the UV sphere its surface is very shiny and that’s a characteristic of glossy materials and to change its color I’ll go to the base color and let’s change this to blue color and now it looks like this and it’s not necessary that you have to give only blue color to it you can assign any color of your choice to this material now one of the most important things to notice here is that the surface of this UV sphere is very reflecting and the reason for this is that I’ve reduced the roughness to zero however this reflecting nature is different from that of a metal suppose I go to the metallic property and increase it to its maximum value you can see here that this material is also reflecting but it’s different from a glossy materials it’s showing the complete reflection on the surface but if I reduce the value to create a glossy material then you will still notice some Reflections and some lights but you can’t completely see them on the surface and that’s what make glossy based materials different from metals and now this blue glossy material looks ready and you can even try different colors from here right now it’s set to a blue color but you can even create different materials by changing the colors from here like right now it looks like a blend of yellow and red color and if I change it to green color it looks like this so you can make any number of materials with the same properties of roughness metallic and other things and just simply by changing the colors so for this one I’ll set the color to green and now we can save this in our asset library for this I’ll go to the scene collection click on this Arrow then click here and here is our material so I’ll double click on it to change the name and we’ll rename it as glossy green and press enter to rename now to save this in our asset Library we have to right click and select Mark as asset and now let’s view it in our asset browser so I’ll click on this icon go to asset browser and I’ll refresh by clicking on this icon and here we have the glossy green material so now we have added these five materials in our asset or the materials library and now to manipulate the looks of your glossy material you can use the roughness of the principle bsdf so let’s try to create a new material which will also be glossy but with a different roughness for this click on this icon and select the Shader editor now I have to create a new duplicate so I’ll select this press shift plus d and right click now in the scene collection if I scroll down here we have the new sphere let’s also collapse this by clicking on this icon and I’ll hide the previous UV sphere so on this UV sphere we have this glossy green material applied and instead of creating a new material again and doing all these settings we can even create a duplicate of it and do the changes on that material and to do this click on this icon here which is the new material icon and now you can see here that the name of this material is glossy green1 which means that it has created a duplicate of the previous material and now if I go to the roughness and increase it slightly you will notice that the look of your material has changed it’s still looks like a glossy material but the reflections or the highlights on the surface have now reduced and at a roughness value of approximately 0.23 or 0.24 it appears like a painted glossy surface I think that we should round off the roughness to 0.25 for a better look and now it looks perfect so I’ll change its name from here let’s remove this 001 at the end and I’ll type painted and press enter to finalize now this is the glossy green painted material and we’ll save this in the material library for this go to the scene collection click on this Arrow then click here and here you have the glossy green painted material so I’ll click on it right click and then Mark as asset to open the asset browser click on this icon and select the asset browser and if I refresh so one of these materials is the glossy green and the other one is the glossy green painted so this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in the previous chapter we begin with the Practical usage of materials textures and nodes in blender and and we even begin the creation of some realistic materials in blender and in this chapter we’ll take a step ahead and we’ll be creating some more materials like the clear coat Shader glass Shader the candle emission Shader a simple cloth Shader and a lot more so let’s begin with it here we have this layout as the default because in the previous chapter that is the chapter number 21 we created this layout for creation of materials and made it the default layout which will always appear whenever we open a new file and the first topic for today’s chapter is creating a simple clear coat Shader so the first thing is what exactly is clear coat Shader clear coat means a transparent and a glossy layer of paint which is applied over a surface and this coating provides hardness and resistance to various chemicals and we’ll be making this clear coat Shader in blender so first let’s turn on the render view by clicking on this icon and to check the render engine click on this icon and here it is set as Cycles Render engine so to create a new material we go to the shade editor click on the new button and here we have the default principal bsdf applied to the UV spere now the clear coat material show a lot of reflection on its surface and we explored in the previous chapter that the reflection or the highlights on the surface are controlled with this roughness value so if I need to increase the reflections I will have to reduce this roughness value from here and here you can see that our UV sphere is showing some reflections of these lights and to view it properly let’s change the base color by clicking here and we should change it to a dark color so I think we should change it to purple this one looks good and now these highlights or the reflections are clearly visible on the surface and if you want to increase the reflections even more then you can reduce the roughness value to exact zero and now the surface is 100% reflecting all the light that is falling on it let’s also go to the base color and to make it darker we can use this brightness slider from here so if I reduce this you can see here that the uis sphere is now colored as dark purple the reason for doing this is that the reflections are more clearly visible on a dark colored object as compared to light colors like white or yellow so we needed a dark color here and we used the dark purple color on the surface and now to make it look like a clear coat or a painted surface go down in the principal bstf and here you have the option of coat so if I select this then here you have the option of weight and this basically controls the intensity of the clear coat or the paint that will be applied to your object so if I increase it to its maximum value of one it will basically add a layer of paint or a coating on your object surface and suppose you want to make the Surface look like it has been recently painted meaning that the surface should be a little wet the paint should be visible on it and to do this we have to use a texture which is the noise texture along with a bump node for this go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in the texture select the noise texture let’s place it here and to add the bump node press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump let’s place it here now now to connect them together take this Factor socket and connect it to the height and take this normal socket and connect it to the normal here and now the surface looks as if it has been recently painted but right now it looks unrealistic because the strength of this bump node is very high and if I reduce this you will notice that it now looks realistic it looks as if a purple colored paint is applied on this UV sphere and this is the clear code material or the clear code Shader and now it’s the time to save this clear code Shader in our asset or the material library that we created in the last chapter and for this we need to save this file first so I’ll press crl + S and we’ll have to save this file in the same folder where we saved our last file because only then it will save our materials in the material Library so I’ll save this with the name M82 do blend and and I’ll click on Save blender file now to save this material first let’s rename it from here and I’ll rename it as clear Cod and press enter now we’ll go to the scene collection click on this drop- down arrow then click here and here you will find the clear coat material so I’ll select this right click and now you will find the option of Mark as asset and if I select this then this clear coat Shader or the clear coat material will now be saved in the asset or the material library and we can even view it in this blender file for this click on this icon and here you have the option of the assess browser this will show you all the ass sets that are saved in your blender file including the default ones and also the ones that you created on your own to view only those materials that we created go to this drop down menu and select the user library now these are all the materials that we have created so far in this course in this chapter we created this clear quat material and all the others were created in the chapter number 21 so now this material is saved in the asset library and now we’ll be creating some more materials to add here and the next topic for this chapter is creating a simple class Shader for this I’ll change this P to the Shader editor click on this icon and select the Shader editor so to create a glass material we first need to remove this material that is applied on the UV sphere so I’ll select this and we’ll create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and right click now in the scene collection I’ll select the previous UV sphere and we’ll hide it by clicking on this I let’s collapse this menu by clicking on this drop down arrow then I’ll select this UV sphere and to remove this material click on this cross icon the reason for creating a duplicate was that we wanted to have both the materials in our blender file the clear coat Shader that we just made which is now saved in this hidden sphere and also the glass Shader that we are creating right now so to begin with we’ll go to the shade editor click on this new button and here we have the default material applied to this UV sphere now the most basic characteristic that sets the glass Shader apart from all the other materials is the transmission so in the principal bsdf if I select the transmission we have this weight option here and if I increase it to its maximum value you can see here that the object looks like this right now it does not look like a real glass because it has a lot of roughness on its surface and as a result we can’t see through the glass right now to fix this go to the roughness option here and reduce it to zero so now you can see through this UV Sphere for example if I select this plain background and change its color from the principal bstf like if I change it to blue color you can clearly see the blue background through the UV sphere but right now I’ll Undo It by pressing cr+ Z and so our glass Shader is now ready but if you want to give it a more realistic look then instead of keeping the roughness value to exact zero you can slightly increase it to a very low value like 0.01 or 0.02 something near it and this will add a slight roughness to your object which will give it a realistic look and one more important thing to note here is that we are right now in the cycle surender engine and with this node system you will get a glass Shader like this only in the cycle surrender engine and not in the EV so do ensure that you have selected the Cycles in the render properties and now to save this material I’ll go to the shade editor click here to rename and I’ll type glass press enter to confirm now go to the scene collection and with this sphere selected click on this drop down menu then click here and here you have the glass material saved so I’ll select this right click and select the mark As asset option now this asset is saved in our material or the asset library to open the asset browser click on this icon and go to the asset browser and here we have the glass material saved and to see how it will look on a different object I’ll select this UV sphere and press h to hide it and let’s add a suzan or the monkey model by pressing shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey let’s move it upwards by pressing G and then Z to move it in Z Direction and left click to fin life before applying the material I’ll right click and shade smooth and let’s also apply a subdivision modifier by going to the modifier properties then add modifier and select generate here you will find the subdivision surface modifier and now if I select this glass material left click drag it and place it on the suzan model then now this model is having the glass material on its surface so whenever you’re working on a project where you need a glass material to be applied on any object you can simply go to the material Library select this glass Shader and apply on that object and now the third topic of our chapter is to create the model of a candle and give it some material and to begin with it I’ll delete the suzan model by pressing X let’s also bring the Shad editor here by clicking on this icon and selecting the Shader editor and now to begin with the actual modeling I need to add a cube in my scene so I’ll press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube so here we have the cube added in the scene and this will be the base on the candle will be placed but I think that we need to move it down by pressing G and then Zed and left click to finalize the position and to get a better view let’s also move it in the y direction towards the camera so I’ll press G and then Y and let’s bring it forward in the Y Direction Let’s also bring it slightly upwards by pressing G and z and this looks perfect now and to give it some material I’ll go to the shade editor click on this new button and let’s change the base color from here and let’s change it to yellow color and now our base for the candle looks perfect now to place the candle on the top of this base we first need to place our 3D cursor here to do this hold on the shift key and right click at the top of the base and now we have the 3D cursor placed on the top of the cube Now to create the candle we’ll be using a cylinder so I’ll press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cylinder now let’s tab into the edit mode and we need to scale it down so I’ll press s and let’s scale it down like this and left click to finalize let’s also move it upwards in the Z Direction now we need to scale it up in the Z direction also and this much looks perfect so I left click to finalize so so the model of our candle looks like this right now but I think that we need to scale it down in the X and Y directions for this I’ll press s and because we only need to scale down in X and Y directions and not in the Zed Direction so I’ll press shift and Zed and now I can scale down in the X and Y Direction simultanously now it looks perfect so I left click to finalize and I’ll go back to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad let’s move it downwards by pressing G and then Z and it looks like this now and now to make it look like a real candle we need to go to the face select mode by pressing and also I think that we should go to the solid mode instead of the render view since we are modeling this candle right now so click on this icon to go back to the solid mode and now to model the candle select this top face press I to insert and let’s insert the face this much and left click to finalize and if you want to change the size of this face you can press s to scale it up or scale it down but I think that this much should work so I left click to finalize it and what I’m going to do with this face is that I’ll extrude it in the Z Direction let’s move it downwards and left click to finalize now I insert this face again by pressing I and left click to finalize and the reason for doing all this is that we want to make the wick of the candle and to do that we now have to extrude this phase so press e and let’s move it upwards in the Z Direction and left click to finalize now we’ll scale this down like this now let’s insert it one more time by pressing I and taking the cursor towards the candle now we’ll be making this very small because this is going to be the base of the candle swick so I think this much should be fine so I left click to finalize this and now to make the wick we need to extrude this pH for this press e and move it upwards and left click to finalize but one problem with this is that the wick is completely straight but in reality it does not look like this because it is slightly bending or slightly curved and to make it appear slightly bending we’ll first move this down by pressing G and then Zed like this and left click to finalize now we’ll rotate this pH by pressing R and let’s rotate it a little bit like this and left click to finalize now we’ll extrude again and left click now you can see here that the wick of the candle is now being bent like this similarly we’ll again extrude it two to three times by first rotating it a little bit left clicking and then pressing e to extrude it and left click again now this looks good to make it look better I’ll scale down this pH by pressing s and let’s scale it down like this and left click to finalize and now our candle looks like this we’ll go back to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad now you might have noticed that in real life the melted wax of the candle looks like this and to create this thing in our candle model we need to view the top face of this candle model and with the face select mode enabled we’ll select some random faces from here so with the shift key holded I’ll select some random faces like this but here you can see that the tip of the candle wick is also selected and we do not need that so to deselect it hold down the control key and left click and drag like this now the face at the tip of the candle wick is now deselected so we’ll continue with selecting the random faces here so you can select any random faces that you wish it’s not mandatory to select only those which I’m selecting in my seen right now and now with these faces selected press G and then Zed to move them downwards like this and left click to finalize let’s go back to the camera view by pressing zero and now the model of the candle looks like this to make it look realistic we’ll return back to the object mode and we’ll apply some modifiers we’ll be applying two modifiers the first one is the bevel modifier and the second one is the subdivision modifier so in the modify properties click on ADD modifier then go to generate and select the bevel then again go to the add modifier and in the generate you will find the subdivision surface let’s increase the level view port to two or maybe three and you can also make it more realistic by going to the bevel and increasing the number of segments by default it is set at one but let’s change it to a higher number like three and now it looks like this so if I go to the camera view again then the candle model looks perfect now and now to make the flame of this candle we’ll be adding a UV sphere at this point so let’s first place our 3D cursor here at the tip of the candle wick for this first I’ll zoom in and then hold the shift key and right click here now to add the UV sphere press shift plus a go to mesh and select the UV sphere tab into the edit mode and we should scale it down like this let’s zoom in to get a better View and we would be making a simple flame out of this UV sphere it wouldn’t be very complex but it would be kind of cartoonish and would look very simple and then we’ll be applying our material over it so for this we need to turn on the vertex select mode by pressing one and now to make it shape look like that of a flame we have to select the vortex at the top of the UV sphere so we’ll select this Vortex here and and then turn on the proportional editing from here or you can even use the shortcut which is O and now we’ll move it upwards by pressing G and to see the circle of influence of the proportional editing tool you have to scroll up your middle Mouse wheel or the scroll wheel and here you can see that we have the circle of influence and now if I move it in the Z Direction by pressing the Z key and moving it upwards like this you can see that it now looks like a little droplet or like a flame so we’ll finalize it now with a left Mouse button click let’s go to the camera view Again by pressing zero on the numpad and now it looks like this now we’ll turn off the proportion editing tool press G and then Zed and let’s move it in upwards Direction like this let’s return back to the object mode now and we should now check whether the candle flame is properly placed on the tip of the wick or not from the camera view or the front view it appears perfect let’s also go to the side view by pressing three on the numpad and it looks like this from this view I think that we should move it in y direction by pressing G and then Y and let’s move it like this and left click to finalize let’s also go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and it looks fine from this angle so we’ll go back to the camera view now by pressing zero on the numpad now to make it look smooth right click and select shade smooth and now the modeling of the candle is complete and so we should move to applying the materials now so we’ll go to the render View and currently we have enabled the cycle sender engine so with this flame selected go to the shade editor and press new to give it a default material we’ll change the color of this flame from here let’s set it to yellowish and we should zoom in to view it properly right now it looks kind of orange in color but I think that we should keep the color to Yellow so I’ll again go to the base color and let’s keep it to Yellow now since the candle flame should look like burning or basically emitting light so we have to go to emission here and we need to set the same yellow color to the emission color also and to do this you can basically left click and drag this color and now to drop the color in the emission color simply release the left Mouse button click and now both the base color and the emission color is same to see the emission effect here we need to increase the strength so let’s increase it to a very high value like 40 and to see how it actually looks we need to turn off all the lights in our scene so we’ll go to the scene collection and we have these two lights in our scene right now so we’ll click on this I button and similarly for this one and now there are no lights in our scene and all the brightness is because of this candle flame but yes right now we have a default hdri added in blender which is also contributing to the light in our scene and to disable it click on this drop down here and here you have the option to control its strength so we’ll reduce it to zero or maybe to a slightly higher value like 0.1 or I think that we should lower it down to 0.05 and now it looks like this now most of the light in our scene or to be more precise more than 95% of the light in our seen is coming from the flame of this candle now the candle flame looks perfect but another thing to consider is the material of the wick of the candle we’ll go to the shade editor click on the new button and here you have the default material applied to this candle now we have to go to the base color and change it to complete Black to view it properly let’s try to change the angle because earlier the background was also black so the candle was not visible properly but now from this angle we can clearly distinguish between the candle and the background the next thing to do is that we have to increase the roughness value to its maximum so we’ll increase it to one and we’ll be using this material not for the candle but only for the wick of the candle but because both the candle and the wick are part of the same object both are having this black color to fix this tab into the edit mode and we have to go to the side view by pressing three on the numpad I think that for editing we should increase the strength of the hdri so that all the things are clearly visible so we’ll go to this drop down menu here and let’s increase the strength to something like 0.5 and now we have a better Lighting in our scene so let’s zoom in and now what we are going to do is that we’ll be selecting only the wax part of the candle or basically the main body of the candle and we’ll assign it a different material to do this first enable the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Zed take your mouse cursor over here left click and drag it and if I release the left Mouse button click then the entire candle body except for the wick is now selected and to give it a different material we’ll go to the materials properties click on this plus icon and then click on this assign button now if I go to the object mode you can see here that the candle body is having the white color but the candle wick here is having a slight dark color let’s go back to the camera view now by pressing zero on the numpad and now our candle looks like this now to create the wax material of this candle I’ll select this body and in the Shader editor click on this new material button let’s go to the base color and change it to slight yellow and this looks fine now one of the most important characteristics of the wax material is that it allows some light to pass through its surface that is it shows slight patches on its surface where light is being passed you can see this image of a real candle and how it is allowing some light to pass through it and to create an effect like this in blender you have to go to the principal bstf and here you have the option of subsurface so I’ll select this and to see its effect you have to increase the weight from here so let’s try to increase it and now if I zoom in you will notice that there are some slight red patches here it might not be properly visible from this angle so let’s try to change the angle let’s zoom in a little bit and now if You observe closely then you can see that there are some slight red patches here which are due to this subsurface and now it looks like a real wax material with this the model of a candle is now ready and while creating this candle we basically made three different materials one was this flame material the second one was this Wick material and the third one was this wax material so we’ll now save all of them in the material or the asset Library so first with this wax selected let’s go to the shade editor and from here we’ll change its name let’s change the name to wax now let’s go to the flame material so I’ve selected this flame go to the Shader editor let’s rename it from here and I’ll type flame and press enter to confirm to do the same with the wick material click on this candle object and here in the material properties tab we have two materials one is the material. 003 which is the wick material and the other one is the wax material so we’ll select this black material which is the wick material go to the share editor and let’s rename it to Wick press enter to confirm now to save these materials in the material Library go to the scene collection click on the drop- down arrow of the cylinder then click here and here you have two materials the Vic and the wax material which are assigned to this candle object so I’ll select this Vic material right click and Mark as a set similarly I’ll go to the wax material right click and Mark as a set now for the flame material left click on this flame go to the scene collection and we’ll scroll down click on this drop down arrow and then click here and here you have the flame material so I’ll select this right click and click on Mark as a set now to view the asset library or the material Library here click on this icon and go to asset browser this one is the flame material this one is the wax material and this one is the wick material so we have now saved all these materials in the material library and now it is the time to move to the next topic of this chapter which is creating a simple cloth Shader and for this we’ll save this file and open a new blender file so I’ve created a new blender file here with this layout which we saved as the default layout in the chapter number 21 for all the files and to create the objects for the cloth Shader we basically have to delete all this setup for this press a and X to delete all and now we’ll be adding an icosphere in our scene so I’ll press shift plus a go to mesh and select the icosphere the icosphere is different from the UV sphere because of its structure you can see these pointing vertices at the surface of the icosphere whereas if I add a UV sphere by going to the add menu and in mesh if I select the uis spere and move it in X Direction then you can notice the difference between the two so in in this case we’ll require an icosphere and not the UV sphere so with this selected I’ll press X to delete it let’s select this icosphere now this iOS spere will be used to place our cloth object and to create the clothe object press shift plus a go to mes and add a plane to increase its size let’s tab into the edit mode and press s to increase the size I think around this much size should work fine so I left click to finalize it go back to the object mode and let’s move it upwards by pressing G and then Zed and now we need to subdivide this plane for this right click and subdivide and to increase the number of cuts click on the subdivide menu and we’ll change the number of cuts to somewhere around 50 and let’s get back to the object mode now to make it look like a real clothe we’ll be applying some simulation to it currently in this course we have not understood simulations but it’s basically used for creating stuff like clothes water fire and all the other similar things and to apply these simulations go to the properties editor and here you have this icon of the physics properties here you will find all the simulations that you can apply to your object now there are two objects in our scene This Plane would act as a clothe and it will fall on this icosphere as a result this icosphere would act like a collision object so I’ll select this icosphere go to the physics properties and apply the Collision we’ll be learning all these physics Properties or the simulations in the future chapters of this course as well but right now let’s look at the Collision so here we have applied the Collision physics to this icosphere meaning that it will now become a colliding object and we’ll see its effect later on now I’ll select this plane and to make it the cloth go to the physics properties and select the cloth and right now we’ll keep the default values that are present here we won’t be changing anything first we’ll look at the impact that these default settings would make in our scene but before moving further let’s first save this file so I’ll press crl + S and we’ll save this in the same folder where I saved the previous two files so let’s change the name from here and let’s keep it clo Shader press enter and click on the save blender file now this file is saved and to see how this cloth physics will work go to this animation timeline that is present here and press this button to play the animation or else you can simply press the space bar to view the animation so I’ll press the space bar and this is how the cloth simulation is working this plain object has now turned into a clothes which fell on the icosphere and we created this simple animation from it and to make the Collision look better and more realistic go to the physics properties here and we’ll scroll down and here we have an option of collisions so I’ll select this and if I scroll down again you will find an option of self collisions and if I turn this on and go back to the frame zero by left clicking here and dragging it on the frame zero and now if I play it you will notice that now the cloth and the Collision looks much more realistic than before so the only thing that you should do right now in this physics properties is to turn on the self collisions although everything looks perfect right now but if you look at its geometry the cloth material looks very rough and to fix this simply right click and select shade smooth and now it looks like a real clothe material and to fix these pointing vertices or the edges simply go to the modifier properties here this cloth modifier is appearing because we have applied the cloth simulation to our object but if I go to the add modifier then in the generate I’ll find the subdivision surface so I’ll apply it and now that roughness is completely gone and our cloth objects look perfect now if you want to give it even more realistic look you can simply increase the levels viewport in the subdivision menu right now it is set to one but let’s increase it to two and now the subdivision has increased in the clothe object which makes it look better now everything in this clothe object is perfect right now except for the thickness if you look closely you will notice that our clothe object has no thickness it simply looks like a paper and to give it some thickness we have to apply the solidify modifier so I’ll go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate you will find the solidify modifier and now you can see that some thickness is visible on a cloth material and now our clothe object looks perfect and so it’s the time to give it some material but before that we need to get the lighting set up first for this I’ll press crol + S to save all the changes and now I’ll be opening the same file where we created the candle for for this press crl + O select that file and click on open and here we have the file where we made this candle now I’ll select this candle and with shift key hold it I’ll select this flame press h to hide them now to bring the clothe object and the icosphere in this scene we need to import them but before that let’s place this 3D cursor at the center by pressing shift plus C and now it’s at the world origin to import the clothe material click on this file option and we’ll go to aent always remember that whenever you have to add any object from another blender file you choose the append option whereas if you want to add a 3D model which is downloaded from some website or basically it is not in a blender file but it’s simply a model then you have to use the import option but right now we have the file saved on our system so I use the append option and here we have the close Shader file so I’ll select this click on append button and in this list we’ll go to the collection then I’ll select this collection and click on append we studied about adding different objects from other blender files as well as the 3D models from some external websites in this chapter of this course but currently let’s go to the camera viewer pressing zero on the numpad let’s zoom out now we need to move the camera so that we can view everything properly so I’ll select the camera from the scene collection let’s scroll up and here we have the camera in the chapter number 21 we locked its position but right now we need to change it so I’ll unlock it from here similarly with the rotation also I’ll unlock them and now I can change the position of our camera for this go to the view option and select lock to camera view now if I zoom out the camera view will also change let’s select this Cube here and press X to delete let’s also select this icosphere and with the shift key holded I’ll select this plane and let’s move them upwards by pressing G and then Zed like this and left click to finalize now to get a proper view from the camera we’ll select the camera from the scene collection and to move it I’ll click on this item and from here you can change the location and the rotation of your camera so let’s increase it in the Zed direction to move it upwards now I’ll reduce the rotation in the X Direction Let’s again move it upwards in The Zed AIS and now it looks perfect let’s also turn off the lock camera to view for this go to the view and turn off the lock camera to view now let us zoom in and this is the icosphere object which has the Collision physics applied to it and this is the clothe object now to give it some material first I’ll play the animation by pressing the space bar and press the space bar again to stop it it looks perfect like this and I think that we should move the cloth and the icosphere upwards so that it is completely visible for this with the shift key holded go to the scene collection and select the icosphere now before changing their position there’s one more important thing to do which is to go to the timeline and take the pointer back to the frame one and now to move them together press G and then Z and let’s place them here and now if I play the animation by pressing the space bar we can now see the complete clothe object in our scene now moving to the materials part first let’s turn on the render view by clicking on this icon now to get a better Lighting in my scene I’ll unhide those two lights which we hided while creating the candle for this go to the scene collection and here we have the two lights to unhide them click here similarly with this one also and now we have a proper Lighting in our scene and now to give it some material we’ll first change this to the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader the editor click on this new material button and here we have the default material applied to it so I’ll select this clothe material and we’ll do some changes in the material to see how it looks in our scene so the most basic thing for our cloth is its base color so I’ll go to the principal bstf click on the base color and we can change the color of the clothes from here you can choose any color that you would like to see on your object but in this case I’ll be going for the red color so I’ll select the red color here and a cloth object looks like this now I think that the strength of these lights is very high in our scene so first I’ll select this light go to the object data Properties by clicking here and from the power I can control the strength of this light right now it is set at 1,000 but I think that we should reduce it to 200 wat and press enter similarly with this one also I’ll select this go to the power option and change it to a lower value like 200 and now it looks perfect the red color of our clothes is now clearly visible now as you must have observed almost all the clothes have a rough surface but right now this cloth object looks very smooth so we’ll go to the roughness and increase it to the maximum value that is one or to make it realistic we’ll reduce it to a slightly lower value like 0.95 and press enter to confirm and now it looks like this this will give some roughness to our clothe object and to give it some texture we’ll go to the shade editor press shift plus a go to texture and let’s add a magic texture I’ll place it here and then we’ll add a bump node here so I’ll press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump let’s place it here now select this Factor socket of the magic texture and connect it to the height socket then take this normal socket of the bump node and connect it to the normal of the principal vstf and now you will notice some patterns on your object’s material so if I zoom in to view it properly it appears like this but in real life no cloth has a pattern like this so to adjust this pattern you will go to the magic texture and increase the value of the scale by default it is set to five but let’s increase it to a very high number like 50 and now you get this realistic looking pattern on your object’s material to make it look even more realistic you can further increase the scale so let’s increase it to around 60 and now it looks like this now if I zoom in to view it closely you will will observe that it really looks like a real cloth fabric it has a pretty decent texture on its surface and you can even control the strength of this pattern or this effect from the bump node here so here you have the option of controlling the strength so you can play with different options here try to change the values and you will end up making some different and some new patterns for your clothe object also we’ll try to add a noise texture which will give a slight roughness and realistic look to the clothe material so I’ll press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it here now I’ll take this Factor value and connect it to the height of the bump then I’ll change the scale to a very high value like 50 also I’ll increase the detailing from here to give it a realistic look right now it is set to a value of two but if I increase it to a higher value like 16 and it looks like this now but I think that we should increase the scale even more because right now it’s not looking realistic like in real life you won’t see a material like this so let’s increase the scale to see the changes so I’ll go to the scale option in the noise texture and let’s scale it up to a very high value like 300 or 400 and then press enter and now this is what our material looks like it has a High roughness on its surface which is giving it a very realistic look and all this is because of this noise texture so this Moise texture provided it a very rough look and earlier when we use the magic texture then it give it a specific pattern also I can connect both of them together to see the effect of both the textures on my clothing object for this I’ll select the magic texture and let’s place it here and to connect them together we’ll use the mix node for this press shift plus a and in the color you will find the mix color let’s place it here now take this Factor socket of the noise texture and connect it to the B then take the color socket of the magic texture and connect it to a now to connect the mix node with the rest of the node system we’ll take the result socket and connect it to the height socket of the bump node and now you will notice that our object’s material would show a combination of both these textures that is it will have a realistic looking roughness due to the noise texture and this pattern because of the magic texture and so we have created this simple clothing Shader in our scene let’s also save this material in the material or the asset library that we created for this go to the Shad editor let’s rename it from here and let’s keep its name as red fabric so I’ll enter the name and press enter to confirm then go to the scene collection click on this Arrow then click here and here you will find the red fabric material so I’ll select this then right click and go to the mark As asset option to view the asset browser click on this icon and select the asset browser and here we have the red fabric material saved in our library so till now in these two chapters that is this one and the previous one we created these 12 materials and even saved them here so that we can use them whenever we are done with the modeling of any object and we need to apply some material to it and this also brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in the previous two chapters that is chapter number 21 and 22 we discussed about basic shaders we also learned to create a material library and made a lot of basic materials in blender and from this chapter we’ll be taking a step further as we’ll begin understanding the procedural shaders here we’ll be working more on the textures and combining different types of notes together to get different types of results so let’s begin with it we have this default layout applied to the blender where we have this Shader editor on the top 3D view port at the bottom and a simple setup of a UV sphere and some lighting if you also want to set up the same as the default for your blender file then you should check out the chapter number 21 of this series where we discussed about all this in detail but right now let’s go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad so the first topic of today’s chapter is Shader nodes to understand it if I go to the Shader editor and press shift plus a here you will find a category of nodes which is the Shader and within this category there are a lot of Shader nodes here and in this chapter we’ll be understanding the functioning of each one in detail and for this we’ll turn on the render view first and I have enabled the cycle sender engine by default now I won’t be using this UV sphere right now so I’ll press X to delete it and let’s add the suzan or the monkey model for this press shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey model let’s move it up in the Z Direction by pressing G and then Z and let’s place it here to give it a better look and to make it realistic we’ll be doing two things one is to right click and shade smooth and the other thing is go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and select the gener rate from here we’ll be applying the subdivision surface modifier let’s also increase the levels view port to a higher number like three and now it looks perfect now to give it some material I’ll go to the Shader editor and click on the new button here we have the principal bsdf applied to this monkey object in fact the principal bstf is the most commonly used Shader node in blender even in the basic shaders chapter most of the things that we did were related to principal bstf like changing the color the metallic property from here the roughness and in fact it is a combination of many different Shader notes because if I go to shift plus a and then Shader we find nodes like emission refraction subsurface scattering glass bsdf glossy bsdf translucent bsdf sheen and transparent bsdf and all these are combined and put together in the principal bsdf only for example if I go down I’ll find this emission option and it is the same as the separate emission node that we just saw in the Shader menu similarly the sheen transmission subsurface scattering all of these can be accessed separately by using their respective Shader nodes but blender finds them together in the principal bsdf and this makes the principal bsdf the most important and the most useful Shader node in blender now the next node that we’ll explore is the diffuse bsdf node for this go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to Shader and select the diffuse bsdf let’s place it here now to break the connection between the principal bsdf and the material output hold down the control button right click and drag your cursor like this and now the principal bsdf is removed from a monkey object now I’ll take the socket of the diffused bsdf and connect it to the surface socket of the material output right now it looks the same as what we saw when principal bsdf was connected but here you have the option of the color and if I click on it and change it to blue color then simply the color of the object changes and this is the basic use of the diffus bsdf it does nothing except for giving you the option to change the color of your object and as I already told you a lot of Shader nodes are combined together in the principal bsdf only so even if you have not added this diffuse bsdf you can use the principal bsdf and change the color of your object from the base color option now now the next one on our list is the subsurface cattering so I’ll go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in the Shader here we have the subsurface cattering so I’ll select this and let’s place it here now this subsurface scattering works in the same way as the subsurface option in the principal bsdf we learned about the subsurface scattering in the chapter number 22 of this course where we modeled this candle and created it material with the help of subsurface scattering but to explain it in simple words it is basically a process or a mechanism in which the light passes through or penetrates the surface of some translucent object and it is scattered by interacting with the material to explain it with the help of an example you might have observed that when you keep your hand in front of some light source it looks like this basically the light tries to pass through your hand which is the translucent object in this case and as a result it looks like this and to see its effect here I’ll take this socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output right now we can’t see any effect here and that’s because of two reasons one of them is that the scale value is very less so if I increase it to a value of one we see some lights scattering around the eyes of this monkey object and it is appearing like this because we have added only two lights in our scene one of them is this white light and the other one is this pink light to understand it more deeply I’ll select this light let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and let’s zoom out and I’ll create a duplicate of this light by pressing shift plus d and let’s place it behind the monkey of the suzan model left click to finalize here in the object data properties we can change the color and the intensity of this light so let’s go to the color and I’ll change it to red color let’s also increase the power right now it is set at 1,000 wat but let’s increase it to 5,000 wat now I’ll go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and to see the effect of the subsurface cing I’ll move the light behind the monkey model so with that light selected I’ll press G to move it and if I take it close to the ears of this monkey model you will observe that the model is now acting as a translucent object which is showing the subs scattering effect if you look at the other ear it does not appear to pass any light through it right now but this ear is allowing the light to penetrate through its surface and show the subsurface scattering effect and that’s because we have the subsurface cattering applied to this monkey object in fact to see this effect on the rest of the object apart from this ear you can go to the subsurface cattering and increase the scale from here right now it is set at 1 but if I take it to five then you will begin to see this effect on other parts of this object as well the effect will surely be visible more on this ear because the light is close to it and lesser on the other side and this is the subsurface scattering node but instead of using this node separately you can simply go to the principal bstf and in the subsurface option you can change all these settings which are the same as the settings in this node now the next one that we going to discover is the glossy bsdf so press shift plus a go to Shader and select the glossy bsdf let’s place it here take this socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output so this glossy bsdf is a simple node which is used to control the reflections on your object surface so if I go to the roughness option here and reduce it to zero you will notice that the object surface is now reflecting all the light that is falling on it and if I take the roughness to its maximum value of one it won’t reflect any light that is falling on it and this is the use of the glossy bstf just like the other two nodes this one can also be controlled from the principal bstf because here you have the option of roughness and if you increase or decrease it you will see the same effect which you expect while using the glossy bstf now the next one is the anisotropic bstf earlier in the previous version of blender the anisotropic bstf used to be a separate node but now you can control the inotropy from the glossy bstf also so here you have the option of the inotropy and if I increase it to a higher value like two or three you will notice some changes here so this anisotropy basically creates a brushed effect on your object’s material we learned about this one also in detail in the chapter number 21 of this series where we created this brushed aluminium material let’s return back to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad now before going further I’ll delete the light at the back that we created so I’ll go to the scene collection and select this light. 002 and press X to delete it then I’ll select this monkey model again and now the next one that we’ll discover is the refraction bsdf so press shift plus a go to the Shader and select the refraction bsdf let’s place it here take this bsdf socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output and now we notice some changes on the material of a monkey model now for those of you who don’t know what refraction is it means bending of light in simple words and if I try to change the view you will notice that our monkey object has a material which looks similar to a glass also in the refraction bsdf we have some more options here you have the roughness option which is currently set to zero and that’s why it looks like this but if I increase the roughness to a higher value like 0.4 it looks like this so whenever you want to create a material whose surface is refracting you can add the refraction BDF and change the settings from here now moving to the next node We’ll add the translucent bstf so press shift plus a go to Shader and select the translucent bsdf let’s place it here now take the socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output and to see the effect properly we need to reduce the lighting in our scene so I’ll select this lamp and here in the object properties let’s reduce the power to a lower value like 100 wat similarly with this one also I’ll select this go to the power option and change it to 100 wats now I’ll go to the camera view to see how the object looks so this monkey object now has the translucent bsdf applied to it you must have studied about the difference between transparent and translucent objects in your school basically the transparent objects allow all the light to pass through them and one example of the transparent objects is glass then on the second number there are translucent objects which allow only some light to pass through them and an example of the translucent objects is a stained glass and the third type is opaque objects which are simply those objects object which do not allow any light to pass through them for example a wooden table or a wooden chair so coming back to the translucent bsdf it makes your object looks translucent and to explain it in detail how it works I’ll go to the top queue by pressing seven on the numpad then zoom out and we’ll add some light at the back of the monkey model so I’ll select this light here press shift plus d and move it here left click to finalize the position go to the object data properties and let’s increase the power to a higher value like 1500 wats press enter to confirm then go to the color option and let’s change it to blue color now let let’s return back to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and now if you will look closely on the monkey model you will notice that this monkey model is allowing some blue light to pass through its surface although you won’t see the same effect as you would see when the light passes through a glass but still it is passing light through it because of the translucent bsdf node and now the next one that we’ll see is the emission node but before that let’s remove the light from the back go to the scene collection select this light. 02 and press X to delete it now to add the emission node go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in the Shader you will find this emission Shader select this place it here now take this emission socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output and to see some changes we need to reduce the lighting in our scene for this go to the scene collection and here we have two lights in our scene we’ll hide them for now by clicking on this I button similarly with this one also also we have added a default hdri in our scene and to disable it or reduce its strength click on this drop- down arrow and you can reduce the strength from here so we’ll reduce it to a very low value like 0.1 and now you can see that even with almost no Lighting in our scene this monkey or the suzan model is emitting light which is because of the emission Shader this emission Shader allows your object to emit light of any color and any strength suppose you want to increase the

    strength then you can simply go to the strength option here and increase it to a higher value like five or six and now the intensity of light has increased similarly if you want to change the color of this light you can click on this color option and if I select the yellow color the color of the light will change to yellow and now the next one is the transparent bstf but before exploring that let’s bring back the lighting in our scene so I will unhide these two lights also I will click on this drop down arrow and increase the strength of the hdri to its previous value of one and now we have enough Lighting in our scene now to add the transparent bsdf go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in the Shader you will have this option of transparent bsdf let’s place it here take this pstf socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output the object will disappear and that’s because we have used the transparent bsdf now there is one way to see your object here which is to change the color so if I click on this color and change the color to blue or any other color then you will be able to see your monkey or the suzan model or else there’s one more way to view it when it gets transparent so I’ll press contrl plus Z to undo it and now it is again transparent go to the color option and reduce the brightness with the help of this brightness slider so if I reduce this slightly the monkey model again reappears in our scene so whenever you want to make your object transparent you can simply add this transparent bsdf and connect it to the material output and now moving ahead the next one on our list is the glass bstf for this press shift plus a go to Shader and select the glass bstf let’s place it here now I’ll take this bstf socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output and now the material of this funky model changes to Glass and this will simply make your object’s material look like a real glass you can even change the color of this glass from here so suppose I take it to green color then it looks like this and similarly for all the other colors so whenever you want to create any glass and even apply some color to it you can use this glass bsdf and now the next one is the sheen bsdf so I’ll press shift plus a go to Shader and select the sheen BS SDF let’s place it here now I’ll take the socket and connect it to the surface socket of the material output and we see some changes here one important thing to note here is that in the previous versions of blender the sheen bstf was also known as The Velvet bstf now you must have seen a velvet cloth or a velvet material it is a kind of fabric which gives a very soft feel and in blender this velvet pstf is used to add some reflection to your material especially when you’re working with clothe objects so whenever you want to create a velvet material for your clothe in blender you you can use this Sheen bsdf you can even control the sheen from the principal bsdf if I go down you have this option of Sheen and if I select this you will get all these settings that were available in the Sheen bsdf and now the next one is the tun bsdf to add it go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in the Shader you will find the tun bsdf let’s place it here take this bsdf socket and connect it here now this tune bsdf is used to create glossy materials or diffused materials with some cartoon light effects in most of the cases you won’t be using this shad and node in blender but if you’re making cartoon type of Animation then you might use this tun bstf and to view its effect I’ll change the angle and now with the help of this T bstf you can control the highlights or these Reflections that are falling on your object and this would also change the look of your object to do this go to the tune bsdf and with the help of this size option you can control these highlights so if I reduce the size you will see that the highlights have reduced similarly if I increase it you will notice that these pink highlights have increased also you can use the smooth option to adjust the look of your object and if I click here you will find two modes to use this tune bsdf one is the diffuse mode and the other one is the glossy now what this glossy mode does is that it will make your object look like a metallic object but with a tune effect to notice the changes properly we’ll go to the size and reduce it to a much lower value like 0.2 or 0.3 and now you can observe that the material of this monkey model is giving a metallic look and the reflections or the highlights on its surface due to these lights are very much different from the regular highlights and all this is due to the tune bstf now let’s return back to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and now we’ll look at some volume shaders in blender and we have three volume shaders the first one is the principal volume the second one is the volume absorption and the third one is the volume scatter to add the first one which is the principal volume press shift plus a go to the Shader and select the principal volume let’s place it here let’s also move this material output and place it here now to break this note connection of the surface socket hold down the control button right click and drag like this now take this volume socket and connect it to the volume socket of the material output and we see some changes here so the principal volume is basically used to create a smokey or a fog effect like this applying this principal bstf fter your object into smoke or fog you can even change the color of this fog from here you have this color option and if I select this and change it to red color then the color of this smoke or the fog will change to red and you can even control the density of this fog from here so if I increase the density it will appear like this this will result in a highly dense fog or smoke of the same shape as the monkey object similarly if I reduce it to a very low value like 0 .4 then the density would be reduced now let’s move to the next one which is the volume scatter for this go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in the Shader you will find the volume scatter at the end let’s place it here take this volume socket and connect it to the volume socket of the material output now this one is similar to the principal volume it will also create a smoke or fog like effect on the suzan or the monkey model and you can control the density from here change the colors from here so there’s not much difference between the two and now the next one is the volume absorption to add it press shift plus a go to Shader and select the volume absorption let’s place it here take this volume socket and connect it to the volume socket of the material output now the volume absorption node allows the light to be absorbed as it passes through the volume and just like the other two you can control the density from here if I increase the density it will turn darker and even the color from here so if I change it to blue color it will appear like this and if I change it to red color it appears like this and this is all we have in the Shader node and now we’ll understand everything that we have learned till now in this chapter with the help of an example and this is also the next topic of this chapter which is creating a procedural car paint Shader so I’ve opened up a new blender file with the same default layout and this time we’ll be working with the second render engine which is the EV render engine so go to the render properties and from here you can change the render engine till now we have used Cycles but for this topic we’ll see how the EV render engine would work so I’ve selected this and let’s go to the render view now the main difference between the EV and the Cycles sender engine is that EV takes very less time to render your images and animations and that’s because it does not consider does so much detailing which the cycles does and that’s why the cycle cylinder engine takes a lot of time to render and now to give it some material I’ll go to the Shader editor and click on this new material button here we have the default principle bstf applied to the UV sphere and I’ll change its name from here let’s name it as simple car paint so I named it as simple car paint and let’s change the base color from here I think that we should change it to red color and to make it dark we’ll use this brightness slider so let’s bring it down and this much looks perfect now to make it surface reflecting we have to reduce the roughness from here so we’ll reduce to its minimum value of zero and it looks like this and now the surface is reflecting all the lights that are falling on it now you must have noticed that there is usually a layer of paint on the car or basically a coating which you can create here with the help of clear coat for this go down in the principal bstf select this coat option and we can increase the clear coat from here right now it is set at zero but if I increase it to one we have this additional layer or coating of paint or reflection on an object’s material and if you look closely at the reflections or the highlights of these lights falling on it all of them can be controlled with the help of this clear coat reflection if I increase it you will notice that the reflecting area of these highlights have increased similarly to reduce it I’ll reduce the roughness from here and now it appears like this so to make it look realistic we should be having some more highlights or the reflections of these lights on our object so we’ll increase the roughness slightly let’s keep it to a value of 0.1 and this looks perfect now the next thing that we will be doing is to make it look more metallic but if I go to the metallic strength here and try to increase it you will notice that the reflections will pick up a lot of color from the background which we don’t want for our material and to fix this I’ll reduce the metallic strength from here and blender gives you the option of specular so if I go to the IR level in specular and try to increase it you can see the changes in the material of this UV sphere but one thing special about this iur level which is not present in other parameters is that even though it appears like it’s maximum value is one but you can even go beyond one by clicking on it and entering a number for example if I type 2.5 then it would take that value and present the changes here I think that a value of around 2.5 or two would give it a nice metallic look and that to without too much colors from the background and here you have an option of specular tint and if I select this and apply any color you will notice some slight effect of that particular color appearing on your object and in this case I think that I should choose the base color which is the red color and now it looks perfect and now to give it some texture We’ll add a noise texture here so press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it here now one way to connect it with the noes system is that you can take this Factor socket and connect it to the nodes but a better way is to use the shortcut which is to select this noise texture press contrl plus shift and then if I left click on it it will directly get connected to the material output but this thing will only work if the no dangler add-on is turned on we learned about this in the chapter number 21 and to check if that no dangler add-on is turned on in your blender or not you can go to the edit option here and select the preferences and here in the add-ons you will find a list of all the add-ons in blender so I’ll go to the search bar and type node and here you will find the node dangler turned on if it is not turned on you can check the box here and then the node Wrangler add-on will be enabled so I’ll close it now and now if you notice here we no longer have the base color that be applied in the principal bsdf that’s because the noise texture directly connected to the material output and it is no way connected to the principal bsdf but we’ll connect it later on because right now we’ll work on the texture part so we’ll be creating some spots on a material and to do this we have to increase the scale from here let’s increase it to a very high number like 200 or 300 and now if I zoom in it looks like we need to adjust the amount of black color and the way how this texture would look for this we’ll add a color ramp here so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp let’s place it here and now it is connected to the noise texture and the material output to create the spots on our material click here and change the interpolation to constant it appears like this because now the colors won’t blend with each other because constant is selected either it will be black or it will be white based on the position of these pointers so if I take the second pointer which is the white and move it like this you will begin to see some white spots here but suppose I want the background to be white and the spots to be black for this you have to take this pointer and move it close to the black pointer and now you will begin to notice that the base color now looks White and the spots on it are black color to change the size and the look of these spots you can select the white pointer again and move it like this if I take it very close to it you will hardly see any spots on the surface so I will adjust it like this and now it looks perfect to increase the detailing on these spots you can simply go to the noise texture and change the detailing from here so if I increase the detailing it would look like this and you can even change the looks from the roughness value here like if I reduce it the roughness would reduce and if I increase it it would look like this so you can change these values to arrive at a texture which you think would look the best for your car paint material I think that this looks perfect so I’ll finalize this one and now to give some color to this we have to use the mixed color node for this I’ll select these two let’s move them here and now press shift plus a go to color and select the mixed color and if I place it here it will get connected between the color RAM and the material output and to see the colors here you have to take this color socket and instead of connecting it to the color a connect it to the factor to break this node connection between the color and the color a I zoom in hold down the control key right click and drag like this now we’ll also be using the principal bstf because it is carrying the material in like the specular the roughness and other things so I’ll select this and if I drop it here it’ll directly get connected with the mix and the material output and for the color part take the color B and change it to that color that you want as your base material in this case we want the red color to be the base material so I’ll take it to red color and now we have red color as the base material and some gray spots on it these gray spots are due to the color a and suppose I want green color on it or maybe blue color and I can increase the brightness from here now you will notice that the base color is red and the color of these spots are blue which is the color a now it’s not necessary that you have to select only these colors or the exact scale value or the detail values here you can try to change these values and get different results each and every time so try to play with these values try to create different materials by changing these colors and you will end up in learning in a much better way in simple words use the texture and the parameters here to change the look of your texture use the color ramp and these pointers to change the size and the color of these spots on your material change the base color from the color B and change the color of the spots from the color a then you can manipulate how your material would look like from the principal bstf like the metallic nature of the material the roughness of the material adding effect of any color from The Tint option here so you can do all this and create any material that you want but right now I think that I should finalize this and we’ll save this one in the material library that we created in the chapter number 21 for this first I need to save this file so press cr+ s and I will save it at the same location where I Sav my other files like cloth Shader file and material one and material 2 files so I’ll change its name to material 3 mat3 and press enter now to save this material go to the scene collection click on this drop down arrow then click here and here you will find the simple car paint material so I’ll select this right click and here you have the option of Mark as ass set now this simple carpaint material is saved in our material library and to view it here click on this icon and go to the asset browser to view only those materials that we ourselves created click here and select the user Library here you will find all those materials that we have created till now and this one is the simple carpa material and also this brings us to the end of this chapter [Music] in the previous chapter that is chapter number 23 we discussed about the procedural shaders in complete detail and we even created a simple car paint Shader and in this chapter we’ll go deeper into the procedural shaders by creating a sand Shader in blender and by understanding and revising all the procedural shaders that we have covered till now so let’s begin with it now I have opened up the default blender file and my screen layout looks like this because we made it the default layout for understanding the shaders in the chapter number 21 of this course we placed This Plane this UV sphere and some lighting in our scene and made it the default dayout so if you also want to set the scene in this way you can check the link of the chapter number 21 and all the remaining chapters of this course from the Pint comment but for now I’ll go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and we’ll be making a basic sand Shader so I’ll delete this UV sphere by pressing X and we’ll add a monkey or the suzan model so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey model let’s move it upwards by pressing G and then Zed and place it here let’s apply the shad Smooth by right click and selecting shade smooth and to make it look perfect and realistic we have to apply the subdivision surface modifier now one way to apply the subdivision modifier is to go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate you will find the subdivision surface but there’s a shortcut available in blender using which you can directly apply the subdivision surface modifier to your object and that is to press control and then press any number for example if I press control+ 3 then it will apply the subdivision modifier and here in the levels viewport the number of subdivisions will be three similarly if I would have pressed contr + 2 then the level C port number would have been two instead of three so you can use this shortcut to apply the subdivision surface modifier directly to your object and now to give it some material we’ll go to the Shader editor press on this new button and here the default material is applied to the monkey object let’s also go to the render view by clicking on this icon and by default we have the cycle trender engine turned on and you can check it from the render properties option here here we have the cycle trender engine and to get a better view of this monkey object I’ll rotate it in the Zed axis so press R and then Zed and let’s rotate it like this and left click to finalize since right now we’ll be making the sand Shader so I’ll change the name of this material by clicking here and typing sand and now the material is renamed to sand now to give it some texture we’ll go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to texture and we’ll add the noise texture let’s place it here and to add an input node press shift plus a go to input and select the texture coordinate and I’ll place it here to connect them together I’ll use this object socket and connect it to the vector socket here now to connect this noise texture to the output one way is to left click on the factor socket and then connect it but the better way is to hold Control Plus shift and then if I left click on the noise texture it directly gets connected to the material output but to use this shortcut do ensure that the node triangular add-on is turned on we learned about the node triangular add-on in the chapter number 21 of this course now if I look closely at the texture it doesn’t actually look like a sand texture and to make some changes here we’ll go to the noise texture and let’s try to change the scale option right now the scale is set at a very small value and we’ll be increasing it to a very high number like 500 and now if I zoom in you will see that it has this grein like texture on it which is similar to that of sand in fact you can add different layers of noise texture on this material to do this with this noise texture selected press shift plus 3 to create a duplicate and let’s place it here I’ll zoom out this second noise texture will act as a second layer of texture for this material and I’ll be reducing the scale value for the second layer of texture so that it looks different from the first layer so I’ll go to the scale value and let us reduce it to a slightly lower number like 250 and let’s also create one more layer of texture by again pressing shift plus d and placing the noise texture here let’s also change the scale of this texture and I think that we should keep it to somewhere around 100 or 150 right now these two textures that is the second layer and the third layer textures won’t be visible on the object’s material and that’s because they are not connected to the material output currently only the first noise texture is connected to the material output now to connect all these texture together select one of the textures press control and shift and if I right click and drag like this I can mix two textures together so if I release these two textures will now be connected to the mix node here which will be connected to the material output and now we have two layers of texture on our object but we need to do some changes here so I’ll go to this option of mix and change it to multiply and now we have some sort of rough green light texture you can change the weight looks with the help of this Factor value so if I increase it we get a much better texture so I will keep it to a value of one and to connect the third layer of noise texture left click on this node press control and shift and with right Mouse button click and dragging like this I can connect both of them together to this mix node just like I change this to multiply I’ll select this one also and change this option of mix to multiply and we can also control the factor value here so if I increase it we’ll get a texture like this let’s zoom out to get a better view but even right now it does not have a realistic looking grainy texture that’s because the texture is not having any 3d effect on the objects material and to get the 3d effect we use the bump node so I’ll go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump let’s place it here I’ll take this material output and place it here similarly this principal bstf and I’ll place it here now now to connect the bump node to the rest of the node system we have to take this result socket of the multiply node and connect it to the height of the bump node then for the output of the bump node take this normal socket and connect it to the normal of the principal bstf and to connect the principal bstf with the material output simply take this bstf socket and connected to the surface and now we are having this white color on the object’s material because of the base color of the principal bsdf and this rough grainy texture is because of the combination of these noise Textures in the Shader editor now to look at the texture properly I’ll zoom in and now we can see how this texture actually looks now it’s not compulsory to set the factor value here at exact one you can change the value at any number like 0.5 but then you will get a different result here you might not notice the exact changes but if you’re very precise about the texture quality and about the scale of the noise texture then you can use this Factor value from here right now this one looks good so I’ve set the factor value of this multiply node to 0.5 now one more thing to note here is that these three noise textures can also be used to give a detailed rough look to your object’s material and for this I’ll take this result socket and connected to the roughness of the principal bsdf and now the roughness will consider that value that it will get from these three noise textures also it’s not necessary to take only this multiply node for the roughness you can select this one also so if I take the result socket of this multiply node and connect it to the roughness the other one will get disconnected and you will get a roughness based on the combination of these two noise textures and now to give this sand some color we’ll go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to color and select the mixed color I’ll place it here and also do remember to save your file so that you don’t lose any work due to any error or some crash and now moving to the color part we have to choose two different colors that will combine together to make the sand color so I searched on Google which two colors should I mix to make the sand color and there I found that these are the two colors which we should combine to make the beach sand color one is the cadmium yellow medium and the other one dioxazine purple and so I searched for the HX code of cadmium yellow medium on Google and it showed me this code which is FDD a0d so we’ll go to the color a and in the HX I’ll enter FDD a0d and press enter to confirm we can’t see any changes here because this mix color node is not connected to the output right now we’ll do that stuff later but for the color B which is the dioxine purple the HX code is this 5c3 a93 so we’ll go to the color B and in the HX I’ll enter 5c 3A 93 and press enter to confirm now to see the changes here take this result socket and connect it to the base color of the principal bsdf and now the color of this monkey object looks like the beat sand color and don’t worry if you’re not seeing the same results of textures that are being shown here because blender takes some time to render these samples and only after the completion of a particular number of samples you begin to see the texture properly and if I change anything here it restarts the sample count and that’s why the object texture look different initially even if I zoom out you will see here that the sample count will restart from one and slowly it will render and it might take a few seconds or even 1 or 2 minutes based on the specifications of your your PC but right now the texture is clearly visible on the object’s material and also I think that we should change the lighting here we have added two lights in our scene this one is the white light and this one is the pink light but I’ll select this light and to change its color go to the object data properties here which is the bulb icon in case of this lamp go to the color option and let’s change it to white color to make it look perfect white you can go to the HSV option here change this value to exact one and this one to exact zero and now we have the perfect white light in our scene let’s go back to the camera view by pressing zero on the Lum pad select this monkey model and here we have all the nodes in the Shader editor and now we’ll be moving to the next topic of this chapter which is understanding the sky texture in blender for this Alpa zoom out and we have to delete this plain background from the scene so I’ll select this press X to delete it and we’ll be adding a new plane so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the plane tab into the edit mode and press s to scale it up let’s scale it up even more and this much should work fine so I left leg to finalize this and now we have this monkey model with a sand Shader and a simple plane in our scene let’s come out of the edit mode by pressing the Tab Key now the sky texture is basically used to add a procedural Sky texture in your scene and the special thing about this texture is that it is not applied to any object instead it is applied to the environment around the scene as a result I’ll go to the Shader editor and to add the sky texture here first we need to click on this option and change the Shader type from object to world so I’ll change it to world and here you have a background node which controls the color and its strength which you see around your 3D viewport now to add the sky texture press shift plus a go to texture and select this Sky texture let’s place it here now to connect the sky texture we’ll take this color socket and connect it to the color socket of the background but we do not see any changes here and that’s because we have added a default blender hdri and to disable it click on this drop down arrow and turn on the scene world and now we see this Sky texture or basically this environment applied in our scene and to adjust how it looks we can change the parameters from here the first thing that I’ll do is to reduce its strength from here so we’ll reduce it to a lower value like 0.1 and now we can clearly see the sky texture around the 3D view Port suppose you want to change the size rotation and position of Sun so you can try to change these values if you want to increase the intensity you can go to the sun intensity value and try to increase it right now I have set it to very high value that’s why it appearing like this but if I reduce it to its default value of one it would appear like this similarly you can go to the sun elevation option and try to change the angle of sun from the Horizon also you can rotate the sun with the help of the sun rotation option basically this will impact the shadows in your scene and the lighting of different objects then you have this option of altitude which will Define the position of the source of Light which is the Sun from the sea level which means the base so if I increase it to a very high value then the altitude of sun will increase similarly if you want to change the color of this environment you can go to these values of air dust and ozone if I take the air value and increase it the environment will get more of yellow or orange look but if I reduce it to its default value and try to increase the dust then it appears like this and if I change it to one and try to change the ozone value this will change the the environment or the sky to blue color but there are some specific parameters that you can use if you want a perfect environment for your scene for example we’ll set the sun size to five Sun intensity will be set to the default value of 1 now we’ll set the sun elevation to somewhere around 100° Sun rotation to 90° and we’ll set the altitude to a value of around 5,000 to 6,000 M and now we have a blue sky background or the environment in our scene we’ll set the air and the dust values to the default one and ozone to a value of 10 and now we have a perfect Sky texture applied to the background so whenever you want a sky texture as the environment you can simply add the sky texture with this world selected as the Shader type set these parameters and connected to the background set the strength to 0.1 and you will end up making this simple looking Sky texture and this brings us to the end of this chapter and also to the part of materials textures and notes because from the next chapter we’ll be starting with another exciting topic of blender which is scene lighting and cameras but before that we need to do one more thing actually in the chapter number 21 of this course we made this layout as the default layout of blender to work on the shaders and materials part but now this layout is no longer required as the default layout and to get back the older layout which is the default blender layout you have to go to the file option here then select the defaults and here you have the option of the load factory settings so I’ll select this load factory settings click again to confirm and here we have the default blender layout now if I again go to the file option here in the defaults we have this save startup file so we’ll select this and click on the confirmation so from now on on whenever I’ll open blender this default blender layout would appear and not the one that we created for the purpose of understanding shading in [Music] blender now in this chapter we’ll be understanding about the lighting in blender the functioning of cameras in blender and so here we have this default file open in blender and the first topic for this chapter is understanding about lighting so here we have this default Point light object in blender and to see its effect we have to go to the material preview mode or to the the render preview mode right now we’ll select the material preview mode if I try to move it by pressing G and move around like this you won’t notice any difference on the cube like there are no Reflections no shadows and this is because the scene light and the scene world are not activated and to fix this click on this drop- down arrow and here you have the option of scene lights and the scene World we’ll turn on both of them and now if I go back to the 3D view port with this light selected press G and if I move around like this you will notice the reflections appearing on your default Cube object and for now I’ll fix its position here so left to finalize now we can even change the color or the type of this light and to do this we have to go to the object data properties so with this light selected click on this bulb or the light icon which is the object data properties and here you have the four types of Lights the first one is the point light the second one is the sunlight the third one is the spotl and the fourth one is the area light we’ll see the effect of each one but right now let’s select the point light and here we have this option of color so using this you can change the color of your light and then you have this power option which is basically used to increase or decrease inre the intensity of light now to see the effect of different lights I’ll remove this default Cube from the scene by pressing X and we’ll add a suzan or the monkey model so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey model let’s move it upwards by pressing G and then Z place it here and let’s rotate it in the Z AIS by 90° so press R then Zed and press 90 then enter to confirm we’ll also be adding a plane below this monkey model so that we can see the Shadows properly so press shift plus a go to mesh and add the plane tab into the edit mode and let’s scale It Up by pressing s and left click to finalize let’s get back to the object mode now I’ll select this light and to see the difference between the four types of Lights we have to place this light exactly at the top of the monkey model for this we’ll try to adjust this lights position from different views first we’ll go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad it’s appearing like a side view because we have rotated this monkey model by 90° and now to move it we first look at this axis since it is colored as red so it is x-axis and you can even confirm it from here the red one is the X the green one is the Y and the blue is the Zed So currently we’ll move it in X Direction so press G and x and we’ll move it like this left click to finalize then for the side view we’ll press three and we’ll move it in y direction so press G and Y and let’s move it here let’s go to the top view by pressing zero on the numpad and here we have this lamp perfectly placed in the middle now if I try to change the angle you will notice that this light is falling only on the head of the suzan or the monkey model and as a result only the Reflection of its head part is visible on this plane we can’t see the the face of the monkey model because light is not able to reflect on it and this is how the point light works basically this point light is an only directional Point light source and to view the face of the monkey we’ll move it by pressing G and then X and let’s move it here and left click to finalize now we can clearly see that the face of the monkey is now visible and also the position of the Shadow has now moved the lighting in blender Works in a very similar way to the lighting in real world if you move a light in real world you will also notice a change in the reflections and change in Shadows and the same is true for blender also also to change the color of this light you can go to the object data properties click on this color option and from here you can change the color of your light by default it is set to white but suppose you want your light to be yellow colored so you can change it to yellow color from this color wheel and the color of this light would change to Yellow also if you think that the intensity of this light is too high then you can go to the power option here and reduce it to a lower value like 300 400 and then the intensity of the power of this light would reduce but right now we’ll change it to its previous value of 1,000 wat so I’ll go to the power value and change it to 1,000 wat now the second type of light is the Sun so if I select this you will notice that now our scene has a lot of lighting and that’s because the strength of the light is too high for the sun type of light usually the strength of the sunlight is kept between a value of 0 to 10 for a perfect lighting but right now it is set to 1,000 and that’s why it appears like this so I’ll go to the strength option and let’s change it to a value between 0 to 10 I’ll change it to six and now the lighting looks perfect now the main difference between the point and the sunlight is that you have this line originating from from the light source and this line basically defines the angle at which this light would fall and to change this angle simply click R and move your cursor you will notice that as you rotate it the influence of light on the objects in the scene would change and to move it even more accurately you can press X to rotate it only in the X Direction similarly y to rotate it only in the y direction and Zed to rotate it only in The Zed Direction now the angle that you want to finaly would depend on what exact objects you’re having in your scene at what angle the lighting looks perfect right now I feel that lighting at this angle looks perfect so I left click to finalize it and now moving to the next type we have the spot type of light so I’ll select this and to see the light properly we need to increase the power from here so we’ll set it to a higher value like 1,000 wat and now we see some light in our scene as the name suggests the spotlight is basically a directional cone light source to explore it properly let’s press G and then Z to move it upwards now this one also works similar to the sunlight because you can rotate it by pressing R and moving around your cursor like this and also you can rotate it in specific axis like the x-axis or the Y AIS or the Zed axis by pressing the respective shortcut keys but to make it look perfect we’ll first have to scale this down so I’ll press s and let’s scale it down like this scaling it down won’t impact the reflection or the intensity of light in any way now to move this light simply press G and now you can move this light let’s place it here now suppose we want to rotate this light in such a way that we will be able to clearly see the monkey face for this with the light selected press R and first let’s try it in x-axis so press X and try to move your cursor we see that by rotating it in x-axis we got a perfect lighting for our scene so we’ll finalize this by left Mouse button click and this is how the spotlight works you can also change the color of this light from here suppose you want red color or blue color or any other color then you can change the color of the light from here let’s keep it to light blue color and now let’s move to the fourth type of Light which is the area light so I’ll select the area light from here let’s zoom out now this area light is basically a directional area light source and by default it is rectangle in shape but you can’t see any rectangle shape light here and that is because it is very small inight to see it in our scene we have to scale it up so press s and move your cursor away and you will begin to see a rectangle near the source of light now if you remember I told you that in the spotlight type even if you increase the skill it won’t affect your object’s Reflections or its Shadows but this is not true in case of area light if I scale it up by a very high number for example I press s and to scale it by 10 times I press 1 Z or maybe 100 times by pressing another zero then you will notice that the lighting would reduce to cancel this I’ll right click and you can understand in this way that more the size of the area light lesser will be the lighting on your object and the reason behind this is very simple when you scale up the area light the same light intensity is now spread over a larger surface area this results in the scene receiving the same amount of Total light but spread out in such a way that it appears to be dimmer and just like you could rotate the light in case of sun and Spotlight you can even do the same in the area light for this press R and move your cursor to rotate the light also just like every other light you can change the color from here you can change it to any color that you like and you will see that particular color as the color of the light in your scene so these are all the four types of Lights in blender you can even add some more lights by pressing shift plus a and here you have the option of light so you can select the type of light from here so suppose I add the point light it will get added at the location of the 3D cursor and to move it upwards press G and Z let’s move it upwards and whenever a new light is added by default its color is white and the power is 10 wat and this is all in the lighting in blender see there is one more important thing to remember the best type and the placement of light depend on the scene you are creating so whenever you’re working on a project you need to experiment with different types of lights and their parameters like the color the power the size of the light to find what would work the best for your project and it always takes a lot of practice and time to create realistic Lighting in blender and now we are moving to the next topic of this chapter which is understanding the cameras in blender so by default we have this camera in our scene to enter the camera view press zero on the numpad and suppose you want to change the position of this camera for this one option is to press G and move your camera like this and press R to rotate it like this but a better way is to use the lock camera to view option and to enable it press n Go to The View option here and here you have the lock camera to view option so I’ll turn this on and now if I try to move my scene the camera will also move along with it suppose I finalize the location and the rotation here and come out of the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad we’ll notice that the position of this camera has changed previously it was located over here but now its position has changed to this point also you can add multiple cameras to your scene and you would be doing this when you’re working on big projects where you need to render animations or your scene from different angles and for this we have to press shift plus a to add the camera here you have the camera option so I’ll select this and the new camera is added at the position where the 3D cursor is located to change its position I will press G and then Z to move it upwards and suppose I want to enter the camera view of this newly added camera but if I use my previous method that is to press zero on the numpad we will see the camera view of the default camera let’s press zero to come out of the camera view and to enter the camera view of the second camera we have to use the shortcut which is to hold the control button and press zero and now this is the camera view of the second camera that we added in our scene here the lock camera to view is enabled and so if I try to move around the scene by holding the middle Mouse button and dragging my cursor like this and then if I scroll down we can see here that we now have a different view of the scene so in simple words if you have to come out of the camera view you have to press zero on the numpad and right now if I press zero on the numpad you will enter the same camera view that’s because in the same collection we have this camera. 001 selected but if I come out of the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad again and go to the same collection select the default camera and now if I press control and zero on the numpad we’ll enter the camera view of the default camera this might be confusing if you’re learning it for the first time but in reality it’s very simple you just have to come out of the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad select the specific camera whose camera view you want to see suppose I select the camera. 001 and now to enter the camera view press control plus 0 in the numpad and this is how you can work with multiple cameras together now if you come to the object data properties you will find some camera settings here but the most important ones are the type of camera and the focal length for now I’ll select the default camera and here in the object data properties if I select the type we have three types here by default it is set to perspective but if I change it to orthographic you will observe that the camera changes let’s enter the camera view to see the changes so I’ll press control+ 0 on the numpad and here we see that instead of getting a 3D view or a perspective view of the 3D viewport and the object we are getting an AOG graic view we learned about the difference between the perspective and the orthographic view in this chapter of the series but coming back to the lens type in most of the cases or maybe even more than 99% of the cases you will be using the perspective type only so I’ll change the lens type to the perspective and we again have this 3D or a perspective look of the 3D view Port then you have this focal length option and by using this option you can change the focal length of your camera lens by default it is set to 50 but if I increase it the focal length of the camera will increase and if I reduce it the focal length of the camera would reduce let’s get back to the default value to view its effect properly I’ll come out of the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and if I try to increase the focal length you will notice that our camera is basically being stretched up like this this is because the focal length of the camera has changed in the real world different lenses of cameras have different focal length and any change in the focal length of the camera also changes the result or the output it produces for example if I go to the camera view by pressing control+ 0 we observe that we are getting a zoomed in output because we have increased the focal length but but if I reduce it we get a zoomed out result in reality the concept of focal length is a bit complex to understand but to understand it simply you just need to remember that to make it look like a real camera view you have to set your focal length somewhere between 35 mm and 50 mm by default blender sets it to 50 mm so I’ll change the focal length again to 50 mm and also this brings us to the end of this chapter in this chapter we learned about the four types of Lights in blender try to rotate and change the position of these lights also explore the color and the power options here then we move to the next topic which were the cameras we understood about changing the position of camera by enabling the lock camera to view then we disc discovered about multiple cameras in blender and also about how you can switch between the two [Music] cameras so to begin with let’s first understand what exactly is animation and the answer to this is simple animation is nothing but an illusion it is an illusion of motion there are several images which are compiled into a video clip or sequence and that how an animation is made here each and every image is said to be a frame in an animation sequence so basically if you’re making an animation in blender you will be making several frames and then blender will compile them to form an animation now coming to the animation in blender we basically have to focus on two areas one is this 3D view editor where you will be having all your objects and the other one will be this timeline editor where we will be animating our frames now the best way to understand about animation is to practically create a basic anim animation seen in blender so suppose I want to create this animation where this Cube simply scales up and then scales down so to make this simple animation with this Cube selected we have to insert a key frame here inserting a key frame means that we’ll be telling the timeline editor that at frame number one our object would look like this that is it won’t be scaled up but it would just be a simple Cube but before that there’s one more important thing to note here and this is related to the frames since I already told you that frames are the images which form the animation but one question that may come in your mind is that how many frames are there in one second of animation and the answer to this question can vary because an animation can be made at 24 FPS meaning frames per second or even 30 FPS or even 60 FPS or more an animation of 24 FPS would mean that each second of the video or the animation will show 24 still images similarly an animation of 30 frame per second would mean that each second of the animation will show 30 images so it totally depends upon on you that how much frames per second you need for your animation but if you are a beginner then I will suggest you to go for 24 or 30 frames per second let’s suppose you choose 24 frames per second and you want to create an animation of 5 Seconds this would mean that your animation will have a total of 24 * 5 meaning 120 frames so here at the frame number one I need the object to be at the default location with the default rotation and scale applied to it and to make this the frame one we have to insert a key frame here the shortcut to insert the key frame is to press I and now a key frame is inserted here to view it properly I’ll expand the timeline editor take the mouse cursor here and left click and drag like this here you can see a yellow dot which means that a key frame is inserted at the frame number one carrying the information that this cube is located at a particular location having a particular rotation and also some scale to view all this information mathematically you can go to the object properties here and here you can see that the location in all the three axes is 0 m the rotation of this cube in all the three axes is 0° and the scale is 1 we decided that the animation would be 5 Seconds long and having 120 frames but right now in the timeline editor we can see that there are frames from the frame 1 to the frame 250 and to restrict it to 120 frames here you have the option of the starting frame and the ending frame the starting frame is set to one but we’ll change the ending frame to 120 and press enter now only the area between frame 1 and frame 120 is highlighted now to make that animation of the cube scale up we have to select a frame here let’s suppose the frame number 40 so I left click here and now the frame number 40 is selected and if I make any changes to this Cube and insert a key frame at the frame number 40 we’ll get a small animation starting from frame number one to the frame number 40 let’s try to do this so to scale it up in the Y Direction press s and Y and move your cursor away and left click to finalize now to insert a key frame at the frame number 40 press I and now we have a key frame here this key frame is carrying the information that at the frame number 40 this Cube will be scaled up like this in the Y AIS now to check this animation between the frame number one to frame number 40 we have to take this pointer to the frame number one so you can either left click like this or else you can also left click and drag like this so we’ll take it to the frame number one and to play the animation press the space bar press space bar to stop the animation and so this was a basic example about how animations are made in blender similarly I can create an animation after the frame number 40 so suppose I take this timeline to the frame number 80 and here I decide that the animation should be like it is scaling up in Z Direction so for this I will press s and then Zed and scale it up like this now to insert a key frame press I and here in the timeline editor we have a key frame inserted at the frame number 80 so if I again take this to the frame number one and play the animation you will see that it first scales up in the y axis and then in the Zed axis and now suppose I want that at the frame number 120 which is the last frame the object should return back to its default state so one way to do this is to go to the object properties here and change the value of scale back to one in all the three axes but a better way is to go to the timeline editor left click on this key frame at the frame number zero now the other two are no more yellow colored that’s because they’re unselected now we’ll create a duplicate of this key frame at the frame number zero and place it at the frame number 120 for this press shift plus d and remember that while doing this your mouse cursor should be in the timeline editor and not in the 3D view Port otherwise it will create a duplicate of the cube in your 3D view port instead of this key frame and now we’ll drag it like this and place it at the frame number 120 left click to finalize and now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation then it first scales up in the Y AIS then in Zed axis and finally it scales down to its original scale value of one and also apart from scaling you can create an animation of an object moving in a particular Axis or rotating for example if I had a UV sphere by pressing shift plus a going to mesh and selecting the UV sphere placing it in y direction by pressing G and then Y and let’s place it here now one thing to note here is that the key frames for previously present here are no longer visible in the timeline editor and that’s because they were assigned only to the cube not to this UV sphere or any other object in the scene so suppose I want to make an animation of this UV sphere in which it is changing its location from one point to another for this we’ll go to the frame number one you can also change the position of your frame from here which is the current frame value suppose I type 20 then the current frame will be set to 20 but right now since we want to place this pointer at the frame number one so we’ll type one and press enter now at the frame number one we’ll move it up in the Z Direction like this let’s zoom out and to insert a key frame at this position press I and here we have the key frame inserted and now if I go to any frame like frame number 60 which is exactly in the middle of frame 1 and frame 120 and move it in y direction like this and if I now insert a key frame by pressing I then here we have another key frame inserted at the frame number 60 now we’ll go to the last frame which is frame number 120 and I’ll create a duplicate of the frame number zero by pressing shift plus d and placing it at the frame number 120 and now now if I play the animation by pressing the space bar you will notice that both the objects are now animated the cube scaled up in the Y and the Zed AIS and then scale down and similarly this UV sphere changed its location from its current position to a new position in the y- axis and then return back to its original position and this is how the animation Works in blender now you can even animate the colors or basically the materials of your object and to show how it works I’ll delete these objects in my scene so with the UV sphere selected hold down the shift button and select this Cube press X to delete them and let’s add the suzan or the monkey model so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey model to make it smooth right click and select the shade smooth and to fix its geometry go to the modify properties and we’ll apply the subdivision surface modifier so click on ADD modifier go to generate and here you will find the subdivision surface so I’ll select this let’s increase the levels view port to higher value like three or four and now to create an animation including the materials or the colors we first have to give some material to this monkey object so I’ll go to the m material properties here and click on the new material now here we have the default material applied to this monkey object you can also open a Shader Editor to set up a new material for this monkey object as we discussed in the chapter number 21 to 24 but right now we’ll be assigning the material from here in the material properties editor only and before assigning any color to it let’s first turn on the material preview mode you can even turn on the render preview from the fourth icon here but right now I will be working on the material preview mode only now if I go to the base color and assign it any random color for example blue color then this object will be having blue color as its material and that to for all the frames here for example if I drag this timeline editor and release it anywhere in the timeline editor we’ll notice that our monkey object is having the same blue material and that is because we have not yet assigned any key frames here only when I will assign some key frames then that particular frame will carry a specific information about the material and then we will be able to see the animation for example if I go back to the frame one and if I want that this monkey object should have blue color at the frame one so I’ll go to the material properties here and here you have a small dot which is basically used to set up key frames so if I left click on it you will notice that the circles turns into this shape and here in the timeline editor we have this first key frame inserted at the frame number one and now suppose I take it to the frame number 120 and at this Frame suppose I want the color of this object to be red so I’ll go back to the material properties select the base color and change it to red color to insert a key frame here click on this icon against the base color and now a key frame is inserted at the frame number 120 now if I place the cursor over frame number one and play the animation you will notice that the color of the object slowly changes from Blue to red color and this is how you animate colors or materials in blender you can do the same with other properties as well like the metallic strength roughness or even the emission so basically any parameter that has this small dot against its name can be animated just by inserting two key frames at different places and then the animation will be created for example if you have have to animate the roughness then go to the timeline editor take this to the frame number one and we’ll assign the default value of roughness which is 0.5 to this Frame so at this value click on this small icon to insert a key frame and now the key frame that you are seeing here is carrying two informations one is about the base color which is blue and other is about the roughness which is 0.5 and now we’ll go to the frame number 120 and suppose at this Frame I want the roughness to be exact zero to insert the key frame I will click on this icon and now this last frame that is frame number 120 is also carrying two informations one is about the base color which is red and the other one is about the roughness which is zero to see the animation we’ll take this pointer to the frame number one and press the space bar now you will notice two things one is the color change from Blue to red and the other thing is the change in roughness from 0.5 to 0 initially at the frame number one our object was blue colored and having high roughness but at the last frame it is red colored and having a reflecting surface with no roughness and now to revise all the concepts that we have covered in this chapter so far we’ll be making this simple Loop animation in blender so to begin with it I’ll first delete this monkey object so press X to delete now if you look closely at this animation you will notice that we first need to make this base and the hollow spaces where these balls will fall and for creating this base the best object to start with will be a cylinder because we’ll scale it down to form a dis- like structure so let’s come back to blender and to add the cylinder press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cylinder now tab into the edit mode and let’s scale it down in the Z Direction by pressing s s and then Zed and scale it down like this left click to finalize and get back to the object mode by pressing the Tab Key now to make the hollow spaces we’ll be using the Boolean modifier we learned about this modifier in this chapter of this course now since we need to make hollow circular shapes like this we’ll be adding cylinders and then apply the Boolean modifier so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cylinder tab into the edit mode press s to scale it down let’s scale it down further let’s move it slightly upwards by pressing G and then Zed and left click to finalize to view the size properly we’ll go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and I think that we should scale it down further so I’ll press s and scale it down like this left click to finalize and let’s move it upwards in the y direction to place it here but right now we need four such cylinders so let’s come out of the edit mode press shift plus 3 to create duplicate move it down in the y direction and after placing it in the middle left click to finalize its position now let’s move it in next Direction by pressing G and then X and let’s place it here left click to finalize let’s try to change the angle and here we have two cylinders added here now to create two more duplicates I will select both of them together and then create a duplicate so with this one selected hold on the shift button and left click to select the other cylinder go back to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad now press shift plus d and place the duplicates here and left click to finalize let’s change the angle and now we have four different cylinders to create the hollow space we need to see the depth of these cylinders inside this base so we’ll turn on the x-ray mode for this but before that we need to enter the solid mode because the x-ray mode cannot be accessed from the material preview mode so I’ll go to the solid mode press alt plus Z to turn on the x-ray mode mode to view the depth properly we’ll go to the side view by pressing three on the numpad and to create the hollow space we need these

    cylinders to have more depth inside this base so I’ll select all four of them by dragging like this and now if I release all the four cylinders will get selected and I’ll move them down in the Zed axis by pressing G and then Z and let’s place them here and left click to finalize now I’ll turn off the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Z and to create the hollow spaces we’ll use the boan modifier so I’ll select this base go to the modifier properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate you will find this Bo I modifier now I have to add all these four cylinders in this object option here and for this I would need to create four duplicates of this Boolean modifier but a better way is to take all these four cylinders and join them together into a single object for this I’ll select one of them and with the shift key holded I’ll select the other three to join them together press crl + J and now they’re converted into a single object with the name as cylinder. 002 let’s select the base again go to the object click on this eye dropper place it on one of the cylinders and left click now in the object option we have the cylinder do to assigned to apply this modifier press cr+ a and now to view the hollow space select this group of cylinders and press X to delete them here we have these Hollow spaces created in our base now to give it a better and a realistic look we’ll apply the bevel modifier so go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate you will find the bevel modifier so I’ll select this let’s change the number of segments to a higher value like three or maybe four and now it looks perfect now to make the balls we’ll go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad then we’ll place the 3D cursor over here by pressing shift sh and right click and we’ll add a UV sphere so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the UV sphere tab into the edit mode and scale it down left click to finalize let’s view it from a different angle I think that we should move it upwards in The Zed axis so press G and then Z to move it upwards and left click to finalize now we’ll need three more UV spheres so I’ll again go to the top view come out of the edit mode and I’ll create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and move it in the Y Direction Let’s place it here and left click to finalize now again press shift plus d and place this duplicate over here and left click to finalize now we’ll create one more duplicate and place it here so press shift plus d and press X to move it in X Direction and place it here left click to finalize and now we have this base and these four UV spheres or these balls added in our scene to make them look realistic I will select all four of them by holding the shift button and left click to select each one of them now we’ll make them Smooth by right Mouse button and applying the shade smooth and now to make this rotating rod with its tiny stand we need to place our 3D cursor over here so press shift plus C now here we have the 3D cursor reloc ated at the world origin so to make the stand of the rod we’ll add a cylinder here so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cylinder tab into the edit mode press s to scale it down and left click to finalize now I’ll zoom in and to view it here I need to move it upwards in the Z Direction so I will press G and then Z to move it up and left click to fin Li I think that we should scale it down even further so I will press s and move my cursor towards it and left click to fin Li and to move it slightly upwards I will press G and z and move it like this left click to finalize and now we have this stand ready so I will come out of the edit mode and to make the rotating Rod I will add another cylinder in my scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cylinder to scale it down we’ll go to the edit mode and press s left click to finalize now we should scale it up in the Zed axis so press s and Zed and scale it up like this now to adjust the size of the rod properly I will again press s to scale it and scale it down like this let’s move it upwards by pressing G and then Z and place it here now we need to rotate it in the x or the Y AIS both of them will work because if I press R and x and rotate it like this then it is perfectly aligned but if I right click and then press R and Y to rotate it in the y axis and then move my cursor like this then also it will get perfectly aligned so you can choose any of the two axes either the x-axis or the y axis for now I’ll be choosing the x-axis so press R and x and I need to rotate it by exact 90° so I will type 90 and press enter let’s bring it down by pressing G and then Z and place it over here to make the rod thinner I will scale it down again and to make it long I will scale it up in the y- axis so let’s scale it up like this and left click to finalize now I’ll go to the front view by pressing pun on the numpad let’s zoom in I think that we should move the rod slightly downwards so I will press G and Zed to move it down in the Zed axis and let’s place it here and left click to finalize now we have all the objects ready in our scene let’s come out of the edit mode we have this base all the four balls this Rod which will be rotating and this Rod stand Now to create the animation there is one important thing to keep in mind if you carefully notice here you will observe that the base and the rod are rotating in opposite directions and to create an animation like this we first have to rotate this rod in the Z Direction by 45° the reason for doing this is that now the animation will start with the rod being in this position previously if I press contr + it to undo it was placed like this and with this position of Rod it would not have been possible to move the balls up and down because otherwise the ball would collide with this rod and that is why we rotated it by 45° to get that rotation back press contrl plus shift plus Z and here we have the rotated Rod to insert a key frame press I and here at the frame one we have this key frame inserted now I’ll go to the frame 120 and since we are creating a loop animation we want this Rod to rotate completely and return back to its original position at the last frame so that the rotation would be same as that at the frame number one for this we have to rotate this by 180° so press R and then z type 180 and press enter to insert the key frame press I and now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation you will observe that this Rod would rotate in The Zed axis by an angle of 180° but its rotation is very slow and to fix this we’ll reduce the number of frames here instead of having 120 frames we’ll be keeping a total of 60 frames to do this go to this end option and change it to 60 now to move this key frame to the 60th frame select it with a left Mouse button click and you can simply move it just like you move any other object in your 3D viewport go to the timeline editor and press G to move it so I will place it at the frame number 60 and left click to finalize now if I go back to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that the rod rotated by 180° and this time it was faster than the previous one now we need to rotate this base in the direction opposite to that of this Rod so I will we select this go to the frame number one press I to insert the key frame then we’ll go to the frame number 60 and to rotate it press R and z and to rotate it in the opposite direction I will type minus 180 this time press enter to confirm and press I to insert the key frame now if I go back to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that the base and the rod moved in directions opposite to each other and now we’ll move forward and we’ll be animating these balls so we’ll go to the frame number one and I’ll select this ball and with the Shifty hold it this ball now initially at the frame number one all these balls will will not be inside this hollow space we will be moving these two balls slightly upwards and the other two will remain in the hollow space to do this press G and z and let’s move it upwards by a small value like 0.2 M so I type 0.2 and press enter to insert the key frame here press I and here we have the key frame inserted now the position of these UV spheres will be the same on the frame number one and the last frame so we’ll go to the frame number 60 and with this key frame selected press shift plus d and move it to the frame number 60 now if I go to the frame number one and instead of playing the animation this time we’ll be dragging a pointer like this to check at which frame we need to animate these balls so we’ll check for the frame where these balls are just above the hollow space and at frame around 30 it looks perfect but to confirm we’ll go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and these two balls are selected here so at frame number 31 it looks like this and if I go to the frame number 30 it looks like this so I think that we should keep it to frame number 31 since it will be exactly in the middle so I will press I to insert the key frame here then if I move forward we notice that the next frame where these two intersect or appear together will be somewhere near the last frame and we already have a key frame inserted here let’s change the angle and now to show the motion of the balls moving upwards and downwards we again have to go to the frame number one and we’ll drag this pointer to somewhere in the middle of the first key frame and the second key frame so we’ll take it to somewhere near 15 or 16 and at this position we’ll move them upwards because the animation will be like the rod and the base are rotating and the ball first moves up and then comes down so with both the balls selected press G and Zed and let’s move them upwards by a value of somewhere around 1 so I typed one and pressed enter press I to insert the key frame and now let’s check how it looks so I’ll go to the frame number one press space bar to play the animation one thing that we noted here is that the animation was a little bit quick as soon as it reached the top or basically its maximum height instantly on the next frame it begin to go downwards but in reality if a ball is thrown upwards it remains at its maximum height for a fraction of second and to fix this I’ll select this Frame and we’ll create a duplicate of it let’s move it here the reason for doing this is that now the ball will go from this point at the frame number one to its maximum height at frame number 15 or 16 and will stay there till the frame number 20 or 21 and then it will come down at the frame number 31 so now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation we see that it now looks a bit more natural than before and now we’ll make these balls go inside this hollow space and for this I will press G and Zed and since previously we move them upwards by 0.2 M so to move them down we have to type minus 0.2 and press enter to confirm press I to insert the key frame let’s go to the frame number one and play the animation now there’s one more problem here which is the animation from the frame number 31 to 32 is very fast and that’s because the two key frames are just adjacent to each other to set them apart I’ll select the first one press G to move it and let’s place it here left click to finalize the position let’s go back to the frame number one and press space bar to play the animation and this time it looks better than before right now we’ll be seeing only the animation till the frame number 30 or 32 because we have not yet animated the part ahead it so our basic animation looks good but still there are some things which we can fix here to make it look perfect for example at the frame number 31 the position of these balls is not perfect you can see that both of these balls are colliding with the base object to fix this I’ll select the space object press R and Z to rotate it in the Zed axis and we slightly rotate it left click to confirm and press I to insert the key frame one important thing to note here is that the rotation in the Z axis should be very slight otherwise the animation will not look natural so again I’ll go to the frame number one drag this pointer like this to check if there is some mistake or not like here at the frame 30 you can see that these two balls are again colliding with this base so I will rotate it again press R and z and let’s slightly rotate like this left click to finalize press I to insert the key frame and now it looks perfect you can also go to the next frame with the help of the arrow keys so if I click the right arrow key you will jump to the next frame similarly if you have to go back to the previous frame you can click the left arrow button right now the frame number 30 looks perfect also frame number 31 and 32 are looking perfect as well now moving ahead I’ll reselect these two balls take this pointer somewhere in between frame number 32 and 60 so I’ll take it to somewhere near 45 or 44 let’s move them upwards in the Z direction to reach their maximum height so I will press G and Zed and we’ll move them upwards by 1.2 M press enter to confirm and we’ll insert a key frame here now we’ll go to the frame number 32 and instead of playing the animation I will use the arrow keys to check each and every frame and this is how our animation would look like till now it looks perfect even till frame number 57 it looks perfect 58 is also fine and 59 and 60 are also perfect so we are done with the animation of these two balls so we’ll go to the frame number one and we’ll check if the animation looks natural or not so press space bar to play the animation and this is how it looks so at the beginner level it looks perfect and now I’ll select the other two balls I selected this one and with the shift key holded I’ll select the other one so we’ll go to the frame number one and insert a key frame press I and here we have the key frame inserted now to check the next frame where these two balls would be at the same position at that of the hollow space we’ll drag this timeline cursor so we’ll drag it like this and somewhere around the frame number 30 the balls will be at the required location so I will press I to insert the key frame and to check if the position of these two balls is perfect or not we’ll go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad this ball looks perfect but we can adjust this ball so that it appears somewhere in the middle so I will select this one press G to move it and since we are in the top view whatever change in location we will do will only affect the location in X and Y AIS so we’ll place it over here and left click to finalize press I to insert a key frame in fact even this ball also appears to collide with the base so I’ll select this one press G to move it let’s place it here I to insert the key f frame and now it looks perfect so I’ll change the angle select these two balls again go to the last frame which is frame number 60 and we’ll insert a key frame for these two balls at these positions for this press I and here we have the key frame inserted again to check the Perfection of the positions we’ll go to the top view and they look almost perfect so we’ll not do any more changes here and now it’s the time to move these balls up and down for this I’ll take this pointer to the frame number one drag this pointer like this and we’ll stop it somewhere in the middle of these two frames let’s move them upwards by 1 M so I will press G and z type one and press enter to insert a key frame press I and here we have the key frame inserted and if I play the animation we again notice the same problem that we faced in case of these two balls which is that at this Frame they are at their maximum height and just at the next frame they begin to fall which gives it a slightly unrealistic or an unnatural look to fix this I’ll select this key frame move it like this and create a duplicate of it and place it here and now if I play the animation by dragging this cursor we will observe that the two balls will stop in between and then go downwards we did the same for these two balls as well but yes we did one small mistake here that you can see in the timeline editor we created a duplicate of this key frame that is the key frame at the frame number 16 and placed it at the frame number 20 but we did not do the same with this one always remember that if the area between any two key frames is shaded like this it means that the second key frame is the duplicate of the first one as a result we can say that these two are the same key frames but there are no more duplicates in the timeline editor so with this key frame selected we’ll create a duplicate of it so so press shift plus d and move it like this left click to finalize the position now I’ll select the other two balls and we have the animation of the first 30 frames completely ready for all the four balls so now let’s move to the next 30 frames we’ll take the pointer to somewhere between the 30th and the 60th frame like somewhere near 45 or the 44th frame we’ll move them upwards so that they reach their maximum height at this Frame so press G and z and let’s move them up by 1 M press I to insert the key frame and we’ll create a duplicate of this key frame also so that it stops at its maximum height for a fraction of second so I’ll select this one move it by pressing G we’ll place it here press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here now I’ll take this pointer over the frame number one slightly change the angle to view all the balls perfectly and we’ll check each and every frame with the help of the arrow buttons so I will use the right arrow to go ahead in the timeline let’s also keep changing the view or the angle let’s move ahead and somewhere it looks perfect till now we have completed 30 frames and there’s no such visible problem or any imperfection in our animation let’s move ahead by clicking the right arrow and the main issue that you might face will be somewhere near the ending frames or the middle frames so on the frame number 56 there’s no such issue we’ll go ahead to the frame number 57 and still it looks perfect similarly 58 and 59 and there is no such imperfection and the last frame which is frame number 60 also looks perfect and so we have created our first basic animation in this course and to give it some material we’ll be using the shaders from the library that we created in the chapter numbers 21 to 24 of this course there we learned about materials in complete detail and also created some basic and procedural shaders and to get that material Library here we have to add a new window here so I’ll take my cursor over here and this double-headed Arrow would appear then right click and select the horizontal split take it in the middle to divide the area into two equal parts now to convert this into the material or the asset browser click on this icon and select the asset browser to view only the specific materials that we ourselves created click here and select the user Library we created all these materials in the chapter number 21 to 24 of this course and also we’ll be creating some more materials when we learn about Advanced shaders further in this course but for now to give these objects some material we’ll go to the render preview mode let’s change the render engine to Cycles so go to the render Properties by default it is set to EV but I’ll change it to cycles and to get a proper lighting click on this drop- down arrow and turn off the scene world and now we have a proper Lighting in our scene first we’ll assign some material to this base so I’ll select this and let’s apply the simple car paint Shader to it so I’ll select this and drag it over like this and if I release it this material would get assigned to the base similarly I’ll select the stand of this rod and let’s assign it the dark gray metal so I’ll select this and drop it over the rod stand and here the material of the stand of the rod will change to dark gray metal similarly we’ll assign this Rush aluminium to this Rod so I will select this drag it and place it over the rod and the material is assigned for the balls we’ll be using this glossy green paint but we’ll change the color of the balls later on so I’ll select this drag it and place it on all the four balls similarly for the third one also and for the fourth one as well now to change the color of these balls I’ll change this to the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader editor now I’ll select one of the balls zoom into the Shader editor and if I try to change the color from here you will notice that the color change will be visible on all the balls and this is because all these four balls are having the same material to fix this we need to create a duplicate of this material and we’ll make changes in that duplicate to do this click on this icon here and now we notice that the name of the material changes to glossy green painted. 001 this 01 means that it is the duplicate of the glossy green painted material and now if I try to change the color from here suppose I choose the yellow color then in my 3D view Port only the color of this specific object will change and not the others now I’ll select the second one create a duplicate and let’s change the color to blue color similarly the third one create a duplicate go to the base color and we’ll change its color to green color and let keepe the fourth one as the pink color now we have assigned the materials to all the objects in our scene so I’ll close this Shader editor by right clicking here and selecting the join areas take this pointer towards the Shader editor and left click and now in the end we learn how can we produce an output of this animation basically how can we render it so the first step is to go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and to change the camera view press n Go to The View and turn on the lock camera to view now I’ll zoom in and let’s also adjust it like this right now the output that you will get will be in this landscape mode but suppose you want to change it to the portrait mode to do this you have to open the output Properties by clicking on this icon here you can control all the settings related to the output that you will render here you can see that the resolution is set to 1920 pixels in the X and 1080 pixels in the Y Y which means that you will get the output in this landscape mode and if you want to render it in the portrait mode or basically that mode in which you watch YouTube shorts or Instagram reels then you just need to reverse these values meaning that in the X resolution I will type 1080 press enter and in the Y resolution I’ll type 1920 and press enter to see the entire view properly I’ll turn off the lock camera to view now if I zoom out this is the area that you will be seeing in the output which will be rendered the frame rate here is set to 24 FPS and since we are having 60 frames so the total length of the final video will be 60 divided 24 that is 2.5 seconds but you can extend it even longer since it is a loop animation now we’ll scroll down here and here you have the output settings the most important thing to change here is the file format by default it is set to PNG meaning that it will generate image outputs of each and every frame instead of generating a video but because we need to render a video so I’ll go to the file format and change it to ffmpeg video now you also need to tell Blender at which particular location it should save your file to do this you have to use the output path option to set a particular location click on this icon and then you can browse a particular location or some folder and if you have to create a new folder then simply click on this icon and a new folder will be added let’s name it videos and press enter to finalize now since I want to save the video in this folder so I’ll double click on it and let’s change the name to something like first animation then press enter and click on accept and now we are ready to render the animation so I’ll click on this render button and select render animation now the screen will appear here which will show you the frame number that it is rendering and the sample count here so it would take some time to render the entire video depending on the specifications of your PC and you can also see the results here frame by frame also here I feel that we should have added a plane at the bottom to give it a better look but right now it is rendering so suppose you want to cancel it so you can simply press Escape key and the render will be cancelled now I’ll close this and to add a plane here I will press shift plus a go to mes and select the plane let’s move it downwards by pressing G and z and place it over here left click to finalize the position tab into the edit mode and I will scale it 10 times so I will press s and 10 and now it looks like this but here in the camera view the end of this plane is visible to fix this we’ll scale the plane even more so I will press s and to scale it twice press two and then enter and it’s still not perfect so I will scale it even more by pressing s and left click to finalize now I’ll get back to the object mode and let’s change the color of This Plane by going to the material properties here click on the new button and now the default material is applied to the plane object to change the base color click here and for a better contrast we’ll make the plane a little dark so let’s change it to gray color or make light blue color let’s reduce the brightness even more and now it looks perfect so we’ll render this again by clicking on render and selecting the render animation and now our final output looks like this and also this brings us to the end of this chapter one important thing before ending is that if you’re learning animation in blender for the very first time it might be possible that your rendered video might be a bit different or there may be some problems in it some imperfections and the best way to deal with this is to go to that specific part of the video where we discussed about that problem or the imperfection and and try to resolve it in your blender project and if you have any doubts then you can write them down in the comments [Music] Below in this chapter we’ll be learning about some Advanced tools which are used in blender animation such as F curves and graph editor now the first topic for this chapter is f curves and whenever we animate our object that is we insert key frames at different positions in the timeline editor then blender automatically creates F curve which is used in airfall design and interpolation and to understand this concept we first have to make a simple animation with this Cube to do this let’s first expand this timeline editor by left clicking here and dragging like this now to start the animation I first have to insert a key frame at the frame number one which will carry the information that the cube is at a particular location rotation and scale value and for this I will press I and here we have the key frame inserted now suppose I want the animation to be of 100 frames so I’ll take this pointer to the frame number 100 and let’s suppose we want to create an animation where this Cube moves from its current position to some in the Y AIS and for this I will press G and Y and let’s move it like this left click to finalize the position and to insert a key frame at the frame number 100 press I and here we have the key frame inserted and to play the animation I’ll take this pointer to the frame number one and press the space bar you will observe that it’s motion is slow in the beginning faster in the middle and it again slows down as it approaches the ending basically you can say that the motion of this cube is not linear now we can even confirm it manually by checking the location in the Y AIS at each and every frame we made this animation of 100 frames and initially at the frame number one its position in the y- AIS was 0 m and at the frame number 100 which is the final frame we moved it to somewhere near 15 m in simple words we can say that with movement of each frame it should have moved approximately 15 divided by 100 meaning 0.15 m in the y axis so to check this we’ll go to the frame number one here it is 0 m and if I use the right arrow key to jump to the next frame we see that the position in the y- axis is less than 0.15 M meaning that it initial speed was very slow similarly on the next frame also the value is still less than 0.15 M but if I take it to somewhere near 40th frame then mathematically we expect that its position in the Y AIS should be somewhere around 0.15 multiplied by the number of frames which is 40 which is equal to 6 M but if I check here the location in the y- AIS is close to 5 m meaning that even till the frame number 40 the speed of the motion or the animation was a bit slower as compared to what we expected we expected a uniform motion but in reality it does not happen but now if I go to the frame number 70 and this time according to us its position in the Y AIS should be 0.15 M multiplied 70 which is equal to 10.5 M but if I check here the location in the Y AIS is very close to 12 M which means that initially the motion was slow but somewhere in the middle the speed of the motion increased and this is how the default animation Works in blender to summarize everything you can understand it in this way for the initial frames the speed will be slow then in the middle the speed will be very fast and at the the end the motion will again slow down and suppose you want to edit or manipulate this speed then you would have to use the F curves and to see the F curves here we’ll change this timeline Editor to the graph editor so click on this icon and here you will find the graph editor so I’ll select this let’s expand this by dragging it like this and this is called the F curve to zoom in or zoom out you can simply use the scroll wheel of your mouse now here on the left hand side you will see a list of all the objects that are animated in your scene since we animated this Cube so here you have the cube in the list then any change in the position or the rotation or the scale of a particular object while animating will be saved in this Cube action since we changed the position of this Cube from 0 m to somewhere near 15 m in the y- axis so you can see this object transformation here meaning that we changed the position of our object in our scene and since we changed the position in the y- AIS here in the graph editor this curve is also representing the y- axis and this is because it is green in color here in the 3D viewport you can see here that the x- axis is represented by the red color Y axis by the green color and Z axis by the blue color so in the graph editor this green curve is representing the object transformation in the y- axis now to observe this graph let’s first zoom out and if you look closely at this graph you will notice that the graph is not linear a linear graph would have meant that the speed of the motion of this Cube would have been uniform throughout in the beginning you have a flat slope here then in the middle it looks somewhat linear but in the end it again has a flat slope as a result in the beginning and the end the speed of the motion was slow and in the middle it was faster but now suppose you want the motion to be of uniform speed and in that case you would need this graph to be linear to do this simply right click go to interpolation mode and select the linear and now this graph is linear and if I take this to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that the cube moves from one point to another with a uniform or a constant speed and all this is because we changed the interpolation of this graph to linear also if you right click and in the interpolation mode you will find some more graph types for example suppose I select the sinos odal then the graph would look like this the shape of this graph turns from linear to cudal now if I move my pointer like this you can notice here that there are two points on this green graph one is this point at the frame number one and the second point is here at the frame number 100 these two points indicate that we have two key frames inserted at these frame values and since both of these points are selected because they’re highlighted with yellow color any change that I make to the interpolation will be applied to the graph between these two points now you may notice here that you also have this blue line intersecting this y- axis graph and this blue line represents the animation of this cube in The Zed axis but during the entire animation we did not change the position of this cube in The Zed axis and that is why it appears like a simple straight line from the frame number one to the frame number 100 it does not seem to change its value at any point between the two frames but moving back to the graph of the Y AIS suppose you have to deselect both of these points so you can simply left click anywhere in the graph editor and all the points will be deselected now to select a particular key frame or a point simply left click on it and now this is selected but if you look at the other point at the frame number one it it is still deselected now with only the second Point selected if I right click and change the interpolation mode to linear you will not notice any difference in the graph or this curve and the reason for this is that this is the last key point of the curve and there is no next key available after this point to apply the change but now if I select the first key frame the other one will get deselected and if I right click and in the interpolation mode select linear you will notice that the Curve will change from sinos serial to linear now suppose I want the animation to be a little longer like from the frame number one to frame number 100 the object should move in the y direction and then from the frame number 100 to frame 200 it will return back to its original position for this we’ll take this pointer to the frame number 200 go to the object properties and change the location in the Y AIS to zero go to the 3D view port and press I to insert the key frame now in this graph we have three points one is at the frame number one second one is at the frame number 100 and the third one is here at the frame number 200 now suppose I want that the first half of this graph should be linear like this but the other half that is from the frame number 100 to 200 should be cudal instead of linear to do this select the frame from where this curve starts that is the frame number 100 then right click go to the interpolation mode and select the sinos serial and now the first half is linear and the second half is sinos serial now blender also gives you the option to manually adjust the graph instead of changing the interpolation type and for this we first have to select all these three points in the y- AIS curve so here the second key point is already selected so with the shift key hold it I’ll select the first one and also the third one and now all of them are selected then right click and in the interpolation mode you will find this bzier option so I’ll select this and now here we have these points here which we can move to change the curve for the first key point that is this one these two are the points which you can use to change the position of the graph for example with this selected if I left click and drag like this you will notice that the graph changes if I leave it here then in the beginning we have a linear graph here similarly if I want to change the structure of the graph in the middle select any of these two pointers suppose this select this one and left click and move it like this I can again change the graph structure similarly for the third Point these two are the pointers which you can use to manipulate the graph so suppose I select this point left click and drag it like this then now we can change the structure of the graph from this point so initially we change the graph to linear then by the time it reaches the frame number 100 it appears curved like this and then due to this steep slope the motion of this Cube will be faster in the ending to view this I’ll take this pointer to the frame number one and press the space bar so initially it moves with a normal speed till the frame number 100 and then it begins to return back and after a few frames the speed of the cube increased so always remember one basic thing that if you want to slow down the motion then the graph should be basically flat or a bit horizontal and if you want the motion to be fast then the graph should be more like vertical to explain this suppose I want the beginning to be slow and the ending to be fast for this with one of the pointers selected I left click and drag like this and now it appears more flat than before also I’ll go to this key point and we already made this fast fter by making the curve like this but if you want to increase the speed even more then select one of the pointers and drag like this if I move the cursor like this then you can see here that the line with the pointers is now vertical meaning that the speed of the motion will be fast similarly if I go to this pointer select one of the pointers and to make it slow I will drag it and make it horizontal and now it looks perfect now initially this is horizontal meaning that the motion will be slow and in the end it is vertical meaning that the animation or the motion will be faster to check this we’ll go to the frame number one and play the animation now in the beginning the speed of the animation is a bit slow till it reached the frame number 100 and when it begins to come back to its original position the speed increased in the end and now suppose you want to change the time for which the motion should be slowed down or should be faster to do this simply select one of the pointers left click and now instead of rotating it I move it like this then here I basically increased the timing for which the motion is slowed down previously if I press control+ Z the motion was slow only from the frame number one to somewhere around frame number 30 but if I redo the now the slow motion effect is applied from the frame number one to the frame number something close to 70 similarly if I go to the third key Point move the cursor like this select one of the pointers and to increase the timing for which the speed is increased I left click on it and drag it like this release the left Mouse button to finalize and if I go to the frame number one and play the animation then the number of frames or the time for which the motion was slow has increased and a similar effect was seen for the faster motion as well so basically in this way you can edit or manipulate the curve and create a motion profile that suits your requirement for a particular animation now suppose you want that when the object reaches the maximum position in the y- axis that is at the frame number 100 it quickly bounces back and move towards its original position to do this we’ll take one of these pointers and with the shift key hold it select the other pointer and now we need to reduce the frames for which the object stays here before bouncing back to do this simply go to the graph editor and to scale down press s and scale it down like this left click to finalize and now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that initially the speed is slow then it reaches the frame number 100 it stayed there for a fraction of second and then after bouncing back the speed of the motion increased now one thing to observe here is that after the frame number 100 if I play the animation the speed of the cube is slow and this is because the curve is not too much steep like this this part of the curve is steep and that’s why the motion is faster here but this part of the curve is not that Steep and that is why the motion appears to be slower and now suppose you want this curve to change back to how it previously looked for this I’ll select this point with the shift key hold it select this point and then the third point right click go to interpolation type and from here you can change it back to any mode like the linear or the sinos sodial so if I select the linear the pointers here will get removed and we’ll get the default linear curve in the graph editor now suppose you want that while moving our Cube object in the y- AIS it should also vibrate in the x-axis and for this blender gives you the noise modifier and now since we want to apply the noise modifier in the x-axis I need to select the curve or the graph of the x-axis for this click on this drop- down arrow and here you will find the X location so I’ll select this now go to the modifier click on ADD modifier and select the noise now here you will see the slight noise added to the curve of the X location and to make it stronger go to the strength option here and let’s increase it to a higher number like five or six and now if I go to the frame number one and before playing the animation let’s adjust the view properly so that we can see the vibration of this cube in our scene press space bar to play the animation and now you see that the object moves in the Y AIS and it is also vibrating in the x-axis and this is how the noise modify works but if I play the animation after the frame number 200 it won’t show any Motion in the y axis and it only vibrated in the x-axis and that is because the motion in the y- AIS was set only from the frame number one to frame number 200 but suppose I want that the animation should repeat itself a specific number of times like if I want it to repeat itself five times then for this we first have to increase the number of frames here right now we have set the maximum number of frames to 250 but if I want the motion to repeat itself in the Y AIS then I have to increase the frame number to a value of 200 MTI 5 which is 1,000 frames to do this click on this icon change it back to the timeline editor go to this end option and type 1,000 press enter to confirm now again click on this icon and go back to the graph editor now to make the motion in the Y AIS to repeat itself five times click here on the Y location and now the curve in the y- axis is selected and now we’ll use the cyclic modifier to apply it go to the Y location right click and here in the extrapolation mode select this make cyclic modifier and now we have the graph of motion in the Y AIS repeated throughout the timeline to view the animation now I’ll go to the fame number one and play the animation and now you can see that our object or this cube is basically vibrating and also moving in the y- axis and after reaching its default position it will again start the motion in the y- AIS and also show the vibration and this is how the cyclic modifier works and also one more thing to notice here is that we applied the Cycles modifier by right clicking at the Y location going to the extrapolation mode and here we have this cyclic modifier but if I go to the modify properties here you will find that blender automatically added this Cycles modifier here as well and suppose you want to clear this cycle then one way is to go to the Y location right click go to extra pollution mode and select the clear cycle or else you can go to the modify properties and click on this cross icon and so this brings us to the end of this chapter today we learned about how the graph editor Works what exactly is the meaning of these curves and these points how can you manipulate the curves to control the speed of the motion then we added the noise here and we even OD about the Cycles [Music] modifier in this chapter we’ll be understanding about nonlinear animation and all the concepts related to it now the first question is what exactly is the nonlinear animation so nonlinear animation allows manipulation and repurposing actions without the need of handling the key frames or else in simple words it is the process of moving rearranging manipulating and blending different animation Clips to produce a new series of motions and now now here is the default blender scene and to understand about nonlinear animation we first have to remove all these objects so press a to select all and X to delete now we’ll add the suzan or the monkey model so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey to make it look realistic right click and apply shade smooth also go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate you will find the subdivision surface let’s increase the levels viewport to a higher number like three and now we have a realistic suzan model now while practicing nonlinear animation we have to use a dope sheet and to open the dop sheet I’ll first expand this timeline editor and we’ll change this timeline Editor to the dop sheet to do this click on this icon and here you will find the dope sheet so I’ll select this then click here where it is written dop sheet and change the mode to the action editor so this is the action editor and whenever you create an animation in blender the data related to that animation is called action and all this data is saved in your blender file whenever your file is saved now since we’ll be understanding about nonlinear animation so here we also need to add a nonlinear anim editor and for this take your cursor over here right click and select the horizontal split let’s divide the area and left click to finalize now I’ll expand the area of the action editor by left clicking and dragging like this now to change this into the nonlinear animation editor click on this icon and here in the animation section you will find the nonlinear animation so we’ll select this and this is the nonlinear animation editor so basically whatever animation that you will do in the 3D viewport will be saved as an action and will be displayed here so to create a new action click on this new button and a new action is created so suppose you want to create a simple animation with the suzan model showing that initially at the frame number one this object will be at its default position but then at the frame number 50 we’ll move it upwards in The Zed axis and then it will come down again when it reaches the frame number 100 and to do this with a pointer at the frame number one we’ll insert a key frame by pressing I and here we have the key frame inserted now since the position of this object at the frame number one and the frame number 100 will be the same so I’ll take the pointer to the frame 100 and to to insert a key frame here I will press I now here you can see that the area between the two key frames is highlighted with an orange color and this means that there is no change happening between these two frames the position rotation and the scale of the object and all the other properties will remain the same between these two frames but we needed to make the animation where it goes upwards in the Z AIS for this I’ll take this pointer to the frame number 50 go to the 3D view editor and to move it upwards press G and Zed and let’s move it upwards by 5 m so I will type and press enter to insert a key frame press I and now we have a key frame inserted here and now let’s play the animation by taking the pointer to the frame number one and pressing the space bar so this was the animation that we created and now it is stored as an action here you can even change the name of this action by clicking here and because it first goes up and then comes down so let’s change its name from action to up down press enter to confirm and now our action is renamed and suppose you want to create another animation so first you need to remove this animation of up down from the timeline and to remove it click on this cross icon the animation that we created is now removed from the timeline but that particular animation is saved in the form of an action and to check it click on this icon and here you have the up down action saved now suppose you want to create another animation and save it as an action in your file so to do this click on this new button and a new action is created and suppose we want that in this particular action our object or the monkey model should rotate so we’ll take this pointer to the frame number one and let’s insert a key frame at this point so press I and here we have the key frame inserted let’s take it to the frame number 50 and we will be creating an animation where this Cube rotates by 180° in The Zed AIS and then returns back to its original rotation for this press R and z and type 180 press enter to confirm now this object is rotated by 180° in The Zed axis and to insert a key frame at the frame number 50 press I and here we have the key frame inserted now we’ll take this pointer to the frame number 100 and to change its rotation back to the original rotation I’ll select this point with a left Mouse button click previously both of them were selected so both of them highlighted as yellow but now only this one is highlighted and we’ll create a duplicate of this and place it at the frame number 100 so press shift plus T and move it like this and take it to the frame number 100 and left click to finalize now to play the animation I’ll take the pointer to the frame number one and press the space bar and this is how the animation shows our object getting rotated by 180° in Zed axis and returning back to its default State now we’ll change the action name to something related to the animation that we created since we created a rotating animation so we should rename it to rotate and since we rotated it in Zed axxis so I will type Zed press enter to confirm and now if I click this icon we have two actions saved here one of them is this up down and the other one is this rotate Z so basically by using nonlinear animation you can apply multiple animations to your object at the same time very conveniently and to do this we need to add these actions in the nonlinear animation editor here and adding these actions in this editor is known as pushing down so suppose I select the up down action from here and click on this push down button then here we have this up down action added in the nonlinear animation Editor to add the second action click on this icon again and select this rotate action click on this push down button and now here in the nonlinear animation editor we have two actions added one is the rotate and the other one is the up down but now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that our object is showing only the rotation animation but not this up down animation and this is because this rotation action is placed in the upper layer of the nonlinear animation editor this editor Works in a very similar way to the video editing softwares like Premier Pro or DCI resolve here we will be getting the output only of the action which is in the upper layer and since the rotate action is placed above the up down action so here in the animation we can see only the rotation and not the up down animation now suppose you want to see the up down animation and not the rotation so for this you can uncheck this box here by left clicking on it and now if I play the animation by pressing the space bar our object will show the up down animation and not the rotation and this is because even though the rotation is still present present in the upper layer but we have disabled it from here as a result it will only consider this up down action and the object will play this animation and you can even try this with more than two actions in your scene so suppose I create a new action from here take this pointer to the frame number one and we’ll be creating an action where this Cube moves in the x-axis so to insert a key frame at the frame number one press I then go to the frame number 40 and let’s move it in the X Direction by pressing G and x and moving it like this press I to insert the key frame and this time instead of making the animation of 100 frames we’ll be keeping it to 80 frames to make the object return back to its default position I’ll select this point at the frame number one create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and placing it at the frame number 80 left click to finalize now let’s play the animation and this is how it looks let’s also change the name of this action from here and because it is moving in the X Direction so let’s name it move X press enter to confirm and now if I click here we have three actions saved and to bring this move X action in the nonlinear animation editor click on this push down button and here at the top ler we have this move X action inserted and now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation only the action at the uppermost layer will work which is the move X action now here we can see that we have disabled the rotate Zed action so first I’ll enable this and now suppose you want only a particular animation to be played here regardless of the order of these actions in the editor for example if I want the rotate set action to be played simply click on this star icon and now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation then our object will show only the rotation animation in the scene and you can even move these actions in the nonlinear animation editor and to do this if I click on this move x with the left Mouse button and drag it like this we can simply move it in the timeline editor also you can change the layer of this action in this editor for example if I left click and bring it down then now this move X action is in the second layer where this rotation action was placed so now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that the object first rotates in The Zed axis and then it will begin to move in the x-axis and returns back to its original position and now suppose you want to see multiple actions played together to form an entirely different animation to put it in simple words we’ll be basically blending two actions together for example this move X and the rotate Z action and the result would be that this monkey would move in the X Direction and will also rotate in The Zed axis but to do this first with this action selected left click and drag it upwards let’s also place it here and we’ll remove the star from here and now all the layers are activated and now to combine multiple actions together we have to work on this toolbar but first let’s expand this window by left clicking here and dragging like this and here we have the toolbar if you are not able to see this then simply press n to toggle this toolbar so here in the strip option selected you have the information about the frame starting and the frame ending for the selected action type but since we need to combine two actions we have to go to blending option and if I select the combine then it basically creates an animation where the move X action will be combined with the action below its layer which is the rotate Zed action so if I take the pointer to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that the object moves in the xaxis and it is also showing the rotation in the Z axis also if I go to the blending option again then we have the add option and if I select this it will work in a similar way as the combine option so if I take it to frame number one and play the animation you will again notice that our monkey object show both the actions the moving action in the x- axis as well as the rotation in The Zed axis and now suppose you want all the three actions to be played together for this we have to go to the second layer and here in the blending we’ll change this to the combine option and this will combine the rotation and the up down animation so now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that our object is showing all the three actions it moves in the x-axis rotated in the Z axis and also showed an up down animation and so this is how the nonlinear animation works one more important thing is that the Practical use of nonlinear animation is mostly in character animation because while you’re animating your character you would need to add different types of actions and there you will be using the nonlinear animation so after covering the chapters related to character modeling and rigging in this course we will also understand about the use of this nonlinear animation in animating your characters so this brings us to the end of this chapter in this chapter we learned about creating and saving different actions about working in the nonlinear animation editor then we learned about combining different types of actions together to create a completely new [Music] animation I will first delete all these three objects by pressing a and then X to delete and to add the text here press shift plus a and here you have a separate object type named as text so I’ll select this and here we have the text object added to our scene and by default it displays the word text on it and just like you move rotate and scale any other object in blender you can do the same with this also to move the text simply press G and move around like this to rotate it press R and rotate like this similarly to scale the object press s and in this way you can scale up or scale down the text in your scene one more important thing to note here is that the text object added to our scene is two dimensional and not 3D this is because it does not have any thickness added to it we will be exploring about how you can increase the thickness of this text and give it a 3D look but before that let’s first understand that how can you edit the letters and the words that are displayed in this text object and to do this we first have to enter the edit mode by pressing the Tab Key and now you can change the text to anything that you want to be displayed here to remove the letters simply press the backspace and now you can type anything with the help of your keyboard and those specific letters and words will be displayed here in the text object and once you have finalized simply come out of the edit mode by pressing the Tab Key again and now we have changed the text in our scene and now to check the properties and the settings of this text object we have to open the object data properties and for this click on this icon here and all these are the properties of the settings related to this text object now the first option here is the resolution preview and this controls how realistic and smooth your text object looks in the 3D view Port usually a value of somewhere around 10 to 12 looks good in most of the cas cases so we’ll keep it to a value of 12 and then the next option is the render resolution and this one controls how realistic and smooth the text would look like when it is finally rendered the default value of this render resolution is set to zero and this zero means that it takes the same value as that of the resolution preview so both of these default values are fine and the next tool here is the fast editing and if I turn it on the text will not be filled while you are editing it however it will still give the same output when you finally render it and the benefit of using this is that when the filling is disabled then it would take less time to calculate the lighting and everything else and will help you in editing the text faster now the fill mode is whether the front or the back of the text should be filled in and you can even choose that none of them should be filled by clicking on this nonone option or if you want both of them to be filled then you can select both in the fill mode here and this fill mode that we just discovered is basically used when you convert your text from 2D to 3D and to give this text a 3D look click on this geometry option here and here from the extrude if I increase it this will give a 3d effect to our text object right now it is extruded too much so let’s reduce it and I’ll change the Extrusion to a lower value like 0.15 and now it looks good to get a better view I will rotate this in x-axis so press R and x and let’s rotate it by 90° press enter to confirm and now our text looks perfect now the next useful tool in the object data properties for this text is the bevel option here if I increase the depth from here it will basically give a bevel effect to the text in our seen you can control the depth of this bevel effect from here and even the resolution higher the resolution more will be the number of segments more smoother will be your text and it would even give it a realistic look by default it is set to a value of four and its default value usually works fine but to give it a slightly better look you can increase it to 6 or eight and this will increase the smoothness of the text and will add some realism to it now suppose you want to change the font of your text for this in the object data properties you have this option of font so I’ll select this and here you have four different font options to choose regular bold italic and the last is bold plus italic but we’ll only be using the regular font and not the other ones because we can do all the changes in the regular font as well if I click on this icon here this will display me a list of all fonts that I have used in my file but right now it is showing only the default font that is applied to this text object and to change the fonts you have to click on this folder icon against the regular font so I left click on this and this will open up the folder where all the fonts are stored in your device and from here you can choose any particular font that you want to apply for your text and in case it does not show this list then you simply have to locate that particular folder where all the fonts of your PC are saved for Windows users that particular path will be this so you can write down this path in the file path option here and then it will display a list of all the fonts in your device and to add any particular font simply click on it and select open font now that particular font will get applied and to change the size and appearance go to this transform option and from here you can increase or decrease the size of your text the next thing is shear and this basically controls the slant of the font if I increase it the slant will increase in this side and if I reduce it then the slanting will be on the opposite side it only allows a value from minus one to one at a value of minus one it will show the shear effect or the slanting in this negative side if I take it to a value of zero then it won’t show any such effect in any of the two directions and if I increase it to a value of one then it shows the attach or the slant effect in this positive direction right now I’ll change the sheare value back to zero and the next useful setting here is the text on curve but before using this option we first have to add a curve in our scene so press shift plus a go to curve and select the bizier curve it is added here press G and Zed and move it like this and we’ll be placing it just above our text so press G and x and move it in X Direction you might not be able to see the curve right now while moving it in X Direction because the red color of the x-axis and the curve are blending with each other but you can see this tiny yellow Dot and estimate the position of the curve so I’ll place it in the middle press left Mouse button to finalize and now we have to go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad and now I’ll select the text again and in the object data properties of this text in the transform section of the font here you have the option of text on curve so with this text selected I’ll click on this eye dropper and we have to select the basier curve so I’ll take it over

    the curve and left click and we notice some changes in our text basically the text on curve curve allows you to deform the curve which will then control the appearance of your text to understand this I’ll select the curve and if I press s to scale it up the text will also get Scaled up like this similarly if I tab into the edit mode and deselect all these points then here in the bzier curve I have two points one is at the beginning and it has these two pointers and the other is at the end and this one also has these two pointers the pointers here help you to deform the curve for example with this pointer selected if I press R to rotate then the text Will get reformed to cancel this I will right click and you can even try one more thing which is to select the particular pointer and instead of selecting the two basier pointers here we will directly try to deform with only this one selected so suppose I press R and try to rotate the curve then we’ll see the deformation on this curve as well as our text object similarly you can try to move the curve by pressing G or maybe scale the curve by pressing s and you will see similar deformations on your text object however you will be using this curve to deform your text in very rare cases but it’s always better to understand the concept so that you at least have the knowledge about the basics of that tool right now I will come out of the edit mode by pressing the T key and I’ll be deleting this curve by pressing X and then delete now all the deformations will get removed on deleting the curve object now I’ll select this text and here in the object data properties if I scroll down we have this segment of paragraph and it basically defines the alignment and the spacing in your text object in the alignment you have two options one is the horizontal and the other one is vertical and if I go to the horizontal alignment and change it to Center then it will basically take the Z axis as the center of alignment and will place the text like this similarly if I change it to right then the text object will show right alignment in respect of the Zed axis but right now I will change the horizontal alignment to the default left and the next option you have here is the vertical alignment and this vertical alignment basically considers the x-axis as the center right now it is set to top basine and that is why it appears like this but if I change it to top top then the alignment would change similarly if I change it to Middle then it appears like this so you can use these different options of alignment to perfectly align your object as per your specific requirement and next you have the character spacing and this basically controls the spacing in between the letters or the characters of this text if I increase it the spacing between the characters or the letters will increase but right now I think that I should reduce it to a value of somewhere around 1.1 or 1.2 and it looks perfect now then next you have the word spacing and this basically controls the spacing in between the words of your text which means that the space between JB and 3D and also between 3D and studio will be controlled with this word spacing so if I increase it the spacing or the distance between the words will increase and for now I will change its value to the default one then next you have the line spacing and this basically controls the spacing or the distance between multiple lines in your text right now we have only one line but to add a new line I will enter the edit mode by pressing the Tab Key and to move to the next line press enter and now if I type anything then it will be seen in the next line of the text and if you want to bring this subscribe text to the center then take the cursor here and press the space bar like this this looks perfect so I’ll come out of the edit mode and now if I go to the line spacing and try to increase it then the distance or the spacing between the line one that is jb3d studio and the line two which is subscribed will increase but for now I will keep it to the default value of one so that the spacing and the distance between them is decreased and there’s one more way by which you can reduce the spacing between jb3d studio and this subscribe which is to actually subscribe to this Channel and now moving ahead you can even create a simple animation of this text and this is because here in the object data properties again some of the options you have these small dots which indicate that you can insert key frames and animate these values for example if I go to the extrude option here and change the Extrusion to zero and insert a key frame by clicking on this dot then here in the timeline editor a key frame is added at the frame number one now if I take the pointer to the frame number 50 and here I’ll change the Extrusion to a higher value like 0.15 and insert a key frame at the frame number 50 as well so now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation you will notice that our text in the scene is getting extruded and getting a 3D look so you can try to animate different properties here and observe the changes in your scene also if you want to give it some material then first I’ll go to the material preview mode then we’ll go to the material properties editor click on the new button and we’ll change the base color from here let’s change it to yellow color and now it looks like this but now suppose you want that the upper text should be yellow but this subscribed text should be red colored and for this we’ll be using a very useful tool which is the convert to mesh tool as I told you earlier the text that we added here is a separate object type and not a mesh a mesh can be a cube a cylinder or a UV sphere and other similar objects and to convert this into mesh go to the object option here then go to convert and select mesh now this text object is converted to mes and now there are some slight changes that we can see in our file the first change is that the key frames that we added here are now removed and even the animation is gone and this is because we converted this text object to Mish in fact if I go to the edit mode now I can no longer type anything which would be displayed as the text in our scene since it is converted to mesh so now it has these vertices edges and faces which you can select and try to edit them but we won’t be doing that right now because it already looks perfect and to change the color of some specific word of the text we’ll first go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad and now we have to select all the vertices of this subscribe text so I left click and drag my cursor like this and if I release it then all these vertices are selected but if I change the view then you will notice that the vertices at the back face are not selected and to fix this we have to use the x-ray mode press all plus Z to turn on the x-ray mode and now if I go to the front view again deselect all the vertices left click and drag like this then in this case all all the vertices of this text will be selected to change the color I will go to the material properties click on this plus icon and to give it a new material click on the new button let’s change the base color from here and I will change it to red color to apply this material to the selected text click on this assign button and now if I go to the object mode then you can see here that this upper text is yellow colored and the subscribed text is red colored and this is how the text works in blender also this brings us to the end of this chapter and from our next chapter we’ll begin with the understanding of geometry nodes in blender and this amazing topic of geometry nodes will be completed in 20 plus chapters because we’ll be discovering about almost all the geometry notes that are present in blender and we’ll also be making a new scene in every chapter with the help of the particular geometry notes that will be covered in that specific [Music] chapter so far in this course we learned about the modeling Tools in blender then we covered all the modifiers in blender after that we understood about the materials textures and nodes created lots of basic shaders and procedural shaders then we covered the basics and even understood the advanced level of animation and from this chapter we’ll be starting our journey of understanding the geometry nodes in blender understanding this amazing concept will require us a total of 20 plus chapters because we’ll be covering all the geometry nodes that are present in blender and in each chapter we’ll be creating different scenes with the help of the geometry notes that we would have covered in that specific chapter and in this chapter we’ll first understand about how the geometry nodes work and then we’ll cover all these nodes in complete detail and we’ll be using these nodes to make this Snowman in blender now to start with the geometry nodes we first have to switch to the geometry nodes workspace so click on this workspace which is named as geometry nodes and this layout appears here this is called the spreadsheet this is the geometry nodes editor and this is the 3D viewport now to get a geometry node we have to click on this new button and this is the basic geometry node applied in the modify properties here you can see a modifier named geometry nodes added automatically so basically geometry nodes is a modifier and that is why it is appearing Here and Now moving ahead here in the spreadsheet we have information about the object that we have selected which is the cube in this case the first option here is the vortex and it basically tells about the number of vertices and their positions in the 3D view Port then here you have the option of edges then the faces and the face corners and a lot of other things and we’ll be discovering all these options later on when we dive deeper in the concept of geometry nodes but for now we’ll be understanding about the mesh options in this spr sheet the first one is the vertex here you can see the number eight which represents the number of vertices and here you can see that you have the position of the specific vertices in the X Y and Zed axis here one thing to notice is that the indexing of the vertices is not starting from one like usually when we are counting things we count it like 1 2 3 4 but in this case the counting or the indexing is started from zero and then 1 2 and then it ends on seven similarly here you can see that we have 12 edges or six faces and 24 face corners but for now we’ll move to the geometry noes and here you can see in the geometry noes editor that we have this group input and this group output the group input basically represents this Cube that we are having right now whatever changes that we’ll make in between these two will get applied to our Cube object which was the input and the output that will be generated will get connected to this group output and will also be seen on this Cube but since we are not having anything in between the geometry input and the geometry output as a result we are not able to see any changes here but if I go to the geometry nodes editor and break this connection by holding the control button and right clicking and dragging like this then a cube will disappear and that is because the connection between the input and the output no longer exists as a result whatever information this group input was carrying about the cube is not able to reach the group output which has to generate the output in a 3D viewboard and therefore we can’t see anything and if I take a geometry socket and connect it to the geometry socket of the output then a cube will reappear and if you want to add any specific geometry Noe then you simply have to press shift plus a and here you will find a list of all the categories of nodes that are present in blender also you will find this category of texture nodes about which we learned in the previous chapters of this course but we’ll be learning about them again while understanding the geometry nodes now suppose I ask you to change this Cube into a UV sphere and that to with the help of geometry nodes usually you would have gone to the 3D view port and deleted this Cube and then would have added a UV sphere but with geometry nodes you simply need to press shift plus a and here you have an option of mesh and if I go to The Primitives you will find a list of the mesh Primitives that we use used to add in our scene by pressing shift plus a so if I select the UV sphere then this node will appear and if I left click to place it here now to convert this Cube into a UV sphere I have to take this mesh socket and connect it to the geometry socket of the group output and here we have the cube converted into the UV sphere basically what we did here is that we broke the connection between the group input which was carrying the information of the cube and the group output and we made a new connection with this node carrying the information about a UV sphere and connected it to the group output and now if I go to this spreadsheet and select this Vortex we now observe that we have different values about the vertex in the mesh as compared to the ones that we had when this object was a cube and this is how the mesh primitive works in the geometry nodes so whenever you have to change the structure of your object to any other mesh simply press shift plus a go to mesh and in The Primitives you can select that particular mesh type for example if I select the cylinder and place it here and to change the structure of this UV sphere into a cylinder I’ll take this mesh socket and connect it to the geometry and here we have a cylinder in our seal and this one thing that you can do which is to select a particular node and hold down Control Plus shift and left click and then this viewer node will appear which basically allows you to preview things quickly for example if I go to the cylinder and press contrl plus shift and left click then we’ll be able to view the cylinder so you can easily switch between different mesh primitive nodes with the use of this viewer node and also one more thing to notice here is that here in the UV sphere and the cylinder node you have these options of changing the settings of that particular mesh for example the vertices the radius the depth of the cylinder so you can use these settings to change the way how your mesh would look like in the 3D view editor and yes this shortcut of holding control shift and left clicking will work only if you have the node Wrangler add-on turned on we learned about this add-on in this chapter of the course and for now I will delete this cylinder node by selecting it and pressing X and we’ll connect this UV sphere to the group output let’s also select this viewer and press X to relate it and now we simply have this UV sphere node connected to the group output and now we are moving to the next topic of this chapter which is the trans node and this transform node is basically used to change the position rotation and scale of your object directly from the geometry node Editor to add it press shift plus a go to geometry and in the operations you will find this transform geometry we’ll place it in between the UV sphere and the output and it will get directly connected to both and you can simply change these values to change the position rotation and the scale of your object for example the translation here basically means the position of this object in the 3D view editor for example if I change the translation in the X axis then it will move like this in the x-axis similarly in the y- AIS and also in the Zed axis and if I go to the rotation and change the rotation in xaxis then it will begin to rotate in the x-axis similarly the Y and the Zed axis also then you have the scaling option and if I change the scale value in the xaxis then it will get Scaled up like this in the x-axis so you can try to change these values to easily transform the geometry of your object and that to in the geometry note Editor to change these to the default values one way is to left click and drag like this and now if I press zero and press enter the position is now again set to the default value of zero but another way to return back to the default value is to hover your cursor over some value and press backspace and now the rotation in all the three axis is set to their default value of 0° similarly if I go to the scale and press backspace it will turn the value to zero however we need the default values to be one in order to see the object so I’ll select all three of them and type one press enter and here we have the UV sphere again so till now we understood about adding some specific mesh with the help of the mesh PR then we learned about changing the position rotation and the scaling of your object with the help of the transform geometry now suppose you want to make a snowman with the help of these geometry nodes for this we have one of the UV spheres added to our scene but we’ll need another one at the top of this UV Sphere for this I will select this node press shift plus 3 to create a duplicate and let’s place it here and right now we can see only one UV sphere in our scene that is because the second node is not connected to this node system we need to join both these UV spheres together in order to view both of them in the 3D view editor for this we’ll be using a new node which is called The Joint geometry node to add it press shift plus a go to geometry and here you will find the joint geometry let’s place it here and you can notice here that the geometry socket here is not circular in shape it is somewhat oval in shape this indicates that it can accept more than one inputs at a time for example if I break the node Connection in between the transform geometry and the group output by holding the control button and dragging the right Mouse button like this and take this geometry socket and connect it to the geometry socket of of the joint geometry similarly if I go to the UV sphere and take this mesh socket and connect it to the geometry socket then it will accept both the inputs in this socket and to get a preview of the result here simply hold down crl plus shift and left click on the joint geometry here you might be thinking that only one of the UV spheres is present but it is not true actually the position of both the UV spheres is same and that is why it appears like this but if I go to the transform geometry which is connected to the first UV sphere and let’s suppose I change the translation in The Zed axis to something like 1.2 m then this UV sphere will move upwards and now we can see both the UV spheres in our scene and since we’ll be making a snowman with the help of these two UV spheres we have to reduce the size of the upper Uvis sphere so I’ll go to the transform geometry note select the three scale values and let’s reduce it to a lower number like 0.7 or 0.8 and now it looks perfect and so this is how the joint geometry node Works in fact it can even be used to join more than two nodes together for example if I select this UV sphere and the transform geometry press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it here let’s Zoom out and now if I take the geometry socket of this third UV sphere and connect it to the Joint geometry then it will take it as an input and will add another UV sphere in our scene to view that UV sphere we have to change the translation in The Zed axis right now it is set to 1.2 but let’s increase it to a higher number like 2 m or maybe 2.2 M and now it looks like this this UV sphere will act as the head of our snowman so let’s reduce the scale value to something even lower like 0.6 and now it looks perfect now suppose you want these UV spheres to be smooth earlier you simply use to right click and select the shades mod but it does not work in this case and that is because we have to use the geometry nodes only to apply the shades mod to it to do this we’ll be using the next node which is the set shade smooth so for this press shift plus a go to mesh and here in the right you will find this set shade smooth so I’ll select this and let’s place it here and to connect it to the rest of the node system simply select it and move it in between the joint geometry and the viewer node and here the shade smooth is applied to all the three UV spheres and now suppose you want that the shade smooth should be applied only to the middle U sphere and not to the others for this we first have to remove this shade smooth from this connection between the joint geometry and the viewer to do this simply hold down alt and left click to drag it and it will get disconnected and since it is no more in the connection all the three UV spheres are shaded flat again and to apply shade smooth only to the second UV sphere that is this one we have to connect this set shade smooth node in between the transform geometry of the second UV sphere and the join geometry so I left click on it and drag it and let’s bring it here and if I release then it will get connected to the second UV sphere and the joint geometry and as a result we see here that only the second UV sphere is now shaded smooth and not the others previously we connected the set shade smooth in such a way that it took input from The Joint geometry which was carrying information about all the three UV spheres as a result all of them were shaded smooth and since we are making a snowman so we’ll need the shade smooth applied to all the three UV spares as a result I have to place this set shade smooth node in between the joint geometry and the viewer node for this I will again hold down the alt button and left click to remove it and let’s place it in between joint geometry and the viewer node and do ensure that you are not holding down the alt button while dropping it in between the two nodes and now this shade smooth is applied to all the three UV spheres and now the last thing is to give some material to our snowman for this we’ll be using another node which is the set material node so press shift plus a go to material and select set material and we’ll place it after the set shade smooth the set material node will help us to give some material to this node man previously whenever we needed to give any material to any object we either used to go to the material properties here and do the changes or we used to open the Shader editor but since we are working on the geometry nodes as a result we’ll be using the set material node to make the changes in the material but yes we’ll still be working on the material properties here and we’ll drop down that particular material that we create in this material option of the set material for example if I change the name of this material to snow and go to the base color and let’s change it to blue color let’s also turn on the render View and to see the material on our object we’ll go to the set material and here in the material option we’ll select snow and here the snow material is applied to our object and since it is placed after the joint geometry node so the material will be applied to all the three UV spheres now to make it look like a real snow texture we’ll be doing some changes in the material in Shader Editor to open the Shader editor here I will change this spreadsheet into the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader editor let’s close this toolbar by pressing n and to increase the size of this window simply take your cursor over here let left click and drag like this let’s zoom in and now to create the snow material we’ll be using the noise texture so press shift plus a go to texture and add the noise texture let’s place it here and to get the input node and the mapping node connected to it I will use the shortcut control+ D but this shortcut will only work if you have the node Wrangler turned on now here in the texture coordinate we’ll change the input to the object socket and connect it to the vector and to connect the noise texture to the output hold on contrl plus shift and left click on the noise texture the basic noise texture is now visible on our object and now we’ll be using two noise textures and we’ll mix them together to create the snow material for this with this noise texture selected press shift plus d let’s place the duplicate over here and to combine both of them press shift plus a go to color and select the mixed color let’s place it here to mix both of them I’ll take this color socket of the noise texture and connect it to the color a similarly I’ll take the color socket of the noise texture number two and connect it to the color B and to connect this mixed socket to the output hold down control and shift and left click on it and here we see that both the noise textures are applied to our object let’s do some changes in the noise textures for example in the second one we’ll keep the roughness to a very high value like 500 or 600 let’s also reduce the detailing to a very low value like 0.1 and also the roughness to a very low value like 0.1 again the reason for doing this is that we’ll be using a combination of both the noise textures to create a realistic looking snow material so one of them has a low scale value with high detailing and roughness and the other one has a high skill value with low detailing and low roughness but we’ll be needing more effect of the noise texture number one because because it is having low scale but High detailing and roughness and to do this we simply have to reduce the factor to a lower value like 0.1 and now it will have influence of the first noise texture much more than the second and to give it some color we’ll be adding a color Ram first let’s take the material output and let’s place it here right now this principal bstf is disconnected but we’ll place it in between the mix node and the output and to give it some color press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp let’s place it here now with the pointer number one selected I’ll click here to change the color let’s increase the brightness with the help of this brightness slider and let’s change the color number one to light blue color and for the color at the pointer number two let’s keep it to white color only and now it looks like this but to make it look realistic and to give it a 3D bump effect let’s add a bump node in the Shader editor so press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump let’s place it here take this normal socket and connect it to the normal of the principal bsdf then take this result socket and connect it to the height socket of the bump node and here we see the bump effect added to the material of our object one more thing to notice here is that the result socket of this mix node is connected to the height socket of the bump node which means that this yellow colored socket is connected to this Gray colored socket of the bump node in one of my previous chapters I told you that usually we connect the sockets of same color together but there’s no hard and fast rule for this you can even connect sockets of different colors together and you will end up getting some different results in this case this mixed node was carrying information about these two noise textures and was having only one option which is the result socket as the output and we needed to apply the bump node to the combination of these two noise textures as a result we had to use the result socket of the mix node and connected it to the height socket of the bump node and now moving ahead you can even try to change the strength of this bump effect from the strength option here right now it is set to its maximum value of one but I think that we should reduce it to something like 0.5 or 0.4 and now it looks better similarly you can also control the roughness from here in the principal bsdf and in this way we created the simple looking Snowman in our scene with all these geometry nodes and this snow material and suppose you want to add a plane below the model and that to by using the geometry nodes but if I press shift plus a and go to mesh then in The Primitives there is no option of plane but to add the plane we have to select this grid option and if I place it here and if I connect it to the Joint geometry by taking this mesh socket and connecting it to the geometry here the plane will get added in our scene but we have to increase its size from here so I’ll change the size value in the X direction to a higher value like8 and also in the y- axis let’s keep it to 8 m and to move it downwards we have to add the transform geometry node so for this press shift plus a go to geometry and in the operations you will find the transform geometry let’s place it here take this mesh socket and connect it to Geometry then we’ll break the node Connection in between the grid and the joint geometry by holding the control button right clicking and dragging like this and then I’ll take this geometry socket and connect it to the geometry socket of this joint geometry and now I can use the translation in The Zed axis to move this plane downwards let’s keep it to a value of somewhere around- 03 or maybe – 0.6 and now it looks perfect and there’s one more important thing to note here if I go to the layout workspace again you will notice that our object is not visible here to fix this go to the geometry nodes workspace again and here in the geometry nodes editor we have not connected the entire node system to the group output for this I’ll take this geometry socket and connect it to the geometry socket of the group output and now if I go to the layout workspace again here we have our snowman added let’s turn on the render view from here and this is how it looks so we created this simple scene in this chapter with the help of all the geometry notes and we even understood about each one in complete detail and this also brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in this chapter we’ll be exploring all these topics in complete detail and we’ll also be creating the simple scene of these buildings with the help of all these topics so to begin with the first topic for today’s chapter is extrude mesh node and to understand it we first have to open the geometry nodes workspace so click here to open the workspace and click on the new button now to add the extrude mesh node press shift plus a go to mesh and in the operations you will find the extrude mesh so I’ll select this and let’s place it here and to connect it to the rest of the note system if I left click and drop it here then it will get connected and we notice some changes here as the name suggests the extrude mesh node basically extrudes up the faces of our Cube object now here in the extrude mesh you have some options the first one is the mode of Extrusion by default it is set to faces and as a result the faces of this Cube are being extruded individually but here we have some other options as well so if I select the vertices it will basically extrude the vertices of this Cube object the next next option available is the edges and just like the other two this one will extrude the edges of the cube but right now I will change the mode back to faces and here you have the offset value which basically defines the offset or the amount of Extrusion that is applied to your Cube for example if I increase it then the Extrusion will increase and if I reduce it to somewhere near- 0.2 or- 0.3 then the faces will get extruded inwards and here in the extrude mesh node you can also see that you have these two options of selection and offset but we’ll study about them later on because it will require the use of some other notes that we have not yet covered in this course so for now you need to focus on the mode of Extrusion and the offset value here now there’s also one more option available here which is the individual and it is turned on by default it basically means that the Extrusion will be applied to the individual faces to understand it better if I turn it off then it would mean that the Extrusion is not applied to individual faces but to the object as a whole so if I increase the offset from here you will notice that the object is getting extruded as a whole and not its individual faces so this individual option is B basically used to set whether you want the Extrusion to be applied individually or as a whole on the object and you can even apply this extrude mesh to any other type of mesh such as a UV sphere so suppose you want to apply this extrude mesh to a UV sphere and add it in our scene for this in the geometry nodes editor we’ll first add the UV sphere node so press shift plus a and since the UV sphere is a type of mesh primitive so I’ll go to mesh and here in The Primitives we have the option of UV sphere so I’ll select this and let’s place it here now to apply the Extrusion to it I’ll take this extrude mesh which is right now applied to the cube and to create a duplicate of it press shift plus d and let’s place it here now I’ll take this mesh socket of the UV sphere and connect it to the mesh of the extrude mesh and now if I take this output socket of the extrude mesh and connect it to the group output here we have the UV sphere with the Extrusion effect applied to it and suppose you want to see both the cube and the UV sphere in the same scene and to do this we’ll be using a node which we explored in the previous chapter and this is the joint geometry node to add it press shift plus a go to geometry and here you have the option of joint geometry so I’ll select this and let’s place it here now I’ll take this mesh socket which is carrying the information about the extruded Cube and connect it to Joint geometry and also I’ll take the mesh socket of the extruded mesh which is carrying information about this extruded UV sphere so I’ll select this and connect it to the Joint geometry we’ll break the node Connection in between the mesh socket here and the group output so hold down the control button right click and drag like this now I’ll take this geometry socket and connect it to the output it appears like this because both the cube and the UV sphere are placed at the same position which is the origin of the 3 world and suppose I want to shift this UV sphere in the x-axis and for this we’ll be using another node from the last chapter which is the transform node to add it press shift plus a go to geometry and in the operations you will find the transform geometry so I’ll select this and let’s place it here in between the extrude mesh of the UV sphere and the joint geometry and to move the UV sphere in the x-axis I will go to the translation and let’s change the position in the x-axis and now here we have the cube and the UV sphere properly placed in the scene and both of them are showing this Extrusion effect applied to them and now let’s revise whatever we did in this geometry note editor first we have this group input which is carrying the information about this cube in the scene then we use this extrude mesh to apply Extrusion to all the faces of this Cube individually then to add the UV sphere we added this UV sphere node and connected it to the extrude mesh because we wanted to apply the Extrusion effect on its faces individually then we had to add this transform geometry because we needed to move this UV sphere in the x-axis and in the end we connected both of them to join geometry in order to see both the cube and the UV sphere in our 3D view port and at last we connected it to the output to see the final output here now moving ahead the next thing that we are going to discover instance on points node to see how it works I will add a plane without deleting all these to do this press shift plus a go to mesh then in The Primitives we have this option of grid so I’ll select this and place it here we studied in the last chapter that we have to use this grid node to add a plane in our scene to see the output here I will break the connection between the joint geometry and the output so hold down the control button right click and like this let’s take this group output and place it here now to connect them together take this mesh socket and connect it here and here we have the plane in our scene here you can see that in the grid we have some settings like the size and the vertices so if I increase the size in the x-axis then it will get Scaled up like this similarly in the Y AIS and here you have two more options which are the vertices in the x and y axis and to understand about them we first need to go to the wireframe mode for this you can click on this icon or else there’s a shortcut which is to hold down Zed and take your cursor to the wireframe and this is the wireframe display of the plane object if I move it slightly in the y- axis by pressing G and Y and placing it here and also in the x-axis by pressing G and x and placing it here then now you can see here that in the x-axis it is having three points one of them is here where it touches the edge the second one is at the middle and the third one is again here where it touches the other Edge and the number of vertices in the x-axis is controlled from this option in the grid here it is set to three but suppose if I increase it to a number like five then now we are having Five Points in the x-axis when is here touching the edge the second one is this the third one is in the middle the fourth one is this one and the fifth is this last one which is again touching this Edge similarly in the y- axis the number of vertices is set to three and as a result as we move along the y- axis we have three points first one is this which is Touching The Edge the second one is in the middle and the third one is here at the end you can change the value of vertices in the y axis from here so if I change this one also to five then now it looks like this in simple words you can understand it in this way that this vertices option in the X and Y AIS is basically similar to the subdivision that we used to apply to our object it helps to increase the number of vertices of our plane and now coming back to our topic of understanding the instance on point node we’ll first add it here so press shift plus a go to instances and here you have the option of instance on points so I’ll select this and place it here in between the grid and the output and suddenly our plane object disappears and that’s because we have to add some instance here which in simple words means any object for example if I add a cube by pressing shift plus a going to mesh and in The Primitives here I have the option of cube so I’ll select this and place it here now I need to connect this Cube to the instance so I’ll take this mesh socket and connect it to instance and we see some changes here to view it properly we’ll go to the solid mode again and here we first need to reduce the size of these cubes so I’ll select the sizes in all the three axis by left clicking and dragging like this and I’ll type 0.1 M and press enter to confirm and let’s try to understand what happened here basically what this instance on points does is that it places the instances meaning the cubes in this case on the points or the vertices of our plain object if you remember we changed the number of vertices in the X and the Y AIS to five here and as a result we are having five cubes placed in the x-axis and also in the y- AIS in simple words as its name suggests it places the instance or the mesh which is connected to the instance here on the points of a particular object which is connected to the points here you can even control the number of these cubes from the vertices option in the grid node for example if in the x-axis I reduce the number to three then here we have three in the x axis and five in the Y AIS now you can also try to do some changes here for example you can apply the Extrusion to all these cubes by going to the geometry nodes editor and to add the Extrusion press shift plus a go to mesh and here in the operations we have the extrude mesh let’s place it in between the cube and the instance on points and it appears like this because the offset value is too high so let’s reduce it to a lower number like 0.1 or maybe 0.01 and now it looks perfect also I think that we should change the number of these cubes to four in both the X and Y axis so go to the grid node select the vertices in the X and Y axis type four and press enter now we have four cubes in the x-axis as well as in the y axis and you can even try to scale them up from the size option here or from the scale option in the instance on points so you can choose any of the two both will work in the same way and I think that we should scale them up to a slightly higher value in all the three axis so let’s change the scaling to 0.2 M or maybe let’s reduce them down to a slightly lower number like 0.16 M and now it looks perfect and yes we’ll be using these cubes to make the scene of the buildings now to convert these cubes into building we have to make them taller and for this we’ll be using another node which is the combined XYZ node but before adding it let’s first zoom out and we’ll be deleting this entire node system because it is not required anymore so I’ll select all of this except this group input because it will be required for making these buildings so to deselect it simply hold down the control button left click and drag your cursor over the group input like this now it is deselected and to delete press X and now they’re deleted now we’ll take this group input and place it here and now moving back to changing the height of these buildings we’ll be adding the combined XYZ node so press shift plus a go to utilities and here in the vector you will find the combined XYZ so I’ll select this and place it over here since we need to manipulate the size of these cubes so I’ll take this Vector socket and connect it to the size and we can’t see anything here because the size of these cubes is now being controlled by these values in the combined XYZ and because they’re set to zero as a result we can’t see anything here to scale them up I will select all the three axes and type 0.16 because that was the size that we previously entered as the size of these cubes now you might be thinking that what exactly is the use of adding this combined XYZ when you could have simply used options in the size here to change the height of your building and you will get to know this answer in a little while but before that we need to First understand about this group input node you must have noticed here that in the group input node you have this empty socket here and suppose I take the socket of the Zed axis and connect it to this empty socket then it basically creates a new socket with the name Zed and also if you go to the modify properties in this geometry node modifier you can directly control the scaling in The Zed axis from here so basically whatever you connect to an empty socket will be created as a new socket in the group input node and then you can control that specific value from the modify properties here and this was the reason why we added this combine XYZ instead of using the size option in the cube by doing this we can now simply change the height of these buildings just by going to the modify properties and changing the Z AIS and now moving ahead there are some more settings that you can do with this newly created socket in the group input node for this we first have to open the toolbar here by pressing the N key and here you can see that we have a list of three items here that are present in group input and the group output the first one is the geometry node the second geometry node and here on the third number we have this Z socket that we ourselves created you can even change the name of this socket by double clicking here and suppose I change the name to height and press enter to confirm and here in the geometry node editor the name of this socket is changed you can even control the type of value that can be added as an input in the height value here by default it is set to float meaning that you can add DE deal values to the height here but suppose I change it to integer then in this case I can only add the integer values like Min -1 0 + 1 + 2 and not the decimal values to it but in this case I’ll be changing the type back to float let’s go to the height again and let’s increase it to 0.16 M for now so this is how the group input node and the combined XYZ node works now moving ahead in order to change the height of these buildings we have to change the height value from here but if I increase it you will notice that the height changes both in the upward and the downward Direction but if you want to increase the height only in the upward Direction and not in the downward then for this we have to use another node which is the math node and the math node is probably that one node which has the maximum number of options in it to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and here in the math we’ll select this math node let’s place it here and now if I click on this drop down you can see here that we have a lot of options in the math node by default the add function is selected here but we’ll be learning all these options as we move further in this course while learning the geometry nodes now as the name suggests this add option in the math node basically adds two values together here we have the option to add two values and by default both of them are set to 0.5 as a result it would add these values and return the output which is one from this value socket in fact you can even connect these sockets against these values if you want to influence or change these values and now to get a better view of the buildings we’ll go to the front or the side view by pressing one or three on the numpad and now to increase the height of the buildings if I go to the geometry node modifier and increase the height from here we see that the height increases in upward as well as downward Direction basically in other words we want that as we increase the height all these cubes should move upwards in The Zed axis so that they start from their origin Point here and whenever we have to change the position of our cubes in any direction then we have to use the transform node so we’ll add it here by pressing shift plus a let’s go to geometry and in the operations here we have the transform geometry so I’ll select this and let’s place it after the cube node and now if I go to the geometry nodes modifier and increase the height then now I can move them upwards to the origin point with the help of translation in the Z axis so if I slightly increase it by holding the shift button and increasing it by dragging like this then they will move upwards and will begin up to their origin points perfectly but whenever I will change the height from here they will again get Scaled up in the downward Direction and again I have to go to the Z translation and change the value from here and to solve this problem we’ll be using this math node so let’s first undo everything by pressing crl plus Z 3 to four times now I’ll take this math node and place it over here and since I need to make the changes only in The Zed axis so I’ll be using the comp B XYZ node here we have already added it so I’ll select this press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it here now take this value socket of the math node and connect it to the Zed axis then take this Vector socket and connect it to the translation now to see the cubes here we have to zoom out and to bring them down we’ll be using this math node here this math node is controlling the translation in The Zed axis with the help of these values right now these values are set to 0.5 each and as a result when they will get added the output will be one therefore the position of these cubes will be 1 M up upwards in the Z axis also you can control the position in the X and Y axis from here which is set to 0.16 because we created a duplicate from here which was controlling the size and therefore we are having these values here so I’ll select both of them and reduce it to zero but even after doing all this our problem is still not solved because if I go to the height option here and increase it we again have the same issue of the cube scaling up in both upwards and downwards Direction and this is because in the math node here the two of these values are controlling the position of these Cubes but instead of these values it it should actually be the height which would control their position in the Zed axis to understand this properly I will take this height socket of the group input and connect it to one of this value socket and now what it does is that it will add the value of height which is 0.6 right now to the second value which is 0.5 and assign that particular value to the translation in The Zed axis so if I go to the height option and increase it then now we notice that this height option is controlling two things here one is the scaling of these cubes and the second thing is the movement in the Zed axis for example if I increase the height to a very high value then the cubes will move up in the Zed axis and if I reduce it then their position in the Zed axis will also reduce even though the movement in the downward direction is now reduced to some extent but still it’s not completely fixed and that is because we are using the add option in the math node because whatever value I will assign to the height this add option will increase it by 0.5 M and as a result these cubes will go upwards in The Zed AIS to fix this we have to change the option from add to divide and now if I increase the height from here and try to adjust the second value here to that particular point where it touches the x-axis then our problem will be fixed and here at a value of somewhere around 1.8 and 1.9 with the height set to 0.82 it appears to be perfect and now if I increase the height from here we see that the buildings are only getting scaled up and down and their position is not getting affected and let’s also understand how this divide option in the math note is working basically the first value is set to the value of height here which is 0.82 and the second value is 1.89 as a result it will generate the output which is 0.82 divided by 1.89 which is equal to 0.433 m to the translation or the position in the Z axis and as a result the cubes appear like this so you can basically use this math node with the Divide option and connect it to the translation in The Zed axis and in this way you can change the height from here without facing the problem of these buildings or the cubes moving downwards in The Zed axis now one thing to notice here is that the height of all these buildings is exactly the same but to give it a realistic look and to have random Heights for each of the building buildings we’ll be using another node which is the random value node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and here you have the random value so I’ll select this and place it here and now since we need to change the height or basically the size of these buildings we have to connect this random value to the scaling here with the help of a combine XYZ node so for this I will press shift plus a go to utilities and in the vector you will find the combine XYZ node so I’ll select this and place it here now the height of the buildings is controlled from the scaling in The Zed axis as a result I’ll take the value socket of the random value and connect it to the Zed axis then take this vector and to connect this Vector we have two options here one of them is the scale of this transform geometry node which is connected to this Cube and the other one is the scale option in the instance on points and if I take the vector socket and connect it to the first scaling option then we see that everything disappears and this connection line is turned to red color which indicates some error so I will press contrl plus Z and let’s try the same with a scaling in the instance on points and this time also we see no output here everything is disappeared but this time this note connection is not red colored which means that at least there is no error in this case and in fact connecting this Vector socket to the scale option of the instance on points was the correct choice because if I go to the combine Exquisite and change these values in the X and Y to one then these buildings will reappear and this time we are having some random Heights applied to each of these buildings now let’s also understand how this random value basically worked we connected the random value note to The Zed axis of the scaling through this combin XY Z node and here you can see that it has two values one is the minimum and the other one is the maximum the minimum value is set to zero and the maximum is set to one meaning that it will generate an output between 0 and 1 and assign it to the Zed axis and that particular value will be a decimal or float value because here in the type of data we have the float selected you also have other options like integer Vector Boolean but in this case we required only the float and so it assigned random Heights between 0 and 1 to all these cubes now you might be having one more doubt in your mind which is that why did did we receive error when we connected the vector to the transform geometry but not in case of instance on points and the reason is very simple see the transform geometry was carrying the information about this Cube as a whole whereas the instance on points was carrying information about all these instances which are the cubes and since we needed a random height for each of the cube or the instance we had to connect the vector to the scaling to the instance on points now here in the random value you have another option which is seed and by changing this you will basically generate another output with different random values assigned to the height of each of these buildings so basically you can generate different outputs with the help of this seed value right now I will change it back to zero and now let’s move to the next topic which is understanding the index node and we’ll be understanding this index node by first creating a simple Cube here so for this let’s move upwards in this geometry noes editor and for those of you who don’t know you can move around the noes editor simply by holding the middle Mouse button and dragging your mouse like this so let’s go over here and to add a cube press shift plus a go to mesh and in The Primitives here we have have the cube so I’ll select this and place it here let’s also add the index node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in the read you will find the index node let’s place it here now to view the cube object here simply hold down the contrl plus shift and left click on the cube and here we see our object and also this shortcut will work only if the node dangler add-on is turned on now to understand the working of this index node we should first extrude the faces of this Cube and for this I will add the extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in the operations we have the extrude mesh so I’ll select this and place it in between the cube and the viewer node now here you can see that all the faces of our Cube are now extruded but suppose you want that only a specific face or some particular Edge or vertex should have been extruded instead of all of these and for this we use the index node now if I remove the extrude mesh from the connection in between the cube and the viewer by holding the alt button and left clicking to remove it and if I select the cube then here in the spreadsheet you can see that with the vortex option selected you have some numbers written over here these numbers start from zero and go on until 7 we learned in the previous chapter that these numbers numbers are the index values of each of the vertices of this Cube see every vertex Edge and face has a particular index value which you can use to manipulate the way it looks similarly if I go to the face option here then you can see that the index value of face is also starting from zero and goes on till five meaning that there are six faces in this Cube now suppose you want that this extrude mesh should be applied to only one of the faces and not all of them to do this I will first select this extrude mesh and place it here and now we have to connect this index socket to the selection socket of the extrude mesh the selection socket allows you to select which particular Vertex or phase or Edge you want to be extruded but to tell this selection socket that exactly which phase at what index number should be extruded we have to use another node which is compare node so press shift plus a go to utilities then in the math section you will find the compare node so I’ll select this and place it here now click here and change the operation to equal we’ll understand about this in a couple of minutes I’ll take this index socket and connect it to the socket a then take this result socket and connect it to the selection and now let’s understand understand what exactly happened here previously the extrude mesh was working on all the faces of the cube but now with the help of this selection socket we give input to this extrude mesh that we want a particular phase of some specific index value to be extruded and to calculate that index value we use this compare or the equal node and here we have two options one of them is a and the other one is B and as the name suggests it basically makes the value of a equal to B meaning that since a is connected to index therefore the index value will be equal to the value of B which is zero so it will give the output of the result to this selection socket that this extrude mesh has to work on that face whose index value is zero and suppose I change the value of B to some other number like one then here you can see that another face is extruded now previously the Extrusion was working on the bottom face and as a result it looked like this and when it change the index value to one the Extrusion took place on the front face similarly you can even try other values like 2 3 4 5 and it will create an extrusion effect on that particular face and this is how the index and the compare node works and now returning back to the buildings that we were creating let’s select all of this and press X to delete and now let’s give some material or some colors to our buildings for this first let’s go to the render view by clicking on this icon let’s also change the render engine by going to the render properties and changing it from EV to Cycles to get a proper lighting click on this drop- down arrow and turn off the scene world and here we go now before creating the material let’s first add the set material node so press shift plus a go to material and select the set material let’s place it here now to create a material let’s change the spreadsheet window to the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader editor now we basically need to create a texture which will make it look like there are actually some windows on these buildings to do this we’ll be using the warid texture so press shift plus a in the Shader editor go to texture and select the warno texture let’s place it here and to get the input and the mapping nodes simply press ctrl+ T and here we have the input texture coordinate and the mapping node added here take this object socket and connect it to the vector and to view the texture simply hold on crl plus shift and left click on it and we are not able to see the texture here because we have not assigned this material in the set material node so I’ll click here and choose this material and this is how the texture looks like right now now here we are having some random Spotlight texture on our buildings but we really don’t want that to change the way it looks click on this option where ukan is selected and change it to the other types with the second option selected which is the Manhattan the texture looks like this and this is also not perfect so we’ll go for the third option and let’s also try to change some settings here for example the randomness and if I reduce the randomness it’s giving a slight texture which somewhat looks like the windows of a building and to make it look perfect let’s reduce the randomness even more so I’ll change it to zero let’s change the scale value so if I increase it we see some slight texture which resembles the structure of Windows on buildings to make it look even more better let’s further scale up the value to something like 10 and now it looks like this now you might be thinking that exactly how do you know that you have to use the water texture and try to change these settings in it to achieve a specific result and the answer to this is that it basically comes with practice you have to keep in your mind how each texture would look like on your object’s material for example the noise texture would add some noise to your material the Warner texture would add some spots to your material and make it look like this similarly the brick texture and all the other textures also work in some specific manner so my suggestion to you would be that you should try to practice by adding different types of textures changing the values here trying different options and try to do this with all the textures that we have studied in this course so far and if you want to add some more windows here then you can use the scale value right now it is set to 10 but if I increase it to something like 12 then it looks like this you can even use the scale options here to change the size and the number of these windows in the texture so suppose I go to the scaling in y- axis and let’s increase it to something like 1.5 and now it looks like this now to give some color to these windows and the building we’ll be using the color ramp so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp place it in between the texture and the output and to change the colors and the intensity we have to move these pointers and change the colors from here so first I’ll take the second pointer and move it like this similarly the first pointer and let’s move it like this now here one thing to notice is that this principal bstf is not connected anywhere in this node connection and there is a reason for this basically we will need two different principle bsdf added here and that’s because one of them will be for the windows and the other one will be for the rest of the building so to create a duplicate of this press shift plus d and place it here and to connect both of them we’ll be using the mix Shader and to add it press shift plus a go to Shader and select the mix Shader place it here now let’s take the output of one of the principal bstf and connect it to the first Shader similarly let’s take the other one and connect it to the second Shader and then take this color socket of the color ramp and connected to the factor and here we can no longer see the texture of the buildings in the 3D scene and this is because previously the color was being controlled from this color ramp but now since we have connected the shaders to this principal bsdf and both of them are having the white base color as a result we can’t see the texture here to see the texture right here

    I’ll take the base color of one of the principal bsdfs and let’s change it to black color and the texture is visible here now you can do one more change in order to make these buildings look very realistic which is to go to the color amp here and change the interpolation to constant and now you can see that you have these windows on all the sides of the buildings and it looks way too much realistic than before and it might be possible that some of you might be having some doubts here so let’s revise each and everything that we have done in the Shader editor till now see to get these windows we first added this war texture made some changes here and ended up in getting some Square spots which slightly look like Windows then we added this color ramp and we use the pointers here to change the position or basically the thickness of the borders of these windows for example if I increase the whiteness with the help of the second pointer then the buildings would look like this similarly if I increase the Blackness then the buildings would look like this then to have different materials like the color and the roughness for the windows and the rest of the building we added two separate principal bstf and to join them we use the mix Shader and connected it to the material output and now suppose you want to change the color of these buildings so you can simply go to this base color option here and increase the brightness from here and change the color to anything like blue or green and the color would change here but suppose you want that these buildings should have some random colors and for this we’ll be using the musk grave texture and to add it we first have to press shift plus a then go to texture and you will observe that there’s no such texture here and I told you in the previous chapters that in the recent blender 4.1 version the musk grave texture was removed and it was replaced by the noise texture so we add the noise texture and place it over here now turn off this normalize and now we can use this noise texture just like the mus grave texture now since we’ll be using this noise texture to give random colors to the windows of the building I’ll take this Factor socket and connect it to the principal bstf which has the black base color using the base color socket and we see some mus grave texture here to give it some colors let’s add a color ramp here so I’ll select this color ramp and let’s create its duplicate by pressing shift plus d and place it here to change the colors let’s select the first point enter and click here to change the color increase the brightness and suppose I change it to red color but now all the buildings are turned to Red to add some new colors click on this plus icon and let’s change this color to something like blue but here you can see that it is not giving the desired result it is basically applying all these colors to the textures and not to the different buildings to fix this we’ll be using the object info node so press shift plus a go to input and select the object info place it here now to tell this noise texture that we want the colors to be applied to different buildings we have to use this location socket here let’s connect it to the vector and if I change the scaling from here you will begin to notice that some random colors are being assigned to different buildings here let’s even increase the number of colors from here by clicking on the plus icon and let’s change it to green color now this little building here is colored green and let’s also try to move these pointers to change the color of the buildings let’s select this blue one and move it here similarly this green one and move it here let’s also change the color of this white pointer by clicking on it and changing it from here so let’s change it to yellow color to get the random colors properly we have to play with the scale value and the position of these pointers here so let’s try to change the scale value and also these pointers in order to get some different results and let’s also try to change the scale value from here like if I reduce it we’ll get different results so you should try to change the scale values and the position of these pointers try to add some more colors and you will get different results each time but I think that right now this combination looks perfect so let’s finalize this and suppose you want to change the color of the rest of the building right now it is set to white color but suppose you want some other color so let’s go down and here in the second principal bstf we have the base color option so if I change it to black color you will observe that the borders of the windows or basically all the part except the windows is now colored black and as I told you before you can change the thickness of these Borders or simply these lines with the help of this color ramp so if I take the second pointer and move it like this the thickness or the width will basically change but I think that this much is fine and you can even change other things like to make them look metallic you can increase the metallic nature from here or make them look rough from here so you can try to change these different settings to change the material of the windows or the rest of the building this principal bstf will work for the windows and the second principal bstf will be used for the remaining building and here I think that we should change the roughness of the windows to exact zero in order to make them shiny and reflecting and now our buildings are completely ready but if you remember we added this Grid or the plane and use the instance on points to add these Cubes at the position where the points or the vertices of this plane were located as a result whenever you want to increase the number of these buildings you can simply go to the vertices option here and right now their value is four but suppose you want to increase it to a higher number like 8 or 10 then the number of these buildings will increase but you need to adjust their size from the size option here so if I increase the size in the x-axis then these buildings will move apart in the x-axis like this similarly to move them apart in the y axis I’ll take this size in the y- axis and increase it and now it looks like this so you can try to change these values to change the number of buildings in your scene and also the distance between them with the help of the size option in the X and the Y AIS and also if you want to change the random colors that are assigned to these buildings you can again go to the noise texture and change the scale value from here or you can also go to the color ramp and change the position of these pointers from here but I think that we should finalize this one and this is how the final output looks like I added a simple plane below its surface added some lighting and this is the final rendered output also this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in this chapter we’ll be understanding all these topics in complete detail and we’ll be using these topics to create this fence and our Target for the upcoming videos will be to create a landscape with this fence some grass and rocks but for today’s chapter we’ll focus only on creating this fence now the first topic for today’s chapter is understanding the resample curve node but before that let’s first open the geometry noes editor and now instead of working on this Cube we’ll be adding a bzier curve so press X to delete it press shift plus a go to curve and add the Bas curve now we’ll be using this curve to make the fence so first let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad let’s zoom in and if I enter the edit mode of this curve by pressing the Tab Key then here you will notice that we have a tool called Draw and if I select this then I can draw the curve just by left clicking and dragging like this and this is going to be very useful while we are creating the fence right now let’s undo now to start working on the geometry nodes first first let’s enter the object mode by pressing the T key and take on the new button now we’ll be adding the resample curve by pressing shift plus a in the curve we’ll go to operations and here we have the resample curve let’s place it here and yes one more important thing is that you do not need to memorize the location of each and every node in this ad menu you can simply search for the specific node from the search bar here for example if I type object info then you will get the object info node here similarly you can search for any other node and easily add it in the geometry nodes editor now we’ll understand this resample curve node in a little while but before that let’s also add the instance on points so press shift plus a go to instances and select the instance on points let’s place it before the output and we learned about this node in the previous chapter of this course now we’ll also need an instance object here and for this we’ll be using a simple Cube so press shift plus a go to mesh and in The Primitives select Cube let’s place it here and connect it to the instance and we notice some changes here but before understanding that let’s reduce the scale of these cubes from here suppose I change it to 0.2 or maybe 0.1 and now we can view them properly now let’s come back to the resample curve node if I tap into the edit mode you will notice that our curve is still present here and it has two points one is this point and the other one is this point and also whenever you select one of the points this handle will appear and this Middle Point is known as the control point of the curve by pressing G I can move the curve like this now to understand the working of this node I’ll first remove it from here by holding alt and if I left click it will get removed now without using this resample curve node we observe that we have two cubes placed only add the vertices or the center points of this curve and that’s because the instance on points node is connected here it will place the instance which is the cube in this case to the point of the curve and then if I select the resample curve and place it here it basically creates more of these points throughout the curve which can be controlled from the count number here previously I showed you that without using this node you had only two instances or the cubes added at the center points but right now the count value here is set to 10 and as a result we are having 10 cubes placed at different points on this curve and also if I press G to move this point and extend it like this you will notice that the number of these cubes will still remain the same only the length of this Curve will change but not the number of these cubes and that is because the mode here is set to count but if I change it to length then basically this length value will control the distance between two instances or two cubes so if I increase the distance the number of Cubes will reduce that’s because within the same length of the curve the increase in the distance between two cubes will result in lesser space for the other cubes as a result the number of these cubes will reduce but if I PR G to move it you will notice that as the length increases the number of these cubes will also increase and this is the use of the length mode in the resample curve and now the third option that you have here is the evaluated and if I select the evaluated mode basically it allows you to control the number of these cubes by going to the object data properties and changing the resolution from here higher the resolution more will be the number of cubes and lesser the resolution lesser will be the number of cubes and this is how the evaluated mode works in resample curve node now suppose you want that instead of the cubes here here you should have the monkey or the suzan model but if I go to the geometry notes editor press shift plus a in the mesh Primitives you will find that you don’t have the option of selecting the suzan model to fix this problem we have the object info node so suppose I delete this Cube by pressing X let’s come out of the edit mode press shift plus a to add a monkey go to mesh and select the monkey let’s place it in the y direction by pressing G and Y and move it here to select the curve again go to the scene collection and select the Basia curve now to assign the monkey to the instance we’ll use the object info node so press shift plus a go to input and in scene you will find the object info node let’s place it here and this node is basically used to input any particular object from the scene in the geometry noes editor for example if I click on the object here and select the suzan and then if I connect the geometry to the instance you will notice that just like the cubes now we are having these monkey objects placed at different points in the curve you can reduce their number from the resolution preview here because we have enabled the evaluated mode in the resample curve now there’s also an easy way to add the object info node which is to go to the scene collection and suppose I need the suzan model so I’ll drag it by left clicking and drop it in the geometry notes editor and now we have the object info note added with the suzan selected now in a very similar way we can create a fence but for that we’ll first add a cube in our scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and add a cube tab into the edit mode and we’ll be making one part of the fence so let’s scale it down in the X and Y axis by pressing s and x and scale it down like this similarly in the Y AIS press s and Y and scale it down like this now go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad let’s also move it upwards by pressing G and z and let’s place it here now to create the remaining part of the fence I will create a duplicate by pressing shift plus d and right click to cancel the movement and let’s rotate it in the Y AIS by 90° so press r y and 90 enter to confirm and we’ll place it here left click to finalize the position and this is how this part of the fence is looking right now let’s also scale this down in the y- AIS by pressing s and Y and scale it down like this let’s also create a duplicate of this part and move it downwards so press shift plus d right click press G and Z to move it downwards let’s place it here and now the part of a fence is ready and we’ll be using this part to create the entire fence for this select the basier curve I will delete this object info node by pressing X and here in this object info node I’ll change the object from the suzan to cube now you can see here that the fence is somewhat visible but it’s not perfect and that’s because we have to change the scale value of this fence so I’ll go to the scale value here and let’s increase it by left clicking and dragging like this and if I move my cursor then the scale will increase or reduce and right now the increments with which the scale is changing is very high and to fix this problem hold on the shift key and now if I scale it up and down we get smaller increments and I think that a value of somewhere near 0.2 would look fine because at this value all the parts of the fence seems to connect with each other but another problem that you can see here is that the rotation of this fence is not right it’s not aligned to the rotation and the structure of the curve and to fix this we’ll be using another note which is the Align uler to Vector node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in the rotation select align UL to vector let’s place it here now I don’t know if the pronunciation of this word is right or not I pronouncing it as uler but a lot of people also pronounce it as Oiler so you can search for the pronunciation of this word if it’s huler or Oiler or something else now the use of this node is that it basically helps to align the rotation in the X Y and Zed axis as per the vector values here so if I connect the rotation of this align U to Vector to the rotation here you will notice some changes here basically the x-axis is selected here meaning that it will align the x-axis as per the vector value here and here you can see that the vector value in The Zed axis is set to one as a result the rotation that you were seeing previously is now aligned like this in the Z axis similarly you can change the axis to align from here for example if I select y then they will get aligned like this similarly The Zed axis and it looks like this it won’t show you any change in the Z axis because aligning the Z axis to the vector will mean that you’re aligning the same axis in the same direction of the vector as the value of Zed in Vector is set to one now if you’re understanding it for the very first time it it might be possible that you can’t understand it completely but in simple words it basically aligns a particular axis according to the vector values that you’re having here now to rotate this fence along the curve we have to add another node which is the curve tangent node so press shift plus a go to curve and in read select the curve tangent let’s place it here and now I’ll go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad then I’ll take this tangent socket and connect it to the vector and to get them properly aligned with the Curve change the axis from here at xaxis it looks fine and you can see here that that there are still some imperfections in this model and to fix this we’ll first reduce the scaling in the x-axis so that the fence part will just touch each other then to increase their count I’ll go to the resample curve change the mode from evaluated to count and if I increase it you will notice that the fence will now look perfect in fact let me show you one more thing if I go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad tab into the edit mode and with this draw option selected if I left click and draw a curve you will notice that a fence will get created that will be perfectly aligned with the structure of that curve and that’s how you can simply create any fence just by drawing a curve so if I go to the top view again we can draw three to four curves like this but one thing to notice here is that as I increase the length of the curves the number of these instances will remain the same and if I go to the count and try to increase them you will notice that the number of instances in the smaller as well as the bigger fence will increase and so we’ll try a better approach which is to change the mode from count to length and now we can set a particular length which will be the minimum distance between two instances so if I reduce it you will notice that the distance between the two instances will reduce and at a particular value they will get connected to each other and make a perfect fence and now let’s move ahead to the next topic of this chapter which is the delete geometry node and this node is basically used to delete some random parts of your mesh and to explore it in detail We’ll add it in the geometry note editor so press shift plus a go to geometry and in the operations select delete geometry let’s place it here now here you can see that in the domain you have some options which means that in any mesh or the object that you select you can can delete the points the edges the faces the spline or basically the curves and even the instances and from here you can select the mode of deleting meaning that if you want to delete only the edges and faces or if you want to delete only the faces and now to see how it works we’ll take it and drop in between the re sample curve and the instance on points and here we observe that it deletes everything and that’s because we have not given any information to the delete geometry node about which part of mesh it should delete and suppose you want to delete some random parts for this we’ll add the random value node by pressing shift plus a going to utilities and here we have the random value so I’ll select this and place it here now here you have some options in the data type like float integer vector and Boolean the data type will basically Define the output that it will generate for example with the float selected it will basically give the output between the minimum and the maximum values that is 0o and 1 and the output will be a float value or a decimal value similarly you have integers vectors but we’ll be selecting the Boolean and for those of you who don’t know what a Boolean is it basically means true or false in fact here you can see that you have this probability bar which is set to 0.5 to discover how it works we’ll take this value socket and connect it to the selection and here you can see that now some random parts of the fence are deleted here see the function of delete geometry is simply to delete the mesh or any part of the mesh but if we don’t give any information to it about which part to delete it will delete everything therefore we needed to add the random value note with the Boolean selected and this probability option will basically Define the probability or the chances of each part of the fence getting deleted since the probability is set to 0.5 it means that the chances of each fence to get deleted is 50/50 and if you want more part of the fence to be deleted you can increase the probability from here and now you can see here that as I increase the probability the part of the mesh which is getting disappeared will increase but to create a realistic looking fence will lower the probability to somewhere around 0.2 or 0.1 then you have the seed option here and if I change it you will notice that it generates a completely different output so you can use this seed value to generate some random outputs with the same probability value but I think that I will change it to this seat value as it looks better right now so you can try to change the probability value from here and also the seat value to get some different results each and every time and I think that this output looks perfect so I’ll finalize this one and now moving ahead let’s give this fence some basic material for this I will change this spreadsheet into the Shader editor by clicking on this icon and selecting the Shader editor press n to close this toolbar and click on new button here we have the default material applied to the fence let’s go to the material preview mode or maybe the render preview mode and we should increase the lighting in our scene so I will select the lamp here and in the properties I’ll change the type of light to Sun let’s reduce the strength from here to something like 10 or maybe 20 let’s also rotate it in the x- axis by pressing R and x and let’s rotate it like this and now we have a better Lighting in the scene but right now I think that the strength is too high so I will reduce the strength slightly and I’ll keep it to somewhere near 10 and it looks perfect so I’ll again select the fence and let’s create the material we’ll be creating a basic wood material to apply to this fence so let’s rename the material to Wood and yes if you have have not learned about the material textures and notes then you can check the previous chapters of this course where we understood about the note components the basic and procedural shaders image textures and a lot more but for now we’ll be creating a simple wood texture by adding a noise texture here so press shift plus a go to texture and add the noise texture let’s place it over here press cr+ T to get the input and the mapping node this shortcut will work only if the node dangler add-on is turned on then connect this object socket of the texture coordinate to this Vector socket and to view the texture here press contrl plus shift and left click on the noise texture but here we need to zoom in to view the texture on this fence now the reason why we can’t see anything here is that we have applied this material to the basier curve but instead of that we should have applied this material to this fence object to do this in the material properties click on this icon and select wood and now if I zoom in you will observe that the noise texture is visible on the fence here now to make a realistic wood texture we’ll change the value of the scale from the noise texture and yes before that we’ll be viewing the texture on this object because it’s comparatively bigger in size and so the texture will be properly visible now we’ll go to the noise texture increase the scale value like this and let’s increase it to something like maybe 50 and let’s also increase the detailing and you might have seen that the wood material has this stretching effect on its surface and to achieve this kind of result in blender we’ll go to the scaling in the mapping Vector node and let’s try to change these values in different axis and if I increase the scale in the xaxis and zoom in you will notice that we are getting some kind of stretching effect but it’s not perfect right now to fix this we’ll take this UV socket and connect it to the vector tab into the edit mode press a to select all then in the UV option here select smart UV project click okay and now if I go to the object mode again and try to change the values of scale from here you will notice that by scaling it in the Y AIS it gives us a better texture to view it properly I’ll go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad and let’s zoom in like this so here you can see that with the scaling in the x-axis set to one if I increase the scaling in the Y AIS we get the stretching effect on the texture so we’ll finalize the texture and now it looks like this and now to give some color to it we’ll add the color ramp so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp let’s place it here and I’ll select the first pointer and change its color from here let’s increase the brightness slightly and I’ll change it to brown color you can check the final result of the color from here and for the second pointer I need the color to be very slightly different from the first color so with this cursor over this brown color if I press ctrl+ C and select the second pointer and now with the cursor over the white color if I press crl plus v the brown color will get added here as well but for this color we’ll increase the brightness from the slider like this to give it a slight orange look and to make the texture look better you can try to change the position of these pointers like this and in this way you can make your texture look more realistic than before let’s also add this principal bstf after the color ramp and now to give it a 3d effect We’ll add the bump node so press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump node place it over here then take this Factor socket of the noise texture and connect it to the height then take this normal socket and connected to the normal of the principal bsdf and here the bump node is applied to the texture you can make this texture look better by by changing the scale value in the y- axis from here so if I reduce it you will notice that at a value of somewhere near 0.2 or 0.1 you will get a realistic looking wood texture and yes one more thing it’s not compulsory to enter the same values that I am adding here you can try to get different results by changing the scale values here or maybe the colors in the color Ram you can also control the strength of the bump from here so I think that we should keep it to somewhere near 0.5 and it looks better now since we are making the wood texture let’s increase the roughness in the principal bstf to a very high value like 0.9 or 1 and now it looks perfect and yes this brings us to the end of this chapter in this chapter we learned about creating this fence in our scene with the help of all these geometry nodes then we even created a simple wood texture for this fence in the next chapter we’ll be making the base of the landscape where the fence that we created will be [Music] placed in the previous chapter we created this fence with the help of geometry notes and in this chapter we’ll be covering all these Topics in complete detail now in the chapter number 32 we created this fence and also give it a basic wood texture and now let’s work on creating a hilly landscape for this let’s first add a Plane by pressing shift plus a and in the mesh select the plane tab into the edit mode and to scale it up press s and if I press 10 then it will get Scaled up 10 times now since we’ll be creating a complex landscape with this plane let’s subdivide it so right click and select subdivide then if I click on this menu from here I can control the number of cuts so let’s change it to 10 or maybe 40 so we have to keep this number high so that we we can easily make a complex landscape let’s come out of the edit mode and to work on the geometry noes with this plane selected click on the new button and now moving to the first topic of today’s chapter which is the set position node We’ll add it here by pressing shift plus a go to the geometry and in the right category select set position let’s place it here now as the name suggest the set position node allows you to set the position of the vertices of your mesh or instance and to use this I’ll select it and drop it in between the group input and the group output now to understand it better I will change this window from Shader Editor to the spreadsheet and with the vertices selected here you can see that we have 1,800 vertices and you also have the position of each of these vertices for example the vertex with the index value of zero has the position of – 10 in the xaxis minus 10 in the Y AIS and 0er in The Zed axis and you can see here that all of these vertices are having the Z component as zero and the reason for this is that the position of this entire plane is at the position value of zero in the Z axis now you can use this set position node to change the position of any of these vertices to any other new position but in order to tell this set position node that the position of exactly which Vortex it should be changing we have to use the position node to add it here press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the position let’s place it here now if you remember we studied about the index node in one of our previous chapters the index node used to act like an input value for the index values here similarly this position node will act as an input for the different position values here to understand these positions better let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and let’s zoom out now here at the index number zero the position of the vortex is – 10 in the xaxis – 10 in the Y AIS and 0 in the Zed AIS and to view this vortex in the 3D view Port you have to understand a simple Concept in the x-axis the left hand side is negative and the right hand side is positive in the Y AIS the downward direction is negative and the upwards is positive and yes do remember that we are viewing this plane from the top view now if I look at the position of the ver at index value 0 the X component is set to minus 10 meaning that the vertex is located at – 10 m away from the x-axis and since we scaled Up This Plane 10 times it means that it is somewhere located on this edge of the plane then the y- AIS the value is set to minus 10 meaning that it’s in the negative Direction and so it’s 10 m downwards as a result we can say that the vertex at the index value zero is placed at exact this point and if I di into the edit mode and zoom in then this is the exact vertex I’m talking about it’s on the left hand side meaning that the X component is negative and it is the farthest away from the Y AIS then being in downward Direction it has a negative y component and again being the point which is farthest away from the x-axis the value of y component is minus 10 and as I already told you the Z components of all these points is fixed to 0 m let’s come out of the edit mode now to convert This Plane into a hilly landscape we’ll be using the noise texture node along with this position node and to add the noise texture press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise noise texture let’s place it here now the reason for adding this noise texture is that in the geometry nodes the noise texture allows you to push some of the vertices upwards and so it can help us to create a hilly landscape but to use it here we first have to add the vector math node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select Vector math and place it here now I’ll take this position socket and connect it to Vector then take this Vector socket and connect it to the position now the reason for adding this Vector math node is that to make the Hy landscape we need to change the position of these vectors meaning that we needed to add some mathematical value to the position of different vectors with the help of the noise texture so in the first socket we connected the position and in the second socket we’ll be connecting the noise texture but before that let’s understand one more thing in order to make this clean a hilly landscape we have to change the position of vertices only in The Zed axis but if I take the factor socket of the noise texture and connect it to the second Vector socket then now it will begin to control the vector in all the three axis and to affect only the Z axis we will be using the combined XY Z node we learned about this node in one of the previous chapters while understanding the geometry nodes now to add the combined exosite node press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the combine XY Z let’s place it here and connect this Vector socket to over here now to connect this noise texture to the rest of the node system we’ll connect it to the combined exisit through the Zed axis so take this Factor socket and connect it to the Zed socket and we notice some changes here but before understanding that let’s first revise each and everything that we have done in this geometry nodes editor the first thing that we added was this set position node because our purpose was to create a hilly landscape and to do that we basically had to change the position of some random vertices by moving them upwards and to achieve this target we used the position Noe and the noise texture and we needed to add them together in order to change the position of the vertices for this we used the vector match node with the add operation enabled then we added this combined XYZ node because we needed the change in position to take place only in The Zed axis and the noise texture in the geometry notes editor won’t be actually adding a texture like it used to do in the Shader editor in state it will create this Distortion effect on different vertices of the plane it basically takes the default position of the vortex and since we have connected it to this Vector math node it will add Distortion to it in the Zed axis and if you want you can use the scale value in the noise texture in order to change the Distortion effect on this plane right now the scale value is set to 0.3 and that’s why it appears like this to view it properly I’ll change the mode from the rendered view to the solid View and this is how it looks right now if you look closely at the plane you will observe that in order to make this into a hilly landscape we need to increase the Distortion effect and always remember that whenever you want to increase an effect significantly in Geometry nodes you can use the multiply math node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the math node since we want to use this Vector math node in order to manipulate the Distortion effect so we’ll place it after the noise texture let’s change the operation from add to multiply and now with the help of this value I can increase the Distortion effect on the plane but one more thing to notice here is that increasing this value also moves our plane upwards so we basically want that as we increase this multiply value the position of the plane should go downwards instead of moving up and for this we’ll be adding a vector math node with the subtract operation for this press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select Vector math we’ll place it just before the set position node and I’ll change the operation to subtract and now if I take the value of Z component in the vector socket and increase it the plane will begin to go downwards but since we wanted that the position of this plane in the Zed axis should be controlled as per the multiply value so we have to connect the multiply value socket to the vector and because it will be controlling Only The Zed axis as a result we’ll be adding a combined XYZ node for this I’ll select this combine XY Z node press shift plus d and place it here take this Vector socket and connect it to the second Vector socket of the subtract then if I take this value socket and try to connect it to the Z AIS socket of the combin XYZ you will notice that they do not get connected and that’s because we have to use a value node to connect them to add it press shift plus a go to input and in constant select value we’ll place it here take the values soet and connect it to the multiply value then again take this value socket and connect it to the Zed axis in the combined XY Z now this value node is working as a connection between the multiply value and the movement in the Zed axis and if I try to increase this value you will notice that the Distortion effect is increasing because of this multiply node and it’s not moving upwards because of the subtract node but here we see that we have another problem if I increase the multiply value then this time the plane will begin to move downwards and to fix this we have to use another math node with the Divide operation so press shift Plus say go to utilities and in math select the math node we’ll place it after the value socket and change the operation from add to divide now we change the value socket in the math node and if I increase it you will notice that the plane will begin to move upwards now we have to keep this value to that number where it just touches the X and the y axis for this we’ll go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad and let’s zoom in and since it is moved upwards so we’ll reduce the Divide value and at a value of somewhere near 2 or 2.5 the plane is perfectly touching the x-axis and to confirm I’ll go to this value socket and change the value to zero and now it’s perfectly placed here so if I change the value to a higher number like 10 then basically two things are happening one is that it will multiply the Distortion effect by a factor of 10 and the second thing is that this value of 10 will reach this math node with the Divide operation 10 will get divided by two the output will be five this value of five will reach the combin xed node and as a result the plane will move downwards in The Zed AIS by 5 m because of the subtract Vector math node now to get a proper Distortion effect we’ll use the scale value in the noise texture right now it is set to 0.3 but if I reduce it you’ll notice that it looks better than before and if you want to change the scale value slowly then simply hold down the shift button and now with the left click if I drag then I can slowly see the change in different scale values and at a value of somewhere near 0.09 or 0.1 we get a distortion effect like this and to increase their height you can go to the multiply value here and increase it so simply by changing the scale value and the multiply value you can turn a simple plane to look like a Hy landscape but right now I think that the height is bit too much so I’ll reduce the multiply value to a lower number like 8 or 10 and now if we zoom in we have this slight Distortion effect applied to the vertices of this plane and yes if you want to make it surface smooth you can add the set shade smooth node in the geometry noes editor so press shift plus a go to mesh and in the right category select set shade smooth place it just before the group output and now we have the shade smooth applied to this plane and also here we have a simple hilly base which we created by distorting the vertices and if you want you can even increase the size of this plane by simply going to the edit mode press a to select all the vertices and now you can press s to scale it up so I’ve scaled it up two times and this is how it looks right now as I told you before you can change the Distortion effect and the height with the help of the scale value of the noise texture and this multiply value but according to me right now the basic structure of the base of landscape looks perfect so we’ll finalize this and now moving ahead we’ll also be creating some grass and rocks to place on this plane in the upcoming chapters but before that we need to understand about another node which will help us to distribute the grass and the Rocks all over the plane and this is the distribute points on faces node to add it press shift plus a go to point and select distribute points on faces we’ll place it just after the set geometry node and we see some changes here as the name suggests the distribute points on faces node basically distributes these points on different faces of the mes object now the first option that you have here is the density and it basically controls the number of these points per square meter of each face higher the density more will be the number of point points and if I reduce the density we’ll have lesser points on the faces then the next option that you have here is the seed and this one basically shuffles these points at different locations and each time it will create a new output and also from here you can control the distribution method by default the random is selected and so it distributes the points randomly on the faces but if I change it to the poison disc you will notice that we have a new option which is the minimum distance and this parameter basically controls the minimum distance between any two points so if I increase it you will notice that the number of these points will reduce as the minimum distance required between them increases and this is the special thing in the poison disc distribution method for now I’ll change it back to random distribution method and now suppose you want to place a specific mesh object in place of these points for this we’ll be using the instance on points node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the instance on points place it after the distribute points on faces and everything will disappear because we have to tell this instance on points about which particular mesh we want to be placed as the instance on those points for now we’ll be adding a cube as the instance so press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select Cube we’ll place it here and connect this mesh socket to the instance here it appears like this because the size of the cube is too big so we’ll reduce it by left clicking and dragging like this and before releasing if I move my cursor the size of the cubes will change I think that we should reduce it to something like 0.1 M and now you can see that instead of the points we have these cubes placed as the instance is here let’s also reduce the density to get a better View and this is how it looks and now suppose you want to see both the plane and these cubes in the scene and for this we’ll be using the joint geometry node so press shift plus a go to geometry and select the joint geometry we’ll place it just before the output and to view the plane here simply take this geometry socket of the set position which is carrying the information about the plane and connect it to the Joint geometry and now here we have both the plane and these cubes as the instances placed on it and yes in the upcoming chapters we’ll be creating some grass and rocks and we’ll place them as the instance objects at the position where the cubes are placed right now and yes one more thing it might be possible that even after applying the set shade smooth the plane still appears to be flat and that’s because we have placed the joint geometry node after the set shade smooth but if I remove it from here by holding the alt button and left clicking and if I place it before the set shade smooth and again if I take the geometry socket of the set position and connect it to the Joint geometry then in this case the shade smooth will be applied to our plane and if you want you can also change the color of this Base by simply going to the material properties and in the base color you can set any particular color as the base color but for now I’ll remove it and yes this brings us to the end of this chapter in this chapter we learned about all these topics in complete detail and also created the simple hilly base of the [Music] landscape in the previous two chapters we understood about creating this fence along with the wood texture and also a simple base for the landscape and we created all this with the help of geometry nodes and in this chapter we’ll be exploring about creating the grass for the landscape and with this we’ll also be covering all these topics in complete detail so previously we made this fence and this base for the landscape and now let’s begin with the creation of grass Now to create the grass first add a cube in the scene by pressing shift plus a and in the mesh select the cube let’s move it in the y direction by pressing G and Y and place it over here and we’ll be creating the grass with the help of geometry nodes in blender for this go to the geometry nodes editor and click on this new button the first node that I’m going to add is the mesh line node to add it here press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the mesh line let’s place it over here and now this mesh line node is connected to the group output now as the name of this node suggest it basically creates a mesh in the form of a line and since it is a mesh therefore it has vertices and edges connecting with each other and if you want to view those vertices we need to add another node which is the mesh to points node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select mesh to points we’ll place it after the mesh line and here you can see that these points are the vertices of this mesh line now here you have some options in the mesh line curve and let’s explore them in detail this offset option basically allows you to change change the distance between each point on a particular axis for example if I increase the x value you will notice that the distance between the points will increase in the xaxis similarly if I increase the value in the y- axis the distance between the points will increase in the y- axis similarly with the Zed axis also if I increase it the distance between two points or the offset will increase then the next thing that you have here is the start location and by using this option I can basically change the position of the first point or the first vertex of this mesh line so if I change it in x-axis you can see here that its Position will change in the the x-axis similarly in the Y AIS and also in the Zed axis so this one is basically used to change the position of the vortex and the offset is basically used to control the distance between two points or two vertices and the next option that you have here is the count and it basically determines the number of these points or the vertices in the mesh line so if I increase it the number of these points will increase and also the length of the mesh line will increase now you also have this option of selecting the mode which is set to offset by default but if I change it to end points it will allow us to control the things in the mesh line differently than before with end points mode selected you can control the length of this mesh line or basically the position of the starting point and the ending point from these values here for example the start location will determine the value of the first vertex which is placed at the bottom and the end location will determine the position of the last vertex which is placed at the top so if I increase the value of end location in The Zed axis you will see that the position of the last Vector will move upwards and as a result the length of this mesh line will also change previously in the offset mode you are able to control the length of this mesh line with the help of this count option but in this ISE no matter what the value of count is the length of the mesh line will remain the same and only the number of these points or vertices will change and now specifically in this end points mode here you have the option of selecting the count mode if I change it to resolution then here you have the resolution value which is basically the minimum distance between any two points in the mesh line so if I reduce the resolution like this then the distance between the two points will decrease and as a result in the same length of the mesh line we’ll be having a higher number of vertices or these points and since we’ll be using this mesh line for making the grass I’ll be changing the mode from end points to offset let’s also change the value of offset in the Z axis to 1 M and let’s round off the count value from 19 to 20 now if you remember we added this mesh two points in order to see these vertices but now it’s no longer required so I will press X to delete it and let’s take this mesh socket and connect it to the geometry and this is how a mesh line is looking right now since we’ll be making a grass out of it we need to apply some rotation to it and for this we’ll be using the vector rotate node and to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the vector rotate let’s place it over here here and since we are changing the rotation of this mesh line we also have to use the set position node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in the right category select the set position we’ll place it just before the group output and now here we have a mesh line node which created this mesh line a vector rotate node which will be used to control the rotation of this line and a set position node which is being used because we are changing the rotation of this line now to connect this Vector rotate node to the rest of the node system take this Vector socket and connect it to the position and we notice that the mesh line disappears that’s because we have to use these values use to control the rotation and the visibility of the mesh line now since we’ll be changing the rotation of different vertices so we have to tell this Vector rotate node about the position of those different vertices for this we’ll be adding the position node about which we learned in the previous chapter so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the position node let’s place it here and connect it to the vector socket and now this mesh line is again visible now here you have this angle option in the vector rotate node and if I try to change it you will see that nothing happens and this is because we need to give some input to it about the index value of different vertices to change the angle to do this press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the index let’s place it here and connect it to the angle and now suppose you want that each of the vortex should rotate around a particular axis for this you can change the type of rotation to any particular axis so if I select the x-axis here we have all the vertices or the points of this mesh line rotated in the x-axis and if you want to control this rotation we have to use the math node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the math node we’ll place it between the index socket and the angle and now if a change the function to multiply then I can use this value to control the rotation of the different points of the mes line in the x-axis and if you feel that while changing the value by left clicking and dragging like this it’s changing very fast so you can simply hold the shift button and then you can see the changes slowly now let’s again understand what all we did here in order to revise each and everything first we added the mesh line node because we wanted to create the grass with the help of this mesh line then to change the rotation we use the set position node and to control the rotation we use the vector rotate node then we use this position node to act as an input about the position value of different vertices and to change the angle of rotation we used this index node and connected it to the math node with the multiply operation so that we can control the rotation of this line and it was rotating like this because we have set the type as the x-axis now moving ahead let me tell you about some other useful nodes which I used to change the object type from mesh to curve or from curve to mesh for this the first node is the mesh to curve node to add it here press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the mesh to curve and let’s place it here now you may not notice any changes here but it actually Chang changes the object type of any object from mesh to curve and to confirm this you can go to this spreadsheet and now in the mesh you can see that you have zero vertices zero edges zero faces and zero face corners but here in the curve section you have this option of spline and the number here is set to one and from this you can confirm that the object type for this mesh line is changed from mesh to curve and there’s another node whose function is just the opposite of this mesh to curve node and it is known as the curve to mesh node to add it here press shift plus a go to curve and in operations select the curve to mesh let’s place it here and now the object type for this mesh line will change from curve back to mesh and to confirm this you can go to the spreadsheet and here in the mesh category you have 20 vertices and 19 edges previously both of these values is zero and the number of spline in the curve was set to one which is now again zero so by using this node you can simply convert the object type of any object from curve to mesh and now moving ahead in order to give some thickness to this mesh line we’ll be using another node which is the curve line node to add it here press shift plus a go to curve and in Primitives select the curve line let’s place it here and now this curve line is very similar to the mesh line that we added here to view it in our scene hold on control and shift and if I left click on the curve line node then now we can see this curve line added in my scene now the difference between the curve line node and the mesh line is simply that the object type of the curve line is a curve and that of mesh line is a mesh in order to view the vertices or the points of this curve line we’ll be adding the curve two points node so press shift plus a go to curve and an operations select the curve two points let’s place it over here and now you can see that these are the points on this curve line now just like the mesh line you can control the position of the first vertex with the help of the starting positions and for the last vertex you have the end position which you can controlled from here so you can simply change the position of the starting point and the ending point in any of the three axes from the parameters here now we’ll be using this curve line node to give the mesh line that we created some width or a dimension by connecting it to the profile curve here to view the results I will delete these two by pressing X and let’s zoom out and we see some changes in the mesh line that we created to increase the width in the x- axis we’ll change the position of the start parameter in the x-axis and now you will notice that the width of this mesh line in the x-axis will increase and another thing to notice here is that one side of this mesh line is slightly pushed upwards in the Z axis and that is because the position of the ending vertex in the curve line is set to 1 m in The Zed axis to level it perfectly I’ll change its value to 0 m and now it looks fine and now let’s revise the curve line node as I already told you it’s very similar to the mesh line except for the fact that its object type is curve instead of mesh and we connected it to the profile curve because because we needed to give some thickness to this mesh line in order to create the grass now in order to make it look like a real glass blade we need to change its shape it should be bigger in size at the bottom and then it should scale down as it moves upwards for this we’ll be using the set curve radius node to add it here press shift plus a go to curve and in the right category select the set curve radius now we have to understand one basic thing the set curve radius node can be applied only to a curve and so the input that it will receive should also be a curve and in this node system we added this mesh to curve node which converted the object object type of this mesh line into a curve meaning that the output that it will give will also be a curve so we’ll be placing it after the mesh to curve node and here it gets connected now you can use this radius value to control the curve radius but in order to achieve the result where the area is bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top we have to use another node to control the radius and it is the spline parameter node to add it here press shift plus a go to curve and in the read category select the spline parameter we’ll place it over here and we have to connect it to this radius value because the spline parameter node is being used to control the radius or basically the size at the different points and for this if I take this Factor socket and connect it to the radius you will notice that at the starting point it now has the lowest size and then the size keeps on increasing and reaches the maximum at the ending point and this is how the factor socket works in the spine parameter and now let me explain you about this Factor socket of this fine parameter in complete detail actually the output that this Factor socket gives is in the form of 0 to 1 meaning that it will pass the value of zero for the beginning and then it increases from zero till it reaches one so you can say that at the lowermost point which is the starting vertex the radius or the size is zero and at the topmost point or basically the end the radius or the size is equal to a value of one now if you remember I told you that we needed the starting point to be bigger in size and the ending point to be smaller but here we have the opposite result meaning that we need to remap the range value of this Factor socket which is currently set as 0 to 1 and we’ll change it to 1 to 0 by doing this the area at the starting or basically the lower part will be greater and then it will reduce and at the top or basically at the end the area will be the minimum and to achieve this result we have to use the map range node now to add the map range node press shift plus a go to utilities and in the math category select the map range we’ll place it after the spline parameter and now this map range is connected to the spline parameter and the set curve radius now to invert the range from 0 to 1 into 1 to 0 simply go to this two minimum value and change it to one and this two maximum value to zero and here we get the result but let me also explain to you exactly how it worked see we add this Pline parameter in order to make this look like a blade of grass and when we connected this Factor socket to the radius it gave the radius a value of 0 to 1 from bottom to top but we needed it to be opposite as a result we added this map range node changed the minimum value to one and the maximum to0 meaning that the range of this Factor socket was now changed into 1 to zero and as a result the radius at the lowermost point is the maximum and at the uppermost point which is the end point it is minimum now another thing to notice here is that at the top you can see that the r I is exactly zero making it look very sharp and pointing and if you don’t want this you can simply increase the two max value to a slightly higher number like 0.05 or maybe 0.03 and now it looks perfect and yes you can also control the size at the bottom either from the two minimum value or from the curve line node by changing the starting position in the x-axis so you can control this size at the bottom with the help of this parameter now moving ahead we’ll be creating a bunch of this grass placed over a circular base and for this I’ll be adding a new node which is the mesh Circle node to add and understand it press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the mesh Circle let’s place it over here now to view the mesh circle in my scene I’ll take this mesh socket and connect it over here let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and here we have the mesh Circle added in our scene this mesh circle is exactly the same as the circle which you can add by pressing shift plus a in the 3D view port and in the mesh here you have the object of circle so both of them are the same circles it’s just that you have added it from the geometry nodes editor now in the mes Circle node you have this option of fil type and by default it is set to none meaning that the circle won’t be filled with any faces but if I change it to endone then now here we have one face and our circle is now filled but in the FI type you have the third option which is the triangles and if I select it you won’t notice any difference that’s because the main difference can only be seen in the edit mode but if I tab into the edit mode you won’t actually be in the edit mode of the circle and that’s because originally the object that was added here was a cube and you can even see this in the scene collection we did all the changes in the geometry notes Editor to convert the simple Cube into various other objects like grass and then we added this mesh Circle node to view the circle but since originally it was a cube object as a result in the edit mode it still appears as a cube but to understand the working of the FI type with the triangles mode We’ll add another mesh Circle by using the add menu for this first I’ll take my cursor over here by holding shift and right clicking now if I press shift plus a go to mesh and select the circle here we have the circle added now if I go to the add Circle properties and change the FI type from Nothing To None and if I tab into the edit mode you can see that we have these vertices around the circle and a face in between well let’s come out of the edit mode and to check the next field type I’ll first delete this add another Circle by pressing shift plus a and in the mesh I’ll select the circle from the FI type I’ll change it to Triangle and if I tab into the edit mode now you can see that all these vertices are getting connected to the center and forming these triangle faces and this is the use of the triangle fi type in fact the same concept is applied when I was working on this mesh Circle and changed the FI type to triangles then you have this option of vertices and by using this you can control the number of vertices of your circle object and and similarly this radius option will determine the size of your circle now we’ll be using this mesh Circle to place grass on its different faces in order to create a bunch of grass for this first elate the second Circle by pressing X and let’s also take this 3D cursor back to the world center by pressing shift plus C and now if you want to look closely at the Circle one way is to zoom in like this but an easier way is to select it and press the dot or the period button in your num pad and now we get a close view of the circle now to place the grass at different faces on this circle we’ll be using the

    instance on point so press shift plus a go to instances and select instance on points let’s place it over here after the mesh Circle and to place the grass over here we have to connect the grass to the instant socket for this I’ll take this mesh socket of the curve to mesh and take it to the instant socket and now here we have the grass placed at different faces of the circle and now one thing to notice here is that all of them are rotated in the same direction and to give them different rotations we’ll be adding a random value node and connect it to the rotation so press shift plus a go to utilities and select the random value let’s place it over here and connect this value socket to the rotation now it appears like this because the data type in the random value is set to float however we know that for rotation we need to input a vector value for this I’ll change the data type from float to vector and now with the help of these parameters I can control the rotation of this grass in different axis for this I’ll take this value socket and connect it to the rotation and this is how our grass is looking right now now what this random value node is doing is that it is giving some random rotation values to all the blades of grass in all the three axis meaning the x- axis the y axis and the Zed axis but suppose you want the r to be only in The Zed axis and for this we’ll be using the combine XYZ node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the combine XYZ let’s place it over here and connect it to the maximum socket in the random value now with this combine XYZ node I can easily control the rotation of this grass in any one of the three axis but since we want to rotate it only in The Zed axis so I’ll go to The Zed axis and try to change the value here and if I increase it each plade of the grass will get a different rotation in The Zed AIS now similar to controlling the rotation you can also control the scaling of the this grass for this I’ll again add the random value node so I’ll select this press shift plus d and place it over here now take this value socket and connect it to the scale and now with these parameters I can control the scaling of different blades of grass in my scene so I can change these parameters like the minimum in the x-axis the minimum in the y axis and similarly the Z axis with these values I can directly control their scaling in different axes for example if I select the minimum value in all the three axes and change it to something like 0.4 then the grass looks like this to view it properly you can deselect the grass and now you can view it from different angles and confirm if the scaling and the rotation are proper in the geometry notes editor or not now if you want to control the size of this bunch of grass or the number of these grass plates you can go to the m Circle option here and if I increase the radius the size will increase like this similarly the number of vertices will control the number of these glass blades and here you can also see that we are not having any grass on the face of the circle we are only having the blades of grass at the position of the vertexes of the circle and to get these blades on different points of the faces we’ll be using another node which is the distribute points on fa faces to add it here press shift plus a go to point and select the distribute points on faces let’s place it over here and now we have the blades of grass placed over different points on the entire face of the circle now you can control the density of this grass from the density option here so if I reduce it the number of grass per square area will reduce and now it looks like this so we’ll finalize the density to this value and let’s also reduce the size of the bunch of grass or the circle with the radius option here and you can also use the seed value to generate a different output with the same settings each and every time now moving ahead let’s also give it some basic material for this we’ll add the set material node so press shift plus a go to material and select the set material let’s place it over here and now we’ll be connecting it after the instance on points node for this first I’ll bring this group output node up in the geometry nodes editor over here then I’ll take the set material node and we’ll drop it in between the instance on points and the output to create and view the material let’s go to the render View and we have to keep the render engine to EV for now now to create the material we’ll change this spreadsheet into the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader editor click on on the new button and let’s rename this material to Grass to assign This Grass material to this bunch of grass go to the set material node and click on this material option and select the grass now we’ll be giving this grass a simple green color by going to the base color and let’s change it to light green color like this and if you want you can add a simple color ramp and make a combination of light green light yellow color or some dark green color but right now I think that it looks perfect so we’ll finalize the simple base color now moving ahead we’ll be creating different bunch of grass with different settings like in one of them we’ll reduce the density or maybe the size of this crass or the rotation or the bending and for this we’ll be using another node which is the collection info node but before that we’ll be using the group input node to directly get all those settings in the modify properties editor Let Me Explain you practically by doing it I’ll select this group input node press n to open the toolbar and we won’t need this geometry socket so I’ll delete it by selecting this geometry socket and clicking this minus icon now if you want to create a new socket of your own you simply have to select that particular socket for example if I want the density socket to be here so I’ll select it and connected to the socket of the group input and now here we have the density connected and because of this I can directly control the density from the modify properties here similarly you can also connect the new socket to other parameters like the radius and here you have the radius in the modify properties and with this I can control the size of the patch of the grass so I’ll rename it from this toolbar by double clicking on the radius socket and it change it to Grass patch size Now to create a socket to control the rotation I’ll take a new socket and connect it to this combined XYZ node in the Z axis this combine XYZ node was connected to the random value which was connected to the rotation and to rename it I’ll go to the toolbar double click on the Zed and we’ll change it to rotate Z press enter to confirm and now we have three parameters in the modify properties first one is the density with which you can control the number of these grass plates in a particular area then with the grass patch size you can control the radius or basically the size of the patch of grass then you can use this rotate set parameter to rotate the blades of grass in the Z axis like this and the benefit of using this group input note is that you can now control these Valu directly from here instead of going to the geometry nodes editor each time and understanding each and every node to create any change in the structure now we can also control the height of this grass by connecting this new socket to the random value node here which is connected to the scaling to increase its height we basically have to increase the maximum value in The Zed axis because if I increase it the height of the grass will increase but if I take this socket I have to connect it to the maximum socket which is controlling all these three axis and to control Only The Zed axis we’ll be using the combine xved node so I’ll select this combined xved node press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here let’s change the value of all the three axes to one because we’ll be connecting it to the maximum socket which is having a value of one in all the three axis now I’ll take this Vector socket and connect it over here and now I can directly connect this new socket to The Zed axis which will allow us to control the scaling or basically the height of this grass in the Zed axis to rename it go to the toolbar double click on its name and we’ll change it to height now from the modify properties you can directly control the height of the grass from here then moving ahead we also added this multiply node here which was controlling the bending of the grass so if you want you can even connect this one to the group input node and to do this let’s bring the group input node over here take out the new socket and connect it to the value go to the toolbar and double click to change its name we’ll rename it to bending and now we have five different parameters to control in the modify properties now the benefit of doing all this is that we can now create different duplicates of this grass patch and control its appearance directly from here for this with this crass selected press shift plus d let’s move it in the y direction and place it over here with this crass patch I’ll reduce its height from here so let’s reduce it to something like 0.7 or 0.6 let’s also reduce its bending to minus 0.3 and let’s increase its density from here now all the changes that I’m doing here are completely random it only depends on you that exactly which type of grass you need for your scene so you can change these settings yourself in order to make the best looking grass but let’s also create another duplicate by pressing shift plus d move it in by Direction and place it over here and this time I’ll increase its height to something like 0.9 or maybe 1 M let’s also increase the ending and this time I’ll be reducing the size of the patch of grass let’s slightly increase the density also and now it looks perfect and now we have three different patches of grass with slight variations in each one of them now before placing them on a landscape we first have to create a collection of these three grass for this I’ll select all of them and to create a new collection with only these three patches of grass the shortcut is to press crl plus G you can change the name of the collection from here so I’ll rename it to Grass it will basically create a collection where it will store the three types of grass that we created now coming back to the land landcape if you remember we distributed these points or basically these cubes on the faces of this landscape with the help of these two nodes that is the distribute points on faces and the instance on points but we’ll be placing the grass that we created in place of these cubes for this I’ll delete this Cube node by selecting it and pressing X and now to connect the collection of grass that we created to this instant socket we’ll be using the collection info node to add it here press shift plus a go to input and in scene select the collection info let’s place it over here now to select the collection of grass click on this collection and select the grass now I’ll take this instance socket and connect it to the instance now let’s zoom out and you can see here that the size of this grass is too high to fix this I’ll first go to the density and reduce it to something like 0.1 then I’ll go to the scale values and change it in all the three axes to a lower number like 0.1 M and now here we have the different patches of grass placed at different points in the landscape now if I zoom out you can see here that the position of this grass is not perfect some of the patches of grass are lying outside this plane and to fix this you simply need to turn on the separate children and the reset children in the collection info node this will place the grass patches or any other object that you choose only on the plane or this landscape now if I go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad this is how our scene is looking right now also you can notice some imperfections for example this fence is going below the plane but we’ll be fixing it in the next chapter but for now if you want to render it then to change the camera view press n and in the view section enable the lock camera to view now you can change the view of your camera by holding the middle Mouse button and dragging your cursor like this now to hide that area which is outside inside the camera view we’ll be changing some settings so for this select the camera in the scene collection and in the object data properties go to this passive part out option in the viewport display and increase its value from 0.5 to 1 and now we’ll be seeing only that area which is inside the camera view let’s also change the density and the size of this grass so let’s increase the density of grass from the density option over here but I think that the density at 0.1 looks fine so we won’t be changing it and for the size we’ll go to these scale values and let’s reduce them down to something like 0.05 and now I can increase the density so that our scene is filled with grass now if you want you can also change the color of the base of this landscape for this you can go to the material properties click on the new button and change the base color from here so if I reduce the brightness and change it to brown color then our scene would look like this but for now I’ll be removing this material from the base of the landscape because we’ll be working on it later on so click on this minus icon to remove it now we can make this scene look better by properly placing this fence and also by adding some rocks and in this way we can finalize our scene but we’ll be doing all this in the next chapter so this brings us to the end of this chapter in this particular chapter you learned about creating and adding grass on different points of faces on a plain object and we understood all this with the help of geometry notes in [Music] blender in the previous three chapters of this course we created the base of landscape the simple fence with the wood texture and even distributed this grass all over the base and in this chapter we’ll be creating some rocks that we’ll place on the base of the landscape and we’ll also be finalizing the scene and with this we’ll be understanding all all these topics in complete detail so this is how our scene looks right now we have the simple looking fence and this grass spread over the base of the landscape Now to create the Rocks we’ll first add a cube in our scene and then do the changes in the geometry nodes editor so first let’s go to the solid View and to add the cube press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube let’s move it in the y direction by pressing G and Y and let’s place it over here now we have added this cube in our scene and to convert this Cube into a rock we’ll go to the geometry noes editor click on this new button and now we’ll be using the subdivision surface node so to add the subdivision surface node press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the subdivision surface let’s place it over here and now this subdivision surface is applied on the cube if you remember we studied about the subdivision surface modifier in this chapter of the course where we covered all the modifiers in detail and this subdivision surface node Works in exactly the same way as the subdivision surface modifier now the reason for adding this subdivision surface node is that we want to turn this Cube into a rock and to create a similar shape the subdivision surface node will help us basically this node subdivides the surface of your mesh and also Smooths it out now to control the amount of subdivision and the smoothing of your mesh you have the level option here so if I increase it the amount of subdivision will increase and similarly the smoothing will also increase so you can see here that if I change the level to a value of zero we get the original Cube if I increase it to one the subdivision will slightly increase and it will look like this but if I increase the level to two the subdivision increase even further and the smoothness also increases and this is how the level parameter in the subdivision surface node works then the next option that you have is The Edge crease and if I increase it it will basically crease the edges of your mesh object like this so This option is used to control the creasing effect of the edges and similarly the third option is the vertex grease which controls the creasing effect of the vertices of the mesh and so these are the three main options available in the subdivision surface node now to give this cube a rock- like shape we’ll be using the extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the extrude mesh and let’s place it over here and the intrusion is applied to all the faces of the cube to view the cube properly for now I’ll change the level of subdivision surface back to zero and here we can see that all the faces of the cube are now extruded to extrude only some specific faces we’ll be using the compare node and the index node for this we’ll go to the geometry nodes editor press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it over here let’s also add an index node and then we’ll understand the purpose of adding them so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the index node let’s place it over here now the purpose of adding this compare node is that we’ll be changing its mode to equal and then we’ll connect it to the index node and the result to the extrude mesh and with that setup we’ll be telling the extrude mesh node about the phase to be extruded for this take the index socket and connect it over here then take the result socket and connected to the selection and now you can see here that only one of the fa is extruded and to be more specific the face add the index value which is equal to the value of B which is zero is extruded here see the compare node has the mode selected to equal meaning that it will set the value of a and b equal as a result the input will be the face at the index value because we have added this index node equal to the value of B which is zero and then the result or the output will be the face at the index value of zero then it will get connected to the extrude mesh and as a result that particular face will get extruded also if you want multiple faces to be extruded then you can change the mode to less than or equal and if I increase the value of B from 0 to 1 then two faces are extruded here let’s also do one more thing right now the data type is selected to Lo but as I already told you the index values are always integers like 0 1 2 3 so I’ll change the data type to integer let’s connect the index Noe again and change the value of B from 0 to 1 now since we have set the mode to less than or equal it will basically apply the Extrusion to all the faces whose index value is less than or equal to 1 or simply the faces with the index value of 0o and 1 as a result two faces are extruded here now in the extrude mesh node you can see that you have some option of individual and it is turned on by default this option basically controls whether the faces of your object will be extruded individually or not and if I turn it off then the faces will no more be individually extruded and this is how the shape of the extruded cube is looking right now and now if I go to the subdivision surface again and increase the level back to a value of two this is how our rock is looking right now it looks very simple because we have not applied any Distortion or any texture to it for this we’ll be using the MUSC texture Noe and as I previously told you in one of the chapters that in the latest version of blender the mus texture is replaced by the noise texture so we’ll be add adding the noise texture so press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it over here and to convert this into the musk grave texture you simply have to turn off this normalize option now since we’ll be creating the Distortion effect on the vertices of this Cube so we’ll also be adding the set position node to add it here press shift plus a go to geometry and in the right category select the set position place it after the subdivision surface node and to distort the vertices we’ll basically be adding this texture effect to the position of different vertices for this I’ll be adding the position node by pressing shift plus a and in Geometry go to the read category and select the position let’s place it over here and to add both of them we’ll be using the vector math node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the vector math let’s place it over here take this position socket and connect it to the vector and take this Factor socket and connect it to the second Vector now this will add the noise texture and the changes that we do in it to the position of different vertices and to connect this with the set position node I’ll take this Vector socket and connect it to the offset and now here we have a sharp pointing texture applied to this rock to control this simply go to the noise texture and change the scale value if I change it to zero you will notice that basically no Distortion effect will be applied to this Cube and if I increase it slowly you will begin to notice slight Distortion effect applied to the different vertices of the mesh object and at a scale value of somewhere close to one you will begin to notice a slight Rock like texture and if you want to give it a more smooth look you can go to the roughness value and change it to zero and now this is how the basic structure of a rock is looking right now now to give it some material we’ll go to the Shader editor and click on the new button let’s also turn on the render preview mode and now we’ll be creating a basic Shader for this rock object for this we’ll be adding the Warner texture in the Shader editor so press shift plus a go to texture and select the Warner texture let’s place it here and to add the texture coordinate and the mapping node simply press C crl plus T but as I have told you in the previous chapters in order to use this shortcut you must have the node Wrangler add-on turned on now I’ll take this object socket and connect it to the vector and to view the texture over here hold on control shift and left click on the V texture and this is how the basic Warner texture looks on our object now this Warner texture will create these spots on the surface of the Rock and to make it look better we’ll be distorting these spots with the use of a noise texture so go to the Shader editor press shift plus a and in texture select the noise texture we’ll place it just before the Warner texture and now we get a texture like this where the spots which were due to the Warner texture are now distorted due to the noise texture now if you want you can try to change the values like the detailing in the noise texture or the roughness from here but right now the basic Shader of the rock is ready but if you wish you can also create a realistic looking Rock Shader by following the steps that I’m going to do right now making a realistic texture for this rock is completely optional for you but if you want to understand the advanced level of shaders then you can do that by understanding the creation of this rock texture so to make it look realistic I’ll go to the Shader editor let’s zoom out place this principal bstf away and right now we have connected only this noise texture to the waret texture to create this Distortion effect on the spots of the texture but now taking a step forward I’ll be combining two waret textures together to create a much better Shader for this I’ll select the Warner texture press shift plus d to create a duplicate and let’s place it over here similarly I’ll select the noise texture also press shift plus d and drop it here just like the above noise texture this one will also help to create a distortion effect on the spots created by the Warner texture to combine both the textures simply take the vector socket of the mapping node and connect it to the vector of the noise texture then take this color socket and connected to the vector of the Warner texture and to get a combined output of both the textures we’ll be using the mixed node to add it here press shift plus a go to converter and select the mixed node let’s place it over here and change the type of data from float to color now we’ll connect the output of both the textures to the color A and B in the mix Shader for this I will take this piston socket of the first one and connect it to the color a then take this one and connect it to the color B to view the result hold on control shift and left click on the mix Shader and here you can see that we get the same result as before and that’s because all the settings in the second bner texture and the noise texture are the same as the first first ones to create some variations go to the second Warner texture and change the feature output from here if I change it to the second option this is how the texture will look similarly we’ll be checking out all the other options to see which one looks the best let’s select the third one and this is how it looks then I’ll go for the fourth option which is the distance to Edge and this is the result I think that right now it has a texture which looks slightly similar to a rock but if you want you can change the value of scaling in the noise texture to make it look different so if I reduce the scaling the texture will also slightly change and similarly you can also try to change other values like the roughness in the noise texture or the detailing but for now it looks perfect and to give it some gray color we’ll be adding a color ramp for this let’s first connect this principal bstf to the material output so I left click on it and place it over here now to give it some color we’ll be adding the color ramp so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp let’s place it over here and to get a proper color we’ll be changing the position of these pointers and their colors in the color ramp so first I’ll select the black pointer and try to move it and this is how the texture is looking right now similarly if I the second pointer and try to move it you can see how the color in the texture changes and if I take this white pointer here where previously the black one was placed you can see that the basic color is now White and the color of the texture is the black color and now I’ll select the white pointer again and let’s change its color to gray color with the help of this brightness slider let’s also reduce the amount of black color by moving this second pointer and here it looks perfect so now we have a simple Rock texture applied to this rock object now just like any other Shader to give this one a realistic 3D look we’ll be adding the bump node so press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump node let’s place it over here now take this normal socket and connect it to the normal of the principal bstf and to get the result of the textures as the input I’ll take this result socket in the mix Shader and connect it to the height and here you can see that the bump effect is applied but it strength is too high so I will reduce it from a value of 1 to something like 0.5 and this is how our rock is looking right now I think that the material of the rock looks perfect so I’ll rename it from here let’s type Rock and press enter and now this rock material is saved now moving ahead we’ll be creating some duplicates of this rock and do some variations in it to do this we’ll be going to the geometry nodes editor and use a new node which is the duplicate elements node to add it here press shift plus a go to geometry and in operations select duplicate elements place it after the set position and we see some changes here you can notice that The Rock has disappeared and there are some points distributed all over the faces that’s because in the domain option here point is selected but to view the rock I will have to change this from point to face and here we have our Cube again now to create the duplicates of this rock you simply have to change the amount in the duplicate elements node so if I increase it you see that nothing happens and that’s because the duplicates of this rock have been created but all of them are placed at the same position as the original Rock in order to move them at different locations we have to use a set position node for this I’ll go to the geometry nodes editor take this set position node and to create a duplicate of it press shift plus d and place it after the duplicate elements node now to change the position of the Rocks I’ll take this duplicate index socket which basically carries the index value of different duplicates of the rocks that I created so if I connected to the offset in the set position then now we can partially see the duplicates of the rocks in are seen and to move them in different positions we have to use the math node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in the math select the math node let’s place it over here and change the operation from add to multiply now if I take the duplicate index and connect it to the value one and if I take the value socket of the multiply node and connected to the offset then now with the help of the second value I can control the position of different rocks so if I increase it the position will change like this but another problem here is that these rocks are moving diagonally and that’s because the multiply socket is connected to the offset which is controlling the offset in all the three axis the x axis the Y AIS and the Zed axis but to move it only in the Y AIS we have to use the combine xed node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the combine XZ we’ll place it over here now to control the Y AIS I’ll take this value socket and connect it to the Y socket in the combined xet then take this V socket and connected to the offset and now with the help of this multiply value I can control the position of these rocks in the Y AIS so let’s keep it to something like -5 or maybe -12 so that all of them are visible here and now let’s revise what we did we added this duplicate elements node to create multiple copies of this rock then to change the position I first added the set position node and to control the offset or basically the change in position we use the multiply node but then we faced an issue that the Rocks were moving diagonally and to fix this we added this combined XYZ node to control the movement only in the y- axis and also if you want to increase the number of these duplicates you can go to the duplicate elements node and change the amount from here so if I increase it to four then now we have four copies of the rocks in our scene now moving ahead you can see here that all these rocks are having the same rotation and that’s because these four rocks are not different objects but they are simply the duplicates of the main Rock to change the rotation of each one individually I first need to convert them into different instances to do this we have the geometry to instance node to add it here press shift plus a go to geometry and here you have the geometry to instance let’s place it over here now to convert each this into a separate instance I’ll take this geometry to instance and place it before the duplicate elements and now we have only one rock in our seed and the reason for this is that in the duplicate elements node you can see that the domain is selected to face and in this list you also have the option of instance since we have converted the Rocks into different instances as a result we have to change the domain from face to instance and now here we have the four rocks back in the scene and now to rotate each one of these rocks individually we’ll be using the rotate instance node to add it here press shift plus a go to instances and select the rotate instances we’ll place it just before the output and with the rotation values here in the rotate instances you can control the rotation of these different rocks for example if I go to the rotation in the x- axis and change it then these rocks will begin to rotate in the x- axis like this similarly if I go to the rotation in the y axis and change it they will begin to rotate in the y- AIS like this and similar is the case with the Zed axis but to give each one a random rotation we have to use the random value node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and select the random value let’s place it over here and by default the data type in the random value node is selected to float but here in this list you can see that we have different options since we want to control the rotation so I’ll be selecting the vector and then take this value socket and connect it to the rotation and now a random value is connected to the rotation of the rotate instances and you can see that each of these rocks are now having a different rotation in the XY and Zed axis to control this rotation go to the random value node and change the maximum values if you want that these rocks should not rotate in the X and Y AIS differently then you can change the values in the X and Y axis to zero and then they won’t get any random value of rotation in the x and y axis and will rotate only in The Zed axis to control the rotation in The Zed axis go to the maximum value in The Zed and if I increase it the rotation of all the rocks will change so let’s keep it to a value of somewhere near 10 and this is how the rotation looks right now all the four rocks are having different rotations in The Zed axis now just like this rotate instances node you also have a scale instances node using which you can change the scaling of different rocks to add it here press shift plus a go to instances and here you have the scale instances let’s place it over here and the scale instances is very similar to the rotate instances and the only difference is that this one is used to control the scaling of the rocks to scale them randomly we’ll be adding a random value node so I’ll select this one press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here now take this value socket and connect it to the scale and rocks will disappear because the maximum scaling in the X and Y axis is set to zero so I’ll select both of them and change it to one let’s also change the scaling in The Zed axis back to one now to view the changes properly I’ll go back to the solid mode and here you can see that all the four rocks are now having different scale values and also this one is very small as compared to the others and that’s because the minimum scaling value is set to zero which means that the scale instances node will provide random scaling values to all the four rocks which will range from a value of 0 to one in all the three axes but to give it a better scaling I will select the minimum values and increase it slightly like if I change it to 0.4 and also the maximum values if I change it to something like 0.6 then now all these rocks will have a random scale value which can be anything between 0.4 and 0.6 now in order to get a proper scaling of these rocks I will be placing them in the landscape that we created here for this we’ll go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and here we have these rocks and this is the plane to move these rocks to the plane press G and and Y and let’s place them over here left click to finalize and now here are the four rocks placed on the base of landscape now to view them properly we go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and here we have one of the Rocks placed now to view all of them properly from the camera view we have to do some changes for this I’ll go to the top view and we’ll be bringing all of these rocks closer to each other so that they’re properly visible from the camera view to do this we need to reduce the Distance by going to the geometry notes editor and we’ll be changing the multiply value here so if I change it you can see that the distance between these rocks will begin to change and they are now closer to each other let’s also rotate them by pressing R and rotating them like this press G to move them and let’s move it to somewhere near the middle of the base and this is how the rocks are placed in our scene right now if I change the angle and view below the plane you can see here that some of the rocks are not properly placed to fix this press G and z and move them upwards but now the other ones have moved slightly more upwards to fix this we’ll rotate them so press R and x and and rotate it like this then press G and Zed to move them downwards and now if I go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad you can see that at least three of the rocks are visible in the scene to get a proper view I will zoom out in the camera view and this is how our scene is looking right now and here I feel that the size of these rocks is a bit too high so I will go to the minimum values and reduce it to something like 0.25 and also the maximum values to something like 0.35 or 0.4 let’s move them downwards Again by pressing G and z and let’s place them here now the rocks are properly placed in our scene and so we’ll be moving ahead to fixing the fence in the scene if I come out of the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad then you can see on the base of the landscape that the fence that we created is not properly visible first of all its size is very small and also some part of the fence like this one is going below the base of the landscape and to fix this simply select the fence tab into the edit mode press a to select all and we’ll be deleting all of them and then create some new fence so press X and select delete segments to create new fence go to the top view by pressing 7even on the numpad and let’s zoom out now to create the fence we have to use the draw tool which is here in the tool bar so we have to select it and to draw the curve simply left click and if I drag my cursor and then release it you can see here that it has formed this fence in our scene but now also you can observe that it’s not completely perfect the fence at this part is clearly visible but the one on the left hand side is hidden below the plane as a result it’s not visible and to fix this problem I’ll again go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad let zoom out and press X to delete all select the delete segments now let’s understand a very basic thing the result that we want to achieve is that we’ll draw the fence and it should appear on the surface of the plane but instead of that whenever we are drawing on the plane it does not take the surface into consideration for this press n and here in the tool category you have this option of depth it is by default selected to cursor and that’s where we were facing this problem but if I change it to surface and now whenever I draw the fence it will basically lie on the surface to check this left click and drag your cursor like this and a fence is drawn here and if I change the angle to view it let’s also zoom in and here you can see that this fence is now taking the surface into consideration and it is also bending according to the surface of the plane and this is the use of the surface depth option here however if you look closely at some parts you will notice that it’s still not perfect here on the left hand side the entire fence is visible but at this part you can see that it’s again falling below the plane and that’s because we have not applied much subdivision to this plane and to fix this issue go to the tool properties here and here you have an option of Tolerance and to fix the problem of aligning the fence to the surface you basically have to reduce the tolerance to a very low value so I will reduce it to something like one or two let’s go to the top view again press X to delete all and select delete segments and now if I again draw the curve or basically the fence by left clicking and dragging like this and if I change the angle let’s also zoom in to get a better View and here you can see that this time the entire part of the fence is lying above the surface of the base now even though it’s properly aligned with the surface of the landscape at some areas you will notice that the fence is not properly positioned like here you can see that the fence appears like this and that’s because along with considering the plane it’s also considering the grass and that’s why when I try to make a fence over it the fence got placed like this and to fix this issue we again have to delete the entire fence by pressing X and selecting delete segments and before drawing the fence again I will remove this grass temporarily from the scene to do this come out of the edit mode select this plane and here in the geometry nodes editor if I break the connection between the collection info node and the instance to remove the grass temporarily then now we have no grass in the scene and so we can easily place our fence and now to create the fence go to the top view Again by pressing seven on the numpad select the basier curve from the scene collection tab into the edit mode and now we can draw the fence so simply left click and drag your cursor like this and now let’s view the fence by zooming in and this is how our fence looks right now let’s also go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad let’s also turn off the draw tool and here the camera to view option is enabled so if I will zoom in or zoom out the camera view will also change accordingly and you can see here that we now have these rocks in the scene and also this fence that we created and it might be possible that you want to increase the height of this fence so that it is properly visible from the camera view in your scene and to do this simply go to the geometry notes editor then in the scale value here we’ll increase all the three to something like 0.25 and now here we have the fence scaled up in the scene and if you want to increase the distance between the two fence parts for this you can go to the re sample curve and if I increase the length you will notice that the distance between the two parts of the fence will increase let’s keep it to some somewhere near 0.25 or 0.3 and here it looks perfect and now to view the grass here come out of the edit mode select the plane and connect the collection info node to the instance on points and so here we have the grph that we created back in our scene to view them properly let’s fix the camera view so I will adjust it properly to get a better view of the scene and here it looks perfect so I will finalize this and this is how the scene looks right now let’s also turn off the lock camera to view so that if I adjust the view the camera view does not change for this you can either click on the lock button or you can press any and in the view option here you have the lock camera to view now moving ahead you can see that the rocks that we have placed here are not shaded smooth and to make them smooth I will select them and here in the geometry notes editor just before the output we’ll be adding the set shade smooth so press shift plus a go to mesh and in the right category select the set shade smooth let’s place it over here and now we have made the rock smooth now let’s come out of the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and here you can see that some part of the fence is getting out of the plane and to fix this simply select the fence tab into the edit mode and we’ll be selecting all these segments that are placed outside the plane for this simply left click and drag your cursor like this and here some of them are left out and to select them together with the others simply hold on the shift button and then I can select the remaining ones let’s also select this one now to delete them press X and select delate segments and here the fence is now fixed let’s also go to the other part of the plane and here also you can see that some part of the fence is lying outside the plane to fix this let’s zoom in and we’ll select these segments and delete them so left click and drag your cursor like this press X and select delete segments and now we have deleted that part of the fence and with this our scene is also almost ready to finalize it let’s first come out of the edit mode and go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad let’s also turn on the render view to see how the scene looks and here you can see that we have each and everything properly placed in the scene but still there are a few things which we need to do in order to finalize this scene for example the bigger part of the fence that we use for the texture has to be hidden while rendering so I will select it and in the scene collection click on this camera icon now this cross on the camera will appear meaning that this object won’t be shown in the final render and if you don’t want to see it even in the viewport then you can click on this I button now each and everything looks perfect except for the ground or the base of the landscape in order to give it some material I will select it and if you remember we created a simple sand Shader in this chapter of the course so we’ll be using that Shader to give some material to this ground for this I’ll change this Shader editor in the asset browser by clicking on this icon and selecting the asset browser we learned about the creation of different shaders or materials and also about saving them in your own library in these chapters of the course now to view only those materials that we ourselves created click on this drop- down menu and select user library and here you can see that this is the sand Shader that we created so I will select it and drop it on the plane and now we have the sand Shader applied to the base of the landscape however one thing to notice is that the Shader that we have applied is actually a sand Shader and not a soil Shader and as we all know that since we have added a lot of grass in the seam the base should have soil instead of sand to fix this we’ll go to the to the Shader editor and change its color so click on this icon and open the Shader editor and here you can see that in the mix node we combine these two colors to form the color of the sand let’s also do one more thing I’ll duplicate this material so that whatever changes we make can be saved as a separate Shader for this go to the duplicate button and if you want to scroll like this simply hold on the middle Mouse button and drag your cursor like this and here we have the duplicate material button so I will click on it and let’s change the name of this material to soil now to make it look like real soil I’ll go to the color a and we’ll change it to brown color for this let’s reduce the brightness with the help of this brightness slider and change it to brown color now the reason why it appears purple is that in the color B we have applied the purple color so let’s click on it and let’s change it to red color or maybe a mix of orange and red and this is how the soil looks right now you can combine different colors together if you want to change the color of your soil and also if I zoom in you can see here that it actually looks like real soil the material is properly applied with a perfect texture and with this our scene is almost perfectly ready if you want to make it look different you can increase the grass in your scene for this select the plane go to the geometry noes editor and here you have the density option in the distribute points on faces so if I slightly increase it the density of the grass will increase like this and here I think that it looks perfect so we’ll finally render it in order to render this image click on the render button and select render image and here the image is finally rendered it will take an average time of somewhere near 5 to 10 seconds to render based on your PC specifications and you can check that time from here for me it took somewhere near 9 or 10 seconds and generated this output and one thing to note here is that we are using the EV render engine and that’s why it’s so fast but if I close this and change the render engine from EV to cycles and then go to the render option and select render image then now it will take much more time to render but for now we’ll keep it to eveve only so I will close it and change the render engine back to Eevee and yes if you want to improve the quality of your render you can change the sampling in the render by default it is set to 64 which is usually perfect for rendering an Eevee but if you want you can increase this value to get better results but with more rendering time for now I’ll keep it to 64 and go to the render option and click on render image so we have rendered the image and if you want to save it click on the image button and here you have the option of saving it and yes this brings us to the end of this chapter from the next chapter we’ll begin with understanding some new geometry notes and by using them we’ll be creating this house in [Music] blender in this chapter we’ll be understanding all these Topics in complete detail and we’ll be using them to create the simple looking house in blender so the first topic of today’s chapter is understanding the recast node for this I’ll first open the geometry nodes editor from here and to understand the recast node I’ll first delete this Cube by pressing X and we’ll be adding a suzan or the monkey model so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the monkey model now to work on the geometry nodes with this monkey selected go to the geometry nodes editor and click on this new button and also I’ll be adding a plane in My Scene by pressing shift plus a going to mesh and selecting the plane let’s move it upwards by pressing G and z and place it over here so now we have a suzan model and a plane placed over it now to use the reast node go to the geometry nodes editor and click on this new button and before using the recast node we’ll first subdivide this plane to see the changes in a better way for this go to the geometry nodes editor and we’ll be adding the subdivision mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the subdivide mesh let’s place it over here now we have applied the subdivision to the mesh now suppose you want that instead of the vertices of the plane you should be seeing some instance object such as a cube for this we’ll be adding the instance on points so press shift plus a go to instances and select instance on points let’s place it here and to place the cube at the position of the vertices of the plane we’ll add the cube node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the cube let’s place it over here and to connect it to the instance take this mesh socket and connect it to the instance socket let’s reduce their size to see them properly so go to the scale option here select all three and let’s change it to something like 0.5 or 0.4 and here you can see that now we have these nine cubes placed as instances on the vertices of the plane and suppose you want to increase the number of these cubes for this you can go to the subdivide mesh and increase the levels from here let’s further reduce their size so that we can increase the number of these cubes even more so go to the scaling again and let’s change it to 0.1 this time or maybe 0.2 and increase the level from here now the levels in the subdivision is set to four and it looks as if we again need to reduce their size so that they’re properly placed so go to the scaling option again select all the three and let’s reduce it to 0.1 or maybe 0.08 and this looks perfect so we simply added a plane and to place these cubes on the vertices of the plane we added this instance on points and connected the cube to the instance then to control the number of these cubes we used the subdivide mesh but the main reason for doing all this was to understand the recast node so we’ll add it here by pressing shift plus a going to geometry and in Sample select the rast node let’s place it over here and this is how the raycast nodee looks now as the name suggests it basically cast Rays from one object to another so suppose I want that the ray should be casted from the cubes of the plane onto the suzan model so in this case the target geometry that you can see here will be the suzan model as a result I’ll go to the scene collection left click on the suzan model and drag it over here now here is the object info node with the suzan model selected and we’ll connect it to the transform geometry so take this geometry socket and connect it over here and now here you can see that we have some output options and the first one is named is hit and to view how it works we have to take this socket and connect it to the selection socket of the instance on points and here we see some changes now as I already told you the rast mode will basically cast the raise out of the different cubes towards the monkey object and with this is hit option selected it will only display those cubes whose rays will actually reach the target object which is a suzan to understand it properly go to the top Cube by pressing seven on the numpad and if I zoom in and turn on the relative option here in the object info node then now you can see that only those cubes are visible which are aligning with the top structure of the suzan or the monkey model to understand it in an even better way go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad let’s zoom out and here in the toolbar you can see that I have this annotate option so I’ll select this and if I hold the left Mouse button then you can see that I have an option of anot rotate line so I will select this and yes whatever steps I’m doing right now you don’t need to repeat them in your file as I’m doing this only for explaining it to you and here you can see that if I zoom in and let’s adjust the view properly then here you can see that if I draw this line then it will fall on this monkey object similarly this is also true for all the other cubes that are visible right now and if I change the view to the side view by pressing three on the numpad then here also you can see that if I draw a Straight Ray out of the cube then it will fall on the surface of this monkey but if I break the connection in between the ray cast and the distance on points by holding the control button right clicking and dragging like this then some more cubes are visible but if I draw array out of it then you can see here that this Ray is not touching the suzan or the monkey model similarly if I go for this one and make a ray out of it then this one is also not touching the suzan or the monkey model and this was the reason why when I was using this rast node these particular cubes were not visible if I connect it again using the isit option then you can see that they will disappear so in simple words you can say that by using the recast node you will be able to see only those Cube objects whose raise will reach the target object which is the suzan now for deleting these annotations again I’ll go to the toolbar hold down the left Mouse button on the draw tool and select the annotate eraser then left click and drag to remove it and now let’s go back to the select mode so we just learned about the is hit socket and the next one that is available here is the hit position socket and you can use this to place these cubes on the surface of the suzan model at those points where the race hit the suzan model to understand it better we’ll be adding a set position node after the subdivide mesh node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in the the right category select the set position node and let’s place it after the subdivide mesh node so if I take the hit position socket and connect it to the position socket of the set position then here you can see that these cubes will get placed on the surface of the suzan or the monkey model and now we can use the same method to make the rooftop of a house for this we’ll be adding a cube in the scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube and place it over here press G and X to move it in the X Direction now blender gives you an option to assign the geometry nodes of any object to some other object for example the geometry node system of these cubes placed over the suzan model is saved here with the name of geometry nodes. 001 and if I select this Cube click on this new button and then if I click on this icon then here you will find the list of all the geometry notes systems that are present in the scene and if I choose the geometry notes. 001 then this particular note system will get applied to the cube but the reason why we can’t see anything here is that in the geometry noes editor the target geometry of the rast is connected to the object info node which is carrying the information about the suzan model to connect the cube here I will first delete this object info node by selecting it and pressing X and then I’ll take this group input which is carrying the information about the cube that we added and connect it to the Target geometry now you can see these small cubes placed here because of the recast node and the instance on points but suppose you want to see the actual Cube for this I’ll break the connection in between the group input and the RAS and then I’ll take the symetry socket of the group input and connect it to the group output and now here we have the cube back in the scene and now to give it a simple structure of a house I’ll tab into the edit mode press three for the face select mode and then I I select the top face to make the basic rooftop I will extrude this face by pressing e and let’s move it in the Z Direction like this press s to scale it down let’s move it slightly downwards by pressing G and Zed and here it looks perfect now let’s come out of the edit mode and to see the effect of the RAS node I’ll take the geometry socket and connect it to the Target geometry of the rast node then take this instances and connect it to the output and now here we have the cubes placed as instances on the rooftop and the base of the house and you can control the number of these cubes from the level in the subdivide mesh here I’ve set the value of level to one and it appears like this right now but in order to make the rooftop we need to make some roof tiles like this and since it shape looks semicircular so I’ll be adding a circle in my scene and we’ll delete it by half to do this let’s go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad Press shift plus a go to mesh and select the circle press G and X to move it here tab into the edit mode and press one for the vertex select mode and now we’ll delete the bottom half of it so select these vertices by left clicking and dragging like this and press X to delete select delete vertices and now to skill it down we first need to place a 3D cursor over its pivot point and for this first come out of the edit mode hold on shift plus s and the snap menu will appear and select snap cursor to select it and now here we have the 3D cursor placed over this point let’s again enter the edit mode by pressing the T key and now to scale the circle around the 3D cursor we have to change the Pivot Point from this icon to the 3D cursor so I’ll select this press a to select all the points and to scale it down press s and Y and scale it down like this left click to finalize and now to make the complete typ we’ll be extruding them in the Zed axis so press e and Zed and move it upwards left click to finalize to view it properly let’s rotate the object properly so press a to select all the vertices press R and we’ll rotate it in the x axis so press X and if I move my cursor then you can see here that instead of rotating about its Center or basically the median point it is now rotating about the 3D cursor this is because in the Pivot Point option here we have selected the 3D cursor and to rotate it in xaxis by 90° press R and x and type 90 press enter to confirm and this is how it looks in order to give it some thickness let’s come out of the edit mode go to the modify properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate select the solidify modifier so you can control the thickness from here and if I increase it you can see that the thickness will increase outwards and if I reduce it the object will get thickness inwards and here at a value of somewhere near – 0.168 M it looks fine and now we’ll be replacing the cubes that were present at the roof top with this roof tile that we created for this select the cube in the scene collection and here in the geometry notes editor I delete this Cube node by selecting it and pressing X then to add the roof tile here select the circle in the scene collection left click and drag it here and now we can connect it using the geometry socket so I’ll take it and connect it to the instances and now here we have the roof tiles in place of the cubes here now the rotation is not correct so we’ll be fixing it later on but in order to save both the roof tiles and the house together we’ll be adding The Joint geometry node so press shift plus a go to geometry and select the joint geometry let’s place it over here and connect the group input to the geometry socket so here we have the house with these roof tiles placed as the instances now if you remember we added a plane above the suzan model to cast the rise on it in order to place the instances similarly for this house also we’ll be adding a grid or a plane in order to place the roof tiles to do this go to the geometry nodes editor press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the grid let’s place it here and to view it hold on control shift and left click on the grid and now here we have the grid added in the scene and now to scale it up we’ll use the size options here in the X and Y axis so I’ll select both of them and let’s increase it to something like three or four and to move it upward so that it’s above the house we’ll be using the transform geometry node so press shift plus a go to geometry and operations select the transform geometry let’s place it over here and you can use a translation in The Zed axis to move it upwards let’s keep it to a value of somewhere near three and this is how it looks now to give it some more vertices you can use the vertices option here and to see those vertices click on this drop down arrow and in the geometry section turn on the wire frame now here you can see that we have four faces and if I go to the vertices option here and increase the vertic in the X and Y AIS to something like 10 then now the number of faces and the vertices will increase like this now since we have basically subdivided our plane by using the vertices option here we no more need the subdivide mesh node so I will select it and to remove it from here hold down alt left click and drag it away and now to see the house with the roof tiles placed according to the Rays coming out of this plane we have to connect the geometry socket in the transform geometry node to the geometry socket of the set position node and in order to see the result I’ll select this viewer node press X to delete it and now here we have the this house with these roof tiles now before proceeding further let me explain to you what all we did here this will help you to revise the function of all the nodes that we have placed here see the group input node is carrying the information about this Cube which we used to create the house in the scene then we connected it to the ray cast as the target gometry so that the Rays of the plane will fall on it and then we can place these roof tiles as the instance on it then we took this hit position socket and

    connected it to the set position and we took the is head socket and connected it to the selection in the instance on points the use of adding the instance on points was to place the roof tiles as the instances on the rooftop of the house as a result we connected this instance socket to the object info node with the circle selected which we used to create these roof tiles then moving ahead we use the joint geometry node in order to see both the roof tiles and the house in the scene then we added a Plane by using the grid node because in order to use the ray cast node we needed an object whose rays will fall on the house and accordingly these roof tiles will be placed then we connected it to the transform geometry in order to move it upwards and this was then connected to the geometry socket in the set position in order to connect it to the rest of the note system now moving ahead you can control the number of these tiles from the vexes option here for example if I select them and increase it to a higher number like 12 then the number of these roof tiles will increase and to fix its rotation I’ll go to the instance on points node and here you have the rotation option to make it perfectly aligned we’ll be connecting it to the Align UL to Vector node about which we learned in one of the previous chapters of the course to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in rotation select align UL to Vector let’s place it over here and connect the rotation socket to the rotation in the instance on points Now to control the rotation we’ll be connecting the normal node to the vector socket here so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select normal let’s place it over here and connect it to the vector now let’s understand about exactly which axis to align along the vector so here you can see that the roof ta that we created is lying along the Y AIS and here on the rooftop of the house in order to keep them straight along the Z axis we have to align them in the Zed axis for this go to the Align UL to Vector select the y a here and in the pivot option select the Z axis now what this basically will do it will align the y axis of the object along the Z axis to understand it better let’s first increase the size of these roof tiles by going to the scale option in the transform geometry node and let’s increase it in all the three axes to something like 0.12 and to control their rotation we’ll be adding the transform geometry node so press shift plus a go to geometry and operations select the transform geometry let’s place it after the object info node and from the rotation options here you can control the rotation of these roof types so if I rotate it in xaxis you can see that they rotate like this in order to make them look straight I’ll reduce the rotation in the x-axis to a value of somewhere near – 60° and the roof tiles look like this right now and to make it look better we’ll be increasing their number from the vertices option in the grid node so I’ll take the vertices in the X and Y AIS and increase it to a higher number like 30 or maybe 35 and this is how it looks now moving ahead we’ll be adding some windows to the house and for this go to the geometry nodes editor and add the cube node so press shift plus a go to meesh and in Primitives select the cube let’s place it over here and to view it in our scene simply hold down contrl plus shift and left click on the cube node in order to increase the number of vertices in the cube we’ll be using the subdivide mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the subdivide mesh let’s place it over here and you can control the number of subdivisions with the help of this level option but for now we’ll keep it to one now to extrude the faces of this Cube we’ll be adding the extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the extrude mesh let’s place it over here here and this will extrude all the faces of the cube like this and to control the Extrusion go to the offset value here and let’s reduce it and now suppose you want to scale down these extruded faces individually and to create an insert effect and to do this we have to use the scale elements node to add it in the geometry nodes editor press shift plus a go to mesh and in the operations select this scale elements node let’s place it over here but right now if I go to the scale value and try to increase or decrease it you can see that the scale of entire object is changing but now suppose you want to scale only the extruded faces then for this here in the extrude mesh node you have the top socket here and if I connect it to the selection in the scale elements then now I can control the scaling of only these extruded faces now in order to make it look like a window first let’s reduce the Extrusion back to zero and here you can see that we have these faces on the cube and the size of these faces can be controlled from the scale option in the scale elements so you can increase it or reduce it as per your own choice now since we making the windows as a result we need to extrude these faces that are formed here inwards and to do this we’ll need need another extrude mesh node after the scale elements so I will select this one press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here but if I try to increase the Extrusion from here you will notice that all the faces will get extruded but in order to get only the top extruded faces I’ll again take this top socket and connect it to the selection and now if you change the extrude value you will notice that these top faces will get extruded like this now in order to make the window I need to extrude these faces inwards for this I’ll take this Extrusion value in this extrude mesh node to a negative number like – 0.0 one and now it looks like this so whenever you have to extrude the faces inwards you have to insert a negative value here and to extrude the faces outwards you should have a positive value now here you can see that these windows are visible on all the six faces of the cube but suppose I need these windows to appear only on this face and the face on the back of it that is this one and for this I need to connect something which carries this information about these two faces in the selection socket of the extrude mesh node here and to do this I’ll be adding two nodes one of them is the normal node which we even added here and connected it to the Align UL to vector and the other one will be the compare node so we’ll add it and understand them in detail so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read category select the normal let’s place it over here and to add the compare node press shift plus a go to utilities and in math here you have the compare node we’ll place it over here and now let’s understand the normal node so the normal basically means perpendicular of a face for example for all the faces on the top of the cube the normal will be in the direction perpendicular to them or basically meaning The Zed axis to explain it in a better way I’ll go to the annotate tool and turn on the annotate line now see if I draw the perpendicular to these faces it means that they will form an angle of 90° with the face and this is how they will look like and as you can clearly see the perpendicular to these faces is in the Z AIS similarly for these faces the normal or the perpendicular will be along the x-axis and for these faces the perpendicular or the normal will be along the y axis like this and this is the definition of normal it simply means perpendicular to a face now I’ll remove these annotations by pressing control+ Z let’s go back to the select mode from here and now this normal node basically acts as an input which is carrying the information about the normals of different faces and here you have the compare Noe and we discussed about it in one of the previous chapters of the course where I told you that it takes two values in the value a and value B and Compares them according to the operation selected here if I select the equal operation and connect the normal to the value a then it basically means that it will check for each value of normal and whenever the normal will be equal to the value of B which is zero that will be returned as the output from the result socket and here you can also see the input type to be selected for example float integer Vector but since we have a normal node here we need the input type to be Vector instead of float and this is because the normal depends on the directions that is the X Y and Z axis and you must also have learned this in your school that Vector quantities basically have a magnitude and a direction and therefore we selected the input type in the compareed node to be Vector now I’ll take this normal socket and connect it to the value of a and here you have the value of B which you can compare with the normal and now suppose you want that the window should be visible only on this face for this you have to check the normal of these faces and as I already told you the normal will basically be the perpendicular line from these faces and you can clearly see here that the perpendicular of these faces will lie in the Y AIS like this but another thing to check is that if this y- AIS is positive or negative and you can confirm it from here where you can see that in this direction it is pointing the positive y direction and if I take my cursor over here then here you have the negative y AIS meaning that this side is positive and the opposite side that is this one is the negative y AIS similarly you also have other axis like the x axis and the Z axis so in case of xaxis this one is positive and this one is negative now I’ll remove all this by pressing cr+ Z 6 to seven times and click on the select mode again to see the Extrusion effect will be applied only on these faces I’ll go to the value B and here you can see that this one controls the x-axis the second one will control the Y AIS and the last one will control the Z axis so I’ll go to the y- AIS option and change it to one and the reason for entering one is that it’s in the positive direction if it had been in the negative Direction I Would have entered minus one in the Y AIS and now I’ll take this result socket and connect it to the selection in the extrude mesh node and now you can see that these windows or the extruded faces are appearing only on this side of the cube and this is because of the normal node and the compare node now moving ahead suppose you want that these windows should also appear on these faces at the back so for this you can see that the normal is in the negative ya axis this time so I’ll go to the geometry nodes editor and we’ll be creating a duplicate of these nodes by selecting both of them pressing shift plus d and let’s place it over here and this time I’ll change the value of B in the y- AIS to minus one but if I try to connect it using the result socket to the extrude mesh through the selection socket then although the windows will appear on this face but they would disappear from this face of the cube and that’s because the selection socket can only accept one input at a time and to assign multiple inputs to the selection socket we have to use another node which is the Boolean math node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in math here you have the bo Ian math node so I’ll select this and place it over here now in this Boolean matth node you have two input sockets named as booleans and an output socket which is again named as Boolean and by using this node I can connect the result sockets of both the compare nodes in the Boolean inputs and if I take the output and connected to the selection then this will create a connection between them but another thing to notice here is the and operation selected here and this thing will basically mean that it will check if the result from this compare node and the result from this compare node are equal or not and only if both of them are equal then in that case it will give the output but as we already know that both of these compare nodes are having different values the first one is having positive 1 in the y- AIS and the second one is having negative 1 in the y- AIS and as a result when it Compares both of them with this and operation the condition won’t be satisfied and no output will be given and that’s the reason why you can’t see the Extrusion effect on any of the faces and to fix this we’ll change the operation from here and if I select the or operation then this thing will basically mean that first it will check if the normal in the positive Y axis is true and then it will check the second one whether the normal in the negative y- axis is true or not and since both of them exist it will return the output that both of the conditions are true and therefore we’ll be able to see the Extrusion effect applied to the faces on both the sides and this is the use of the Boolean math node now moving ahead in order to make this window smaller in the Y AIS we’ll go to the cube node which is placed here and reduce the size in the Y AIS so let’s reduce it slowly and at a value of somewhere near 0.2 or 0.25 the structure of a window looks perfect so in this way we understood about the Boolean math node and it’s working in the and as well as the or operation see previously when we selected the and operation the reason why we didn’t get any output is that with the and operation it will give an output which will satisfy both the conditions however in this case the first condition was that the normal should be in the positive ey Direction and the second condition was that the normal should be in the negative ey Direction as a result both the conditions couldn’t be fulfilled simultaneously because both of them are completely different and therefore we didn’t get any output but with the or operation selected it will check both the conditions that is whether the normal is in the positive y- axis in the first case and in the negative y- axis in the second case and will return the output based on which one is true and in this case since both of them were true as a result we got these extruded faces or the windows on both of these faces now moving ahead we’ll be placing this window on different faces of the house that we created and here in the 3D view Port you can also see that the house that we created is not visible and that’s because we are using the viewer node here which is connected to this window to view the house in my SE scene first I’ll delete this viewer node by pressing X and here we have the house in our scene let’s also connect this extrude mesh node which is carrying the information about the window that we created and connect it to the Joint geometry now to view the windows on different points or different faces of the house we’ll be using the instance on points node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the instance on points we’ll place it after the extrude mesh node and since the window object is to be used as an instance to be placed at multiple points we’ll break this connection and connect the mesh socket to the instant socket but the reason why we can’t see anything here is that we have not added any input in the point socket and here we need to add the input which is carrying the information about this house for this we’ll be using this group input node and if I take the geometry socket and connect it to the points then now here we have these windows placed at different points of the house now moving ahead before fixing this house let’s learn about another node which is the mesh Boolean node this node is exactly similar to the Boolean modifier about which we studied in this chapter of the course to understand it again we’ll first add the mesh Boolean node here so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the mesh Boolean let’s place it over here and now here you can see that you have option to add mesh 1 and mesh 2 and here it’s also visible that mesh 1 can take only one input but the socket of this mesh 2 is oval in shape meaning that it can take multiple inputs then from here you can control the operation such as the difference Union and intersect which is exactly the same as in the Boolean modifier with the difference options selected we’ll be adding two mesh objects in the geometry noes editor and connected here so the mesh one will be a cube to add it pressure shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the cube let’s place it over here let’s also connect it to the mesh one and now for the second mesh we’ll be adding a sphere so press shift plus a go to mesh and Primitives select the UV sphere let’s place it over here and connect it to the mesh to to view the output here hold on control and shift and left click on the mesh buo node now the reason why you can’t see anything here is that by default the size of the cube is set to 1 M which is small and if I change the size in all the three axes to something like 1.25 M or maybe be 1.5 M then now here you can see that this strange looking structure of cube will appear to understand it properly let me explain it to you with the help of the Boolean modifier for this let’s first bring the 3D cursor on the selected object by pressing shift plus s and select this cursor to select it then we’ll add a cube and a UV sphere just like we added in the geometry noes editor so in the 3D view Port press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube press G and X to move it here now the reason why that structure disappeared is that whenever I do any changes in the 3D viewport the viewer node will get turned off here and only that output will be seen which is connected to the group output node here to fix this we’ll be connecting the mesh Boolean node to the group output so let’s connect it here and now in the 3D viewport let’s also add a UV sphere so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the UV sphere press G and X to move it in X Direction and place it over here let’s enter the edit mode and to scale up the UV sphere let’s first change the Pivot Point back to the median point then press s and scale it up like this let’s get back to the object mode and now to apply the Boolean modifier on this Cube first I selected it then go to the modify properties and click on ADD modifier then in the generate category select the Boolean modifier now here you can see that you have three options intersect Union and difference which is similar to the mesh Boolean node that we saw in the geometry nodes editor here also you can see that we have three operations intersect Union and difference if I again select this Cube and in the object if I click on the eye dropper and select this UV sphere then it will basically subtract or remove the part of the UV sphere intersecting with the cube and to see the changes here first I need to apply this modifier so I’ll apply it from here and then if I select the UV sphere and move it somewhere else then here you can see that this area or basically the volume of the UV sphere will get removed from the cube and the exactly same operation was performed by the mesh Boolean node on the cube that we added here similarly you also have some other operations like intersect and Union and if I select the intersect then only the UV sphere is visible here and that’s because the cube is disconnected here so if I connect it to the mesh socket again then a structure like this appears the reason why it looks like this is that with the insert operation it will only show that part of the mesh which is common between the cube and the UV sphere then if I change the operation to Union then this one will basically join the two mesh objects that is the cube and the UV sphere and form a structure like this and this is how the mesh boo node Works in blender even though I explained you each and every operation in detail but if you are still having any doubts in it then you can understand about the Boolean modifier which is exactly the same as the mesh Boolean node in this chapter of this course and now moving ahead we’ll be using this mesh Boolean node in order to place the windows properly on our house but first let’s remove all these nodes which we use used for understanding the mesh Boolean node so I’ve selected all these and press X and to view the house in our scene I’ll take back the retry socket and connect it to the group output now if I press shift plus a and in the mesh operations select the mesh Boolean node and place it over here just before the joint geometry node then here I can connect two mesh types with the difference operations so what I’m going to do is that I’ll be selecting this house that we created as the first mesh object and the windows as the second for this let’s first break the connection here by holding control button right clicking and dragging like this then for the mesh one I’ll take this roup input socket and connect it to the mesh one then I’ll take this instances on points which is carrying the information about the windows and connect it to the mesh number two and now let’s understand what exactly is happening here by using this mesh Boolean node we are basically subtracting the geometry of the windows from the geometry of this house now even though this is not the final result that we need but still it helped us because now we have a clear idea about where we need to place the windows on these faces we’ll be adding a window over this face similarly at the back face and also at the side faces so once again this mesh pan node simply subtracted the of mesh 2 which is the windows from the geometry of the mesh one which is the house now in order to place the windows on these faces we need to add another node which is the mesh to points node to add it here press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the mesh to points and we’ll be placing it just before the point socket of the instance on points now what it basically does is that it converts the mesh that comes as the input which in this case is the house because we have connected the mesh Point node to the group input here and as I already told you this group input node is carrying the information about the house but yes before explaining the mesh points note to you let me first place all these notes properly here to avoid any kind of confusion so I’ll select the instance one points node here and place it here similarly this one let’s place it here let’s place this one and similarly select this one and place it here and this one also then let’s go downwards and bring this normal node upwards and let’s place it over here now if I zoom in you can see here that this group input node which is carrying the information about this house is connected to the mesh two points node and if I change the mode from vertices to faces then we see some changes here but to understand them deeply I will directly connect the mesh two points node to the group output now here you see some points added which are basically placed at the different faces of the house that we created and this is because in the mode option here we have selected the faces but if I change it to vertices then it will basically place these points on the position of different vertices of the mesh object or basically the house but since we want that the window should be placed at only the faces of the house as a result we’ll change the mode to the faces and if I connect the joint geometry node back to the group output then here you can see that our window is placed on all these faces of the mesh object now even though these two windows are perfectly placed the windows at the sides are not perfect and we can fix this with the help of rotation in the instance one points for this I’ll connect the rotation socket to the Align UL to Vector node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in rotation select the line UL to Vector let’s place it over here and connect it to the rotation socket of the instance on points now as I already told you we need to input the normal information of all these faces in the vector option here however all these fa cases are having different normal information and for this you have the capture attribute node in the geometry nodes Editor to use it press shift plus a go to attribute and select the capture attribute node and I’ll place it here now what this capture attribute node does is that it basically captures the information about the normal of these faces and that information can be used to rotate these windows properly so we’ll be connecting it in between the group input node and the mesh two points node so let’s place it over here now here you can see that you have the data type option which is selected to float by default but since since we wanted to capture the normal information which is a vector so we’ll be changing it from float to vector and also one more thing is that the information that we want to get is about the normal on the faces but here in the domain point is selected which will give you the information about the normals of the points but here I’ll change it to faces and to tell it that we want the normal to be captured we need to connect this value socket to the normal so one way is to press shift plus a and in Geometry go to read and add the normal from here and the other way is to select this normal node press shift plus 3 to create a duplicate place it over here and connected to the value socket of the capture attribute node and now this capture attribute node will capture the information about the normal of different faces of the house object and now to give this information about the normals to the Align ular to Vector node we’ll take this attribute socket and connect it to the vector socket of the Align UL to vector and now we can align the different axis with the x file and Z option here along any other axis which you can select from the pivot option by default it is selected to Auto and this is how it will align the y- axis of the object or basically the windows like this and since we want them to be straight like this in the Zed axis you should either align the y- axis and set the pivot to Auto or you can set it to the Z axis now although this house now has a perfect basic structure there are still some imperfections in it for example the windows that you can see here are also added to the rooftop which you can’t see right now because of these roof tiles and similarly it’s also added here at the base of the house and to fix this we basically need to tell the mes two points note here about at exactly which normal value of the faces we want these windows to appear and if you remember we did a very similar thing here in this case when we connected the normal socket to the equal or basically the compare node and we used it to compare the normal value to the vector B that we added here similarly in this case we want that the window should be placed only on those faces whose normals are in the positive or the negative X direction or in the positive and the negative y AIS or in simple words I can also say that we need these windows at all the faces whose normals are not in the positive or the negative Z axis and to do this press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it over here change the data input to vector and to add the normal node I’ll select this one press shift plus d and place it over here let’s connect it to the vector a let’s also change the operation to equal and set the value in The Zed axis in the vector B to minus one then to create another compare node with a vector value of positive 1 in The Zed axis I’ll select both of them press shift plus d and let’s place it over here and change this value to positive 1 now both of them are carrying the information about the faces whose normals are in the negative or the positive Zed axis but since we need the faces which are not in the positive or the negative Zed axis we’ll change the operation from equal to not equal similarly with this one let’s select not equal now another thing to understand here is that the normals of the faces where we have added these roof tiles are not perfectly in The Zed axis and that’s because they’re not straight like the other faces you can see that they are slining like this and as a result if I take the annotate tool and change it to annotate line and if I go to the side view by pressing three on the numpad then the normal of these faces will be something like this you can clearly see that this is perpendicular to the face however it is not lying perfectly in any of the three axes as a result when I’ll connect these compare notes to the mesh two points it will basically mean that these faces will also be included and to solve this problem let’s first undo the annotations go to the select mode again and we need to see only the points of this mesh object for this hold on control shift and left click on this mesh two points node and this will basically allow you to see all the points of the mesh or basically the house that we created now if I take the compare node and connect it to the select of the mesh two points then the uppermost Point here gets deleted and that’s because it was carrying the information that it must be showing all those points whose normal is not equal to one in the Zed axis similarly if I connect this one to the selection socket then the lowermost point will get deleted because this one is carrying the information that all the points must be shown whose normal is not in the negative Z AIS and also here you can see that these four points are actually the points lying on the faces of the rooftops and to remove these we’ll take the second compare node again and connect it to the selection and and here you have the option of Epsilon in the compare node and if I slightly increase it by holding the shift button and dragging it like this then at one particular point you will notice that those four vertices will get disappeared and now we can connect both the compare nodes together with the use of the Boolean match node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the Boolean math let’s place it over here and connect the first one to the Boolean similarly the second one to the Boolean and take this output node and connect it to the selection and now here we have only these four points which are actually those points that we needed to add the windows on the house and yes the reason for choosing the and operation here is that we need both of these conditions to be true the first one is telling that the point whose normal is in the negative Zed axis should not be included and the second one which is telling that the point in the positive Z axis and also those four points that we adjusted with the help of Epsilon are not to be included here so both the conditions need to be satisfied and therefore we selected the and operation now to view the windows on the house I will delete this viewer node by selecting it and pressing X and now here we have our house with the window windows on all the four faces but not on the bottom face and also not on any of the faces where you have these roof tiles now moving ahead to the next topic of this chapter which is the bounding box node and we’ll be using this node to make our Windows look better right now you can see that the windows are looking very simple and so we’ll be using the bounding box node to make this structure perfect but before that let’s understand this node with the help of the suzan model that we added here so I’ll select this and in the geometry nodes editor here we have the default geometry node system applied to add the bounding box node press shift sh plus a go to geometry and in operations select the bounding box let’s place it in between the group input and the group output and here we see a cube or a box placed around the monkey object now to see what actually happened here let’s go to the wireframe mode by clicking on this icon now to view both the objects together that is the bounding box and the suzan model we’ll be using the joint geometry node so press shift plus a go to geometry and here you have the joint geometry node let’s place it over here then I’ll take the socket of the group input and connect it to the Joint geometry and now here we have the suzan object with the bounding box so this bounding box node will basically create a box around your object and that to with the minimum volume such that it completely surrounds the object so if I go to the front view by pressing one on the numpad then here you can see that our suzan model is perfectly placed in this box like this similarly if I go to the side view by pressing three on the numpad then from this Dimension also you can see that the box is exactly covering the suzan model similarly if I go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad let’s hide this object by selecting it and clicking on this I button then from the top view also you can see that this box is exactly covering the suzan model and this is the use of the bounding box node it will create a box- like structure covering your object completely and that to with the minimum possible volume now just similar to the suzan model we’ll be using the bounding box node on the Windows of this house in order to make the frame of these windows for this I’ll delete the suzan model with this bounding Box by pressing X let’s also delete this Cube and the UV sphere which we used to understand about the Boolean modifier so I’ll delete both of them and now if I select the house then this geometry node system will appear and so now let’s add the bounding box node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in operations select the bounding box let’s place it over here now we have to place it after that node which is carrying the information about the windows and that specific node is the instance on points node if you remember we added this mesh Boolean node in order to subtract the first mesh which was the house and the second mesh which was the window and at the mesh number two we have connected this instance on points node and so we can say that this node is carrying the information about the windows that we created so I’ll take this bounding box Noe and connect it over here and it creates these spaces in place of the windows that we added and to get those windows back simply take this instances socket and connect it to the Joint geometry and this is the result if I zoom in you can now see that we have these frames added because of this mounding box node and this makes the windows look much better than before and now it’s the time to give some materials to the house and the windows for this go to the render view then go to the material properties and click on the new button now the first material here will be basically that material that will appear on the house so let’s change its name from material to house and let’s change the base color to slightly yellow now moving ahead let’s create another material for the window glasses so click on the new button change its name from here and we’ll rename it to Glass let’s keep the base color to white right now then we’ll create another material which will be used for the window frame so I’ll change its name from material to frame let’s also change the base color and this time I’ll keep it to blue color now to apply the window frame material we’ll be adding a set material node so press shift plus a go to material and select the set material and we’ll be placing it in between the extrude mesh and the instance on points node and if I change the material to frame and now the entire frame along with these window glasses are assigned the frame material to give some different material to the window glasses or basically the top extruded faces let’s create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and place it along with the first set material node and change the material to Glass and now we see that this glass material is being applied to the window frame as well as the glasses and that’s because we have placed the set material node with the glass material after the one where we assigned the frame material and whenever you have such a situation where two similar nodes are giving different information about the same object then in that case it will only consider that node which is placed after or basically on the right hand side of the previous one but in order to assign this glass material only to these windows or basically these top extruded faces we have to take the top socket of the extrude mesh node and connect it to the selection in this set material node and now you can see that this glass material is applied on the top extruded faces and this Frame material is applied to the rest of the window now if you remember while making the glass material we simply added a white color to the base and did no other changes but to make it look like a real glass I’ll click on the surface option here and change it to Glass pstf let’s also reduce the roughness from here so I’ll reduce it to zero but if you remember in one of the previous chapters of the course we created a simple glass material but the reason why we can’t use it here is that in the render properties we have set the render engine to Eevee but that glass material was only for the cycle cender engine and in order to make a glass material in EV we also have to go to the screen space Reflections here and turn it on and also you have to turn on the refraction and now to get some proper Lighting in our scene I’ll select the light from the scene collection go to the object data properties and we’ll change the light from point to Sun let’s reduce the strength to something like five or six then press R to rotate and X to rotate in the x-axis and if I move my cursor like this then now we can see the house that we created properly now another thing that you can notice here is that even though we have assigned the glass material to these window glasses you can’t actually see see through it to fix this problem I’ll select the house go to the material properties and with the glass material selected go to the settings option here and change the blend mode from opaque to Alpha blend to see the changes here we need to view only the windows and for this hold on control shift and left click on the instance on points node and now here you can see that the glass material is perfectly applied on these window glasses and you can clearly see through them now press X to delete this viewer node now before giving some material to the roof tiles here let’s first turn off the wireframe mode that we turned on previously in this chapter so click on this drop- down menu and from here I’ll turn off the wireframe display now to give some material to these roof tiles first I’ll select the bigger roof tile that we created and in the material properties click on the plus icon and let’s create a new material we’ll rename it to roof tiles let’s also change the base color to something like orange and to view the changes here with this roof tile selected tab into the edit mode press a to select all the vertices and click on this assign button let’s come out of the edit mode and now you can see that the color of these roof tiles has changed but another thing that you can notice here is that the yellow color of the house is also appearing on this lower part of the roof and to fix this issue we’ll add a set material node by pressing shift plus a go to material and select set material and we’ll be placing it in between the node connection of the group input node and the joint geometry so let’s place it over here let’s zoom in and we’ll change the material to house then I’ll create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and placing it over here and change this material to the roof tiles but as I told you earlier the one that is present on the right hand side will only be seen as the result but in order to apply this house material only to the side faces then for this we have to tell the set material node that we want to apply it only on those specific faces whose normal lies on the positive and negative x-axis or on the positive and negative y AIS and if you remember we created a system of nodes with the normal and the compare nodes which were serving the same purpose so if I take the Boolean socket here which is connecting both of them and connected to the selection then now you will see that the house material is getting applied only on the side faces and not to the rooftop now in order to see the glass material properly to ensure that you have this R race refraction option turned on and now we have a simple yellow color applied to this house this blue color applied to the window frame and the faces in between the window have been assigned the glass material but the reason why you can’t see anything inside the house is that the face behind this window is also having the yellow material that we assigned to the house and to fix this issue we’ll be creating a transparent material and we’ll place it after the bounding box node so go to the material properties click on the new button let’s create a new material and to make it transparent change the surface to transparent bstf also because we are in the EV render engine so change the blend mode from opaque to Alpha blend then to assign the material select a set material node press shift plus d and place it after the bounding box node change the material to the material. 001 where we created the transparent material so I’ll select this now to see the result I’ll go to the mesh Boolean node hold on control shift and left click on it and now here you can see that these faces are now having the transparent material but if I delete this viewer note you won’t be seeing the same thing here and the reason for this is the set material node that we added here since in the selection socket it is carrying the information that it has to apply this house material or basically the yellow material to all these four faces as a result it’s also applying this yellow house material to the face behind the window and to fix this problem instead of connecting it in between the group input and the joint geometry we’ll connect both of these nodes in between the group input and the mesh buia node I’ll select the first one press shift plus d and place it over here then I’ll delete it from here similarly I’ll select the second one and yes instead of creating a duplicate you can also remove it by holding the alt button and left clicking on it now I’ll place it over here and again I’ll take the Boolean socket of the ad node and connected to the selection in the set material node of the house material and now you can see here that you can easily see through the windows of this house because the face at the back of them is having a transparent material now moving ahead let’s finalize this house and fix some minor issues in this house model so I’ll go to the solid view again now the first thing to notice here is that the tiles are not properly placed for example you can bring them down to make it look better and to do this we have to select the tile in our scene tab into the edit mode press a to select all the vertices and if I press G and Y to move it in the y direction then you will notice that these roof tiles will also begin to move like this let’s fix this position and now roof tiles are looking like this and let’s come out of the edit mode and now another thing that we can fix here is the tiles appearing on the top here and to solve this problem I’ll go to the geometry noes editor and if you remember we created these styles with the help of this Ray cast node now we’ll be using using the math fan node in order to tell the instance on points node here that it does not need to add any tiles on this face which has a normal pointing towards the positive Z axis and to do this press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the Boolean math let’s place it over here then press shift plus a again go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it here change the input type to Vector since we’ll be adding a normal node and to add that normal node press shift plus a go to geometry and in the read category select the normal let’s place it over here now we’ll connect this normal to the vector a then I’ll change the operation to not equal and we’ll set the vector value in B to one in the Zed axis now I’ll take this result socket and connect it to the first Boolean input and for the second Boolean input I’ll take this is head socket and connect it here and now to see the output we’ll be connecting this Boolean output socket to the instance on points here so I’ll take this socket and connect it to the selection and now here you can see that the tiles at the top of the face have disappeared and now our house looks perfect but let me show you another thing if I Tye into the edit mode and if I press three for the face select mode and select this pH then I can extrude it like this and it will automatically add these windows at all these side faces similarly if I select this pH and press e to extrude it then in this case also it will add a window here and also some roof tiles the reason why the number of roof tiles is less is that here in the grid option the size is very low but if we increase it from 4 M to something like 100 m let’s also increase the vertices from 35 to a very high number like 400 or maybe let’s increase them to 500 then this is how it looks to see it properly let’s come out of the edit mode and turn on the render View and now this is how this house is looking right now and to fix these issues like the placing of the tiles you simply have to change the values in the size option and the vertices option for example if I take the size values and reduce it to something like 80 then it looks like this let’s also change the number of vertices in the x and y axis and if I increase it to something like 550 then it looks like this and if you want to change the scale of these tiles then you can go to the transform geometry node and change the scaling from from here but right now I think that the house model looks perfect so let’s finalize it and we’ll also be adding a plane below it by pressing shift plus a go to mesh and select the plane tab into the edit mode press s to scale it and to move it downwards press G and z and let’s place it over here let’s also scale Up This Plane Slightly more by pressing s and I think that we should scale it up 10 or 20 times so I will press 20 and press enter then go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad let’s also come out of the edit mode of this plane and to change the camera view you can either click on the lock button here or you can press n and in the view section turn on the lock camera to view now let’s change the view of the camera to that particular position where the house is completely visible and that too from a perfect angle so here I think that it looks perfect so let’s finalize this and to hide this bigger tile I’ll select this and click on this I button and if you don’t want it to appear in the rendered version also then turn off the camera icon from here similarly we also hided this plane in our scene so I’ll click on the camera button here also to hide it in the render view now to give some material to the base or the plane we’ll be ass assing the sand material to it which we created in this chapter of the course to add it here first we need to open the asset browser so click on this icon go to the asset browser then change this to the user library and now here we have the sand material that we created so I’ll select this and drop it on the plane and yes one more thing that I noticed just now is that this window of the house is colliding with the roof and to fix this issue I’ll select the house tab into the edit mode and with the upper face selected press G and Z to move it upwards let’s move it up like this and here it looks perfect let’s come out of the edit mode let’s also adjust the camera view so I’ll zoom out and adjust the camera like this now you can also try to change the color of this house or maybe try to add some different materials with different types of roughness metallic nature and other things and also you can add some more lights in the scene in order to make it look better and I also did some basic changes in the material and the lighting and this is how the final rendered version looks and also this brings us to the end of this chapter in this chapter we learned about lots of geometry notes and the usage and if you’re learning them for the very first time there is a really very high probability that you can’t understand understand all of them by simply watching the video once so a better approach will be to either re-watch the whole video again and then make the model or else re-watch that particular part where you think that your concept is not [Music] clear in this chapter we’ll be covering all these topics in complete detail and we’ll be using these geometry nodes to create this donut so to begin with we’ll be adding a curve in our scene so first let’s delete this Cube by pressing X and to add the curve press shift plus a go to curve and select the bzier curve now since we’ll be making the donut with the help of geometry nodes so let’s also go to the geometry nodes workspace for this click on the workspace named as geometry nodes here and to add a new geometry node click on this new button now the first note that we are going to discover is the set spine cyclic node to add it here press shift plus a go to curve and in the right category here we have the set spline cyclic so I’ll select it and let’s place it over here let’s also go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and now what this set spline cyclic note does is that it will make the curve cyclic by connecting the two ends of the curve together meaning that this node will connect this end point of the curve to the first point here and this can be done by turning on the cyclic option here so if I turn it on then now our curve is looking cyclic because it has join the two end points together now the benefit of this node is that if I tab into the edit mode and select the draw tool from here and to draw the curve I simply have to left click and drag my cursor like this and you can see here that it will automatically make the curve cyclic so if I turn it off then you can see here how the original curves look and by using the cyclic option the curves will get completed and as a result they look cyclic and now we’ll be using this node mod to create the cyclic structure of a donut for this tab into the edit mode press a to select all these points and we’ll delete them and create a new cyclic curve so press X and select delete segments now let’s draw the curve to be used as the donut let’s come out of the edit mode and you can see here that we have a simple basic structure in the form of a curve ready for the donut now in order to make it look like a real donut we have to convert this curve into a mesh and for this we’ll be using the curve to mesh node to add it here press shift plus a go to curve and in operations select the curve to mesh let’s place it over here now since here we have a cyclic curve so we’ll be connecting this profile curve socket to a curve Circle to do this press shift plus a go to curve and in Primitives select the curve Circle let’s place it over here and connect it to the profile curve and now here you can see that we have a structure which slightly looks like a donut in order to make it perfect I’ll go to the curve Circle node and reduce the radius from here now if you think that it looks oval then you can tap into the edit mode and we’ll scale it up in the y- axis so press s and Y and let’s slightly scale it up like this let’s come out of the edit Boe let’s also slightly is the radius from here and this is how it looks now moving ahead let’s also add the frosting at the top and for this we’ll be using the extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mes and in operations select the extrude mes let’s place it over here now it’s extruding all the faces individually and to fix this I’ll first turn off the individual option and to extrude only the face at the top we’ll be using the compare node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it over here and we’ll be using this to tell the extrude mesh node that you want the Extrusion to be applied only on the top f faces and for this we’ll be using the normal node and that’s because we know that the normal for the top or basically the perpendicular to it will be in the positive Z AIS and to do this first I’ll change the input type from float to Vector let’s also change the operation to equal now in the vector a I’ll be connecting the normal node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the normal let’s place it over here and connect it to the vector a and now we’ll be using the values in the vector B in order to make it equal to the normal node the first value will control the x- axis second will control the y axis and the third will control the Z axis and since the normal of these top faces lies in the positive Z Direction so we’ll be changing the value of B in The Zed axis as positive 1 now if I connect the result socket to the selection then you see that nothing happens and that’s because you have to control the area where the Extrusion is to be applied with the help of this epilin option here to increase it slightly hold down the shift button left click and if I drag my cursor like this you will notice that the Extrusion is being applied to certain part of the top and to increase this area I’ll go to the Epsilon option again and if I slightly increase it then the area to be extruded will increase like this and to reduce the Extrusion go to the offset option here and reduce it like this let’s further increase the Epsilon value from here so that it actually looks like the frosting of a donut so let’s increase it like this and let’s keep the value to that point where the structure actually looks like a donut so this Epsilon value will basically control the area to be extruded and the offset value will control the Extrusion of that area also to make it look better I’ll reduce the resolution from here from 32 to something like 16 and now this is how our donut is looking right now and here I think that the Extrusion at the top face is a little high so I’ll reduce it from here and at a value of somewhere near 0.1 the Extrusion looks fine now in order to add some sprinkles to it we’ll be using the distribute points on faces node to add it here press shift plus a go to point and select the distribute points on faces let’s place it over here and now this will distribute these points over the different faces of the donut that we created in order to view both the donut and these points we’ll be adding a joint geometry note here so press shift plus a go to geometry and select the joint geometry let’s place it over here and to view the donut take the mesh socket of the extrude mesh and connect it to the geometry in the joint geometry and this is how it looks now if you want to make your donut look better and more smooth then for this you can use the subdivision surface node to add it here press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the subdivision surface we’ll place it in between the extrude mesh and the joint geometry node and now the subdivision is applied to this donut now here you can see that these points are distributed all over the donut but we wanted them to appear only on this extruded part and for this we’ll be using the same result socket that we connected to the extrude mesh in order to extrude this part and we’ll connect it to the selection socket of the distribute points on faces and now the points will be distributed only on the extruded part now one more thing to notice here is that the things that are distributed on this extruded pH are simply these points but not sprinkles and to replace these points with the sprinkles we need to add the instance on points node after the distribute points on faces node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the instance on points let’s place it over here and yes if you want to know about these two nodes and they’re functioning in complete detail then you can check the previous chapters of the course where we discussed about both both of these geometry nodes in complete detail but for now I’ll be using this instance one points node in order to place the sprinkles on this extruded part but before that we also need to model the sprinkles for this in the 3D view Port press shift plus a go to mesh and add a cylinder let’s move it in the X Direction by pressing G and x and let’s place it over here tab into the edit mode and now to make it look like a Sprinkle first I’ll scale it up in the Z Direction so press s and z and scale it up like this now we’ll be applying the subdivision surface modifier to it for this go to the modify properties click on ADD modif fire and in generate select the subdivision surface let’s increase the levels you put to a value of two now in order to make this pointing part flat at the top and the bottom enable the face mode by pressing three select the top face and press I to insert it let’s bring it down and now here the insert is applied similarly I’ll select the face at the bottom and press I to inz it and now this is how it looks now since we are making a Sprinkle so we need to reduce its thickness or basically the scaling in the X and Y AIS to do this press a to select all then s to scale and to apply the scaling in the X and Y AIS simultaneously press shift plus Z let’s scale it down like this and left click to finalize let’s come out of the edit mode and now our sprinkle is ready and to distribute these sprinkles over the extruded face of the donut we need to select the donut we have to connect the sprinkle to the instance option here for this I’ll go to the scene collection left click on the cylinder object or basically the sprinkle and if I drag it into the geometry nodes editor and drop it here the object info node is created with the cylinder selected here now I’ll take this geometry socket and connect it to the instance and here the sprinkles are placed at different faces on the top of the donut however we need to reduce the scaling from the scale option here so let’s select the scaling in the XY and Zed axis and let’s reduce it to a very low value like 0.1 and this is how it looks now in order to rotate them I’ll first select the cylinder or basically this main sprinkle object and we’ll be rotating it so with the cylinder selected tab into the edit mode press R and X to rotate it in the x- axis like this and to rotate it by 90° press 90 and enter to confirm now just like this main sprinkle these other sprinkles on the donut are also rotated in the xaxis by 90° now even though the basic rotation looks good in the x-axis but another thing to notice here is that all of these sprinkles are having the same rotation but to make it look realistic let’s give each of them a random rotation so let’s come out of the edit mode select the donut and to give the sprinkles a random rotation we’ll be connecting this rotation socket to the random value node so press shift plus a go to utilities and select the random value let’s place it over here and change the data type to Vector now take this value socket and connected to the rotation and now you will notice that the sprinkles are now rotated randomly and if you want to control this rotation you can try to change the maximum value in the random node for example if I try to change the maximum value in The Zed axis then you can see that the randomness of the rotation in The Zed axis will change like this similarly I can do the same with the x- axis and also the Y AIS and yes if you want to increase the number of these sprinkles then you can go to the density option here and if I increase it the number of sprinkles will increase like this also I think that I should increase their scaling in order to make them look thicker so I’ll go to the scale option here select all the three and let’s increase it to a slightly higher number like 0.12 and now it is looking perfect and yes with this our structure of donut is ready now but let me show you one more thing if I select the donut go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and also go to the edit mode then with the draw tool selected if I draw a curve like this then it will automatically create a donut out of it similarly I can create any number of Donuts by simply making a curve like this and see that’s the benefit of using the geometry nodes even though the geometry nodes look complex to understand in the starting but if you master them completely then they’re really very helpful and can save a lot of time if you want to create different objects also since we have used the set spline cyclic node here which makes any curve cyclic so I don’t need to draw the entire circle and close it I can simply draw a curve like this and it will automatically join the two end points together and now I’ll be keeping these two Donuts in my scene and we delete the other ones for this click on the select tool left click and drag like this and to select the other one hold on the shift button left click and drag like this now all the points on the two Donuts are selected and to delete them press X and select delete segments let’s come out of the edit mode and now the next topic for today’s chapter is understanding the realized instances node so what it basically does is that it helps to convert the duplicate objects into separate geometries for example the sprinkle stup placed on this donut are simply the instances that are placed on different points and to confirm this you can go to the spreadsheet and in the instances option here you can see that we have 49 stenes and these are basically the sprinkles that are distributed over the top of the donut however to convert them into different geometries we have to use the realization in senses node and using this node is also important in order to assign different colors to the sprinkles so to add it press shift plus a go to instances and here you have the realized instances node so I’ll select this place it over here and now it’s connected but you won’t see any difference here however if I go to the spreadsheet the now in the instances you can see that there are zero instances and that’s because all these sprinkles which were the instances are now converted into separate geometries now in order to give different colors to the sprinkles here we have to use a new node which is the store named attribute node to add it here press shift plus a go to attribute and select the store named attribute let’s place it here for now now this node is basically used to capture some attribute and store it with a name which you can then use somewhere else in the program if you remember in one of the previous chapters we studied about the capture attribute node and it’s exactly similar to The Stone named attribute node except for the fact that this node is having the name option here to understand it better let’s first place it after the instance on points and since we’ll be using it to give different colors to the sprinkles so we’ll change the data type from float to color and since we have

    connected it to the instance on points we’ll also change the domain from point to instance now if you want your sprinkles to have random colors assigned to them then for this we have to connect the random value node to the value socket here to do this press shift plus a go to utilities and select the random value let’s place it here let’s also change the data type to vector and connect it to the value socket here now you also have the name option here in order to save this attribute with the name so if I left click on it I can assign any name to it so for now I’ll keep the name to color and now it is saved with the name color now to give these sprinkles some material I’ll change this to the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader Editor to give it a new material click on the new button now to give some colors to the sprinkles let’s add the color ramp so press shift plus a go to converter select the color ramp let’s place it over here and connect it to the base color in the principal bstf so we’ll be using this color ramp node to assign different colors to the sprinkles here also we’ll change the interpolation from linear to constant so that we can add different colors here without blending them with each other now to view the colors of the material let’s go to the render preview mode now to apply the colors on the sprinkle we need to add the attribute node here with the name that we assigned in this node to do this press shift plus a go to input and from here select the attribute let’s place it over here now in the name option we’ll type color and this is the same name which we assigned to the attribute in this node and now to connect it with the color ramp I’ll take this color socket and connected to the factor and to view the changes here we need to use the set material node in the geometry nodes editor so press shift plus a go to material and select the set material node and we’ll place it after the realized instances and from here I’ll select the material. 001 and with this you can also see that the sprinkles are now assigned the material. 001 and so they appear to be black colored now to get different colors here we have to use the pointers in the color ramp for example if I move this white pointer then now here we have some black sprinkles as well as some white sprinkles you can even add some more colors to it by clicking on this plus icon let’s change the color from here by increasing the brightness and let’s assign it yellow color similarly let’s add one more color and change it from here increase the brightness and this time I’ll change it to pink color also I’ll change the color of this first pointer because we won’t need any black sprinkles on the donut so I’ll select it and change the color by increasing the brightness and for this one let’s change the color to green and to see all the colors properly we have to adjust the pointers at different positions the amount of sprinkles having a particular color will depend on the position of these pointers for example here you can see that most of the part is yellow colored and as a result most of the sprinkles in the donut are also yellow so to get a uniform distribution of colors we have to adjust these pointers properly and if you want you can even create more Colors by clicking on this plus button and changing the color from here let’s give the red color and now this is how the sprinkles are looking on our donut Now to create the chocolate material to be placed on the top of the donut let’s go to the material properties click on the plus button and go for new material let’s change the name of this material to Chocolate similarly for the sprinkles material let’s also rename it to sprinkles and now we have two materials in the material properties one of them is the sprinkles and the other one is the chocolate material now let’s go to the Shader editor and in the principle bstf we have to change the base color to make it look like the chocolate color and for doing this perfectly we’ll use the hex code of chocolate so I searched it up on Google and this result came up so we’ll change the hex code to the hex code of chocolate which is 41190 and now in the base color you can see we have the chocolate brown color and now to set this chocolate material to our donut we’ll be using the set material node for this I’ll select the set material node and create a duplicate of it so press shift plus d and place it after the subdivision surface node it appears like this because we need to change the material from sprinkles to chocolate and now this is how our donut is looking right now we have these colorful sprinkles distributed over the top and the simp simple chocolate material applied on the donut object now Although our donut is almost ready we can do some more changes in it for example it might be possible that you want that only the top extruded layer where the sprinkles are placed should have the chocolate material and not the remaining part and to do this we’ll create another material for the base of the donut so go to the material properties click on the plus icon and let’s create a new material we’ll rename it to Donut and for now I’ll keep the base color to white and we’ll work on applying this material only to the base of the donut for this we need to create a duplicate of the set material node and add the donut material to it so press shift plus d and place it over here change the material from chocolate to Donut but here you will observe that since this set material node with the donut is placed after the set material node with the chocolate material as a result the entire donut including the top extruded face is now having the white donut material but in order to assign the chocolate material to the top extruded face of the donut we need to tell this node to apply the material only on that specific part and if you remember we used this compare node with the normal selected which carried the information about the extruded to phase so if I take the result socket and connect it to the selection here you will observe that nothing happens and that is because as I already told you that since we have placed this set material node with the donut after the chocolate material so only this node with the donut will be considered and to fix this problem we basically need to place this set material node after this one and to do this let’s first remove it from the node connection so hold down the ALT key and if I left click and drag my cursor like this then the node will get removed and now we’ll place it after this set material node with the donut material so let’s select it and place it over here again take the result socket and connected to the selection socket and now here you can see that the chocolate material is now applied only to the top of the dut however you can see here that the material is not perfectly placed like in this area you have the chocolate material but it’s not present in the remaining area and to fix this problem we simply have to go to the EP silent value here and we have to slightly increase it so we’ll increase it slightly like this and at a value of somewhere near 0.75 or 0.8 our donut looks perfect so let’s finalize this and now we should also reduce the size of the sprinkles because they appear to be too large on the top of the donut for this I’ll select the cylinder tab into the edit mode and let’s scale it down in the Y AIS by pressing s and Y and scale it down like this and if you want to make the sprinkles thicker then for this press s and shift plus Zed to restrict the scaling only in the x and y axis and now you can change the scaling to increase or decrease the thickness of the sprinkles for now let’s finalize this and come out of the edit mode now moving ahead in order to give this chocolate a realistic look we’ll go to the Shader editor change the material from donut to chocolate and we’ll be using the noise texture with the bump node to add the bump node press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump node let’s place it over here and connect the normal to the normal in the principal bsdf and now to add the noise texture press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it over here and to connect it with the bump node take the factor socket and connect it to the height and now this chocolate material is having this noise texture real melted chocolate now to connect the noise texture to the input and the mapping node press ctrl+ T and in the input node or basically this texture coordinate node take this object socket and connect it to the vector and now this is how the chocolate material looks now you can change its appearance from the scale value here so for now I’ll reduce it to something like 1.5 or two and if you want to control the bump effect applied to it then for this you can go to the bump node and change the strength from here for now I’ll keep it to 0.5 and this is how it looks now moving ahead suppose you want the chocolate material to cover more area of the donut or maybe this inner area of the donut and to do this you have to go to the compare Noe here and try to change the values of the vector B in the X and Y axis for example if I change both the values to a slightly higher number like 0.1 then now the area on which this chocolate material is applied will increase and with this our chocolate material is completely ready and before moving towards the creation of the material for the rest of the donut let’s first improve the lighting in our scene so for this I’ll select this lamp and change the type of light from point to Sun let’s reduce its strength to something like 5 or 10 and now we have a proper Lighting in our scene now to make the donut material I’ll go to the Shader editor change the material from chocolate to Donut and to give it some color we’ll be adding the color ramp so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color Ram let’s place it over here and connect it to the base color now in order to create a color which resembles the donut we have to use a combination of orange and yellow color so I’ll change the first color by increasing the brightness and I’ll change it to orange color and for the second color I’ll select it and change it to a mix of orange and yellow color if you want you can even make the color look darker by reducing the brightness from here and now it looks like this now to give it some simple texture we’ll be adding the bump node and the noise texture to add the noise texture press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it over here press control+ T to connect it with the mapping and the texture coordinate node connect the object to the vector socket and to view the texture take this Factor socket and connect it to the factor in the color RAM and now to give the texture a more 3D look We’ll add the bump node so press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump node let’s place it over here and connect the normal to the normal in the principal bsdf then to connect it to the texture take this Factor socket and connect it to the height and now this is how the texture of the donut looks let’s reduce the bump effect from the strength option here to something like 0.1 or maybe to a much lower number like 0. 02 or 0.01 and this is how the base of the donut looks now and also if you want you can make it look shinier by reducing the roughness in the principal bstf so if I reduce it to a lower value like 0.2 the roughness of the dut will reduce giving it a shiny or smooth look and with this our Donuts are completely ready and the best part about creating donuts procedurally with these geometry notes is that I can simply go to the edit mode and with this draw tool enabled if I draw a curve like this then it will automatically convert it into a donut so you can create any number of donuts with different sizes simply by drawing them in the edit mode but for now to finalize the scene we’ll be keeping only two donuts and to delete the rest of them let’s first change the mode to solid mode so that we can see the points properly turn off the draw tool by clicking on the selection tool and with this one selected I’ll also be deleting this donut in the scene so hold on the shift button left click and drag like this press X to delete and select delete segments now I have to select the best two out of the remaining three so I’ll go to the render view again let’s change the view to see them properly and I think that I should delete this one because it shape is not perfectly circular so let’s go to the top view again switch to the solid mode select these vertices and press X to delete segments now to finalize the scene we’ll be placing one donut in such a position that it looks inclined towards the first one and to do this we have to select the points of one of the donuts and let’s rotate it in the Y AIS so press R and Y and rotate it like this and to place it perfectly let’s go to the front view press G to move it and place it over here and now we have both the donuts perfectly placed in our scene let’s come out of the edit mode Let’s also turn on the render view now let’s create the base with the help of the plane so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the plane tab into the edit mode press a to select all the vertices and S to scale it up let’s scale it up to a very high number like 20 let’s also bring it downwards by pressing G and Zed and move it down like this and then come out of the edit mode now let’s also fix the lighting so for this I’ll select the first light press shift plus d and let’s move it in the x-axis and to rotate it towards the donut press R and Y and rotate it like this left click to finalize and if you want you can also change the type of light from Sun to Spotlight or area light and they will also work in the similar way for example if I select the Spotlight and increase the power to a higher number like 1,000 wat then we get a lighting like this let’s also change the color of this light from the color option here I’ll change the color to slight pink and similarly for the second light I’ll select it and for this one also you can change the type of light to spot or area or point but for now I’ll keep it to sunlight and let’s also change the color of this base to a darker color like gray color so I’ll go to the material properties click on the new button and change the color by reducing the brightness from here if you want you can also change the color to dark blue or dark purple or red color or any other color of your choice for now I’ll be keeping the purple color now let’s go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and to turn on the lock camera to view either click on this lock button or press n and here in the view option you can turn on the lock camera to view so let’s change the view to that position where both the donuts are perfectly placed in the scene let’s also bring it down and here I think that it looks perfect so we’ll finalize it and to finally render it go to the render option and select render image and so this is the final rendered image of the donuts that we created with the help of geometry notes to save the image you can click on the image option here and here you have the option to save the file and yes this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in this chapter we’ll be understanding all these topics in complete detail and we’ll be using them to create this amazing meteor apocalypse scene in blender now the first topic for today’s chapter is understanding the split edges node but before that let’s open the geometry nodes workspace from here then go to the geometry nodes editor and with this Cube selected click on the new button so to add the split edges node press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the split edges node let’s place it over here now as the name suggest the split edges node basically splits the edges of your mesh and helps to separate each and every face if you remember while understanding the generate modifiers in this chapter we studied about the edge split modifier and the split edges node is exactly similar to that modifier to revise it let’s add another cube in the scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube let’s move it in the y direction and place it over here then go to the modify proper properties click on ADD modifier and in the generate section select the edge Spate modifier let’s apply it from here and now if I tap into the edit mode then because of the edge split modifier the edges of this Cube would have been splitted and as a result the faces must also be separated to check this press three for the face select mode and if I select the top face and press G to move it you can see that it is now separated from the rest of the cube similarly if I select any other face and press G to move it then this one will also get separated and just like this modifier in the geometry nodes you have the split edges node to check the same thing on this node we’ll be adding a scale elements node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the scale elements let’s place it over here and as discussed in one of the previous chapters this node is basically used to scale different elements like the edge or the faces of your mesh object so if I go to the scale option here and try to slightly reduce it you will notice that the faces are no longer connected with each other and this is because of the split edges node also if I remove it from here by holding alt and if I left click on it and then if I use the scale value you can see that all the faces are connected with each other so the split edges node will simply split the edges of your mesh object now moving ahead we’ll be creating a scene with some futuristic buildings and for this we’ll delete this Cube by pressing X and now let’s add a new cube in the scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube and to make them taller tab into the edit mode and let’s scale them up in the Z axis so press s and Zed and scale it up like this let’s also move it slightly upwards so press G and Zed and let’s place it over here now to get some more vertices and edges we’ll be using the loop cut so press crl plus r and to increase the number of loop Cuts you can scroll the mouse wheel and I’ll be keeping the number of loop cuts to five left click to finalize and then it will give you the option to fix their position but to get the default position simply right click now let’s come out of the edit mode and before doing any changes to it let’s create two more duplicates for some different buildings so press shift plus d and place it in the y direction and to create another duplicate press shift plus b again and place it over here let’s select the first building again now to modify this building let’s tab into the edit mode and I’ll be selecting some of these edges so I’ll select this one hold on the shift button and select these also since we need to make the buildings look futuristic so we’ll apply the bevel effect to it by pressing cr+ B and move your cursor like this then left click to finalize and this is how the basic structure of our first building looks we’ll be doing similar things with the other buildings also so let’s come out of the edit mode select the other building tab into the edit mode and now I’ll select the upper face and extrude it so press three for the face select mode select the top face press e to extrude bring it here and let’s scale it down like this now just like this one you can also select random edges here by pressing two then hold down shift and let’s select these edges press control plus b to apply the bevel effect then left click to finalize and let’s also do the same with some other edges as well so I’ll select some random edges here also press contrl plus b and apply the bevel effect like this now our second building is also ready so let’s come out of the edit mode and now for the third building let’s go to the edit mode press three for the face select mode select the top pH press cr+ B to apply the bevel effect and you can use the scroll wheel to increase in or decrease the number of segments then left click to finalize then I’ll press two for the Ed select mode select some random edges press crl plus b to apply the bevel effect then left click to finalize and yes all the changes that I have made here are completely random and you can make any random changes according to what you think will look the best for your buildings and yes if you want you can even make similar changes for the back of the building and to do this I’ll select some random ages here also press contrl plus b to apply the bevel effect and left click to finalize then I’ll do the same with other buildings also so let’s come out of the edit mode select the the second building I’ll select some random edges press C crl plus b to apply the bevel effect and similarly for the third building let’s select some random edges here press contrl plus b and left click to finalize the basic structure of all our three buildings is completely ready now and now to give them some material we have to open the Shader Editor to do this I’ll change this geometry notes editor into the Shader editor by clicking on this icon and selecting the Shader editor from here to give it a new material click on the new button and here we have the default basic material assigned to the building now to view the material switch to the rendom view from here and to get a proper Lighting in the scene I’ll select this lamp go to the object data properties and change the type of light from point to Sun let’s reduce the strength to a lower number like 5 or 10 you can rotate the light by pressing R and moving your cursor like this and now we have a perfect lighting in our scene now to give some material to the buildings let’s go to the Shader editor again and we’ll be using the Warner texture so press shift plus a go to texture and here you have the Warner texture let’s place it over here and to connect it to the texture coordinate and the vector mapping node press ctrl+ p then as always I’ll take this object socket and connect it to the vector and to view the texture here hold on control and shift and left click on the Warner texture now to make this pattern look like Windows we have to change the distance metric option to the third one and then reduce the randomness to zero and now we have this window like pattern that we created using the Warner texture if you remember we use this Warner texture to create a similar pattern on the buildings in this chapter of the course as well and now to make the window pattern look better we’ll be adding the color Ram so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color Ram let place it over here and change the interpolation mode from linear to constant then if I move the second pointer which is the white colored in this direction then you will begin to notice this pattern of black windows appearing on the building and now to have separate colors for the windows and the rest of the building we have to use the mix Shader node so press shift plus a go to Shader and select the mix Shader let’s place it over here and instead of connecting the color Ram to the first Shader we’ll connect it to the factor socket and now for the first Shader I’ll take this principal bstf and connect it to the first Shader socket and for the second one we’ll create a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d place it over here and connect it to the second Shader socket and now if I select the base color from here and change it to suppose blue color then now you can see that we have the blue color added here and now since this principal bstf node is controlling the material of the windows of the building so I’ll increase the metallic nature from here to a value of positive one let’s also make the color slightly darker by reducing the brightness from here and now this is how the material of these windows is looking right now and now for the borders around the windows you can set the color from the second principal bsdf so we’ll make it darker by bringing the brightness lighter down and and in this way we’ll change the color to dark gray color and now let’s change the name of this material from here and let’s rename it to buildings and press enter to confirm now if I view the top face of the building then you can see that this pattern of Windows is also applied here and to get some other material for the top face or basically the rooftop simply go to the material properties and click on the plus button let’s create a new material and for this one let’s change the base color to the red color and reduce the brightness from here to assign this material to the rooftop simply tab into the edit mode press three for the face select select the top face then select this material 0001 and click on the sign button and now we have this red colored material applied to the top of the building and now for this bevel part we’ll be creating another material but before that let’s change the name of the material. 001 to Rooftop and press enter to confirm to create a new material click on the plus icon here and create the new material and for this one we’ll set the base color to dark orange color let’s also reduce the brightness from here then tab into the edit mode and we’ll be selecting all the faces in this bevel part so left click and drag like this and for the remaining part hold on the shift button left click and drag like this then here also hold on shift button and select these faces also and similarly with the last part here to assign this material to these faces click on the assign button and now we have this dark orange color applied to this bevel part also I think that I should make it darker so I reduce the brightness further and now it looks like a mix of dark orange and brown color and now to apply the buildings material to the remaining two buildings I’ll first select both of them and with the shift key holded if I select this building then I can use the link material tools to assign the same material to these two buildings for this press cr+ L and select link materials and now I’ll select the second building tab into the edit mode and for the rooftop I’ll select this face click on the rooftop material and click on assign button similarly I’ll select this bevel part by left clicking and dragging like this select the material. 001 and click on assign button let’s also do the same with the remaining bevel part so I’ll select this one by left clicking and dragging like this click on the assign button let’s also go to the back of the building select these faces click on the material. 001 and assign material similarly let’s select these faces also and click on assign button and with this we have the materials properly applied to these two build buildings and now similarly for the third one we’ll select it tab into the edit mode select the top face and let’s assign the rooftop material from here and now for the bevel part let’s select all the Faces by left clicking and dragging like this select the material. 001 and click on aign button let’s do the same with other faces also select these faces by left clicking dragging like this and click on assign button let’s go to the back of the building select these faces click on assign button and in the end select all these faces and assign the material and so now we have our basic material applied to all these buildings and now to create a scene with several duplicates of these buildings I will add a cube in the scene and place these buildings as instances on all its edges and to do this first I’ll select all the three buildings by holding the shift button and select all the three press G and Y and place them over here then press shift plus a go to mesh and add the cube and to place these buildings as instances on the different edges of the cube we have to go to the geometry nodes editor for this let’s change the window from Shader Editor to the geometry nodes editor click on the new button and now here we have the default geometry note system applied to it and to place the buildings we’ll be using the instance on points node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the instance on points let’s place it over here and to use the buildings as the instance object here we have to create their collection so I’ll select all three of them and to create the collection press crl + G then click on the create new collection and let’s change the name of the collection to buildings and to add these buildings in the geometry nodes editor we’ll be using the collection info node so press shift plus a go to input and in scene select the collection info node let’s place it over here and connect it to the instant socket then I’ll choose the collection which is the buildings collection here and turn on the separate children and the reset children and also turn on the pick instance option so that all the three buildings are not placed over each other and now to scale them down I will use the scale option here let’s select all the three and reduce it to something like 0.5 however since I have used the instance one points node as a result these buildings are being placed at the vertices of the cube and to place them on the edges we have to use the mesh two points node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the mesh to Point Let’s place it over here and change the mode from vertices to edges and now here we have the buildings placed around the edges of the cube let’s reduce this size from here and this time I’ll reduce it to something like 0.4 and now this is how it looks and yes to ensure that no two buildings are intersecting with each other for example here I can see that these two buildings are intersecting with each other and to solve this problem we simply have to go to the scale value and try to reduce it even further so this time let’s reduce it to something like 0.3 but still they’re intersecting so again I’ll scale it down to a value of 0.28 and now they’re no longer intersecting and now because of scaling them down down in all the three axis their scaling in the X and Y axis is also reduced but to make them look better we’ll increase the scaling in the X and Y axis by selecting them and let’s increase it to something like 0.33 M and now it looks better now if you want you can even make a skyscraper type of structure with the help of these buildings and to do this you simply have to select this tab into the edit mode and this Cube will appear on which we have applied the geometry node system and if I select the top face and extrude it by pressing e then now you can see that these new buildings will appear here let’s zoom out and so you can create any number of buildings simply by extruding the faces and moving them by pressing G and Zed and now you can change their position in the Zed axis let’s place them over here let’s extrude it one more time so press e and bring the buildings upwards let’s scale them down by pressing s and this is how it looks similarly to increase the number of these buildings you can increase the number of edges by pressing crl plus r and adding the loop cuts and now if I left click with these four Loop Cuts then now we have so many more buildings in the scene but for now I will Undo It by pressing cr+ Z and this is how the scene is looking right now and yes you can scale it up and scale it down in any way that you think will look the best for your scene to understand it even better I’ll turn on the solid view from here then if I turn on the x-ray mode by pressing alt plus Z then here you can see that this is the extruded Cube and just by extruding these faces or scaling them up and down we are changing the position of the buildings so if I bring this face down by pressing G and Zed and place it over here then if I create it duplicate by pressing shift plus d move it upwards in The Zed AIS and place it over here and if I go to the render view then this is how it looks I can control the distance between the buildings by scaling the face up and down but right now it looks perfect so we’ll finalize this now let’s also come out of the edit mode and to give each building some random rotation in The Zed axis we’ll be using the random value node so press shift plus a go to utilities and select the random value let’s place it over here change the data type to vector and connect it to the rotation to get random rotations only in The Zed axis I’ll change this value in the X and Y axis back to zero and with this third value I can control the random rotation of these buildings in the Zed axxis and now if you remember we understood about the split edges node and we can use it here to make the buildings look broken so for this press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the split edges node let’s place it over here and to view the changes we’ll be adding the scale instances node so press shift plus a again go to mesh and in operations select the scale elements let’s place it over here and now if I slightly reduce the scale value then you can see here that the buildings are now appearing as broken which is because of the split Edge node here but for now let’s delete the scale elements node and connect the split Edge node to the group output and with this we have the structure of buildings completely ready in the scene and now we’ll move to the next topic of this chapter the geometry proximity node and this node basically allow us to make the changes in an object based on the position of some other object and to understand it I’ll first add a plane in my scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the plane press G and Y and place it over here then go to the geometry noes editor and click on the new button and yes if you want to control the size of this plane from the geometry noes editor then for this you can simply add the grid node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the grid node and place it over here now this group input node which was carrying the information about the original plane will get disconnected and a new plane will appear because of the grid node now let’s increase its size from here so I’ll select the size in the x and y axis and let’s increase it to something like 4 M let’s also increase the number of vertices in the X and Y AIS to a higher number like maybe 30 or 35 and now to add the geometry proximity node press shift plus a go to geometry and in Sample select the geometry proximity let’s place it over here and we’ll be using this node to displace the vertices of this plane with the help of a Target object and since we’ll be working on the position of vertices so let’s all also add the set position node here so press shift plus a again and in Geometry go to right category and select the set position node let’s place it over here and for the Target object we’ll be adding a cube here and to place it exactly at the plane we’ll bring the 3D cursor over it so press shift plus s and select the cursor to select it then to add the cube press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube let’s move it slightly upwards by pressing G and z and place it over here now to use this Cube as the target object I’ll select the plane and you can see in the same collection that this Cube has the name cube. 004 so to bring this cube in the geometry node editor of the plane I’ll go to the scene collection select cube. 004 by left clicking on it and if I drag it and drop it here then this object info node will be added with the cube selected so to use it as a Target object first I’ll select the relative from here and connect it to the geometry socket in the geometry proximity and to see the changes here we have to connect the distance socket to the offset and now you can see here that the plane has been deformed and I can also control it by selecting the cube and if I press G to move it then the vertices of the plane will also get displaced because of it and now suppose you want that it should only move in the Zed axis as per the cube so for this I’ll select the plane and now I’ll be adding a vector math node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the vector math let’s place it over here and change the operation to multiply and now if I select the cube and try to move it you will observe that nothing happens and that’s because in the geometry nodes of the plane this Vector in the multiply node is having a value of zero in all the three axes but suppose I change this value in The Zed axis to minus one and then if I select the cube and try to move it then you can see that this is how the vertices of the plane are getting displaced now and now to see this effect more properly we’ll be adding the map range node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in the math select the map range we’ll place it after the geometry proximity node and now if you increase the size of this plane with the grid option here let’s keep the size to something like 6 M and now if we select the cube and try to move it then you can see here that these vertices of the plane are getting displaced upwards as per the movement of the cube now if I go to the plane again and here in the geometry proximity node you can see that the target geometry is set to faces and this means that it will basically consider the faces of the cube in to displace the vertices for example if I select the cube tap into the edit mode and if I select the bottommost ph and if I try to scale it down by pressing s then you can see here that the displacement of the vertices of the plane will also get changed like this and this is all because in the geometry proximity node the faces option is selected here similarly you can also change the target geometry to edges or maybe to points and you will get the displacement accordingly and now we’ll be using this geometry proximity node with the building that we created here we’ll be creating a scene where a meteor is hitting the building and then that part of the building will begin to break off now for this I’ll delete this Cube and the plane by pressing X let’s also take the 3D cursor back to the world origin by pressing shift plus C and now if I go to the side view by pressing three on the numpad and here in the tool bar I have this measurement tool so if I select it and then left click and drag like this you can see that this tool helps us to measure the distance between any two points and so I can also use it to measure the height of this building and you can see here that it’s somewhere between 9 and 10 m but we’ll be increasing its size to something like 50 or 100 m for this first I’ll UND and then I’ll zoom out and I’ll use the measure tool to measure the distance of 50 to 100 m so I left click and drag like this and let’s keep it to something like 8 m and you can see that this point is somewhere located here so I’ll select the annotate tool and make a point here let’s switch to the select mode again and now to scale up the buildings first I need to select them so I’ll select it from here tab into the edit mode press a to select all and press s to scale it up let’s also bring it upwards by pressing G and z and place it over here and now let’s come out of the edit mode so we have increased the height of the building let’s also remove The annotation so I’ll go to the annotate tool hold down the left Mouse button and I’ll select the annotate eraser let’s erase it from here and go to the select tool again and to increase the scaling I’ll go to the scale option here select all three and if I drag my cursor then the scaling will begin to change let’s keep it to something like 3.5 and now it looks like this and now to create the breaking of effect on the buildings we’ll be using the geometry proximity node but before that since we’ll be breaking the building so we’ll add the set position node after this plate edges go to geometry and in right category select the set position let’s place it over here and now to add the geometry proximity node press shift plus a go to geometry and in Sample select the geometry proximity let’s place it over here and for the Target object we’ll be adding a cube in the scene so press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube move it in the y direction by pressing G and Y and place it over here and to scale It Up tab into the edit mode and scale it up like this let’s come out of the edit mode and let’s also move it upwards by pressing G and z and place it over here now to use it as a Target object I’ll go to the scene collection and this cube is named as cube. 0005 so I’ll drag it and drop it in the geometry notes editor and we’ll connect it to the geometry proximity node and we’ll also change it to relative from here and now if I connect the distance socket to the offset here then you will notice some changes in the scene so now with the cube selected if I try to move it then it will basically change the offset of the buildings in the seam but what we really wanted was that when the cube touches the building it should break off at that point and to achieve this result I’ll select the buildings again and we’ll be using the map range node in order to restrict the range of movement or the offset so press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the map range node we’ll place it after the geometry proximity node and now if I select the cube Cube and press G to move it and take it close to the building you can see here that the position of the buildings is not changing however if I zoom in and then move the cube then you will notice slight changes in the geometry of the building to view them properly I’ll turn on the solid mode from here and with the x-ray mode turned on if I try to move the cube then you will notice very slight changes in the geometry of some buildings and this is because of the geometry proximity node added in the geometry noes editor and right now this effect of displacing is working on the instance as a whole therefore it shows a very small result on moving the cube so to increase this result I’ll be using the realiz instances node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the realiz instances node let’s place it over here and also to increase its effect we’ll be adding the math node with the multiply operation so press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the math node let’s place it over here let’s change the operation from add to multiply and if I increase the value you will begin to notice some changes here so if I select the cube press G to move it then you will begin to notice that wherever it touches the building it will begin to displace the vertices or the edges of that particular building and to see this effect in a better way we’ll scale up this Cube so tab into the edit mode Let’s scale it up like this let’s come out of the edit mode and now if I try to move the cube towards the buildings then you can see this effect in a much better way than before at the point where it touches the building it’s creating a slight breaking of effect which is due to the geometry proximity node and yes if you want you can try to change the values in the map range node here in order to increase the effect for this I’ll increase all these values by a slightly higher number so let’s increase the first one to something like 0. five let’s increase the from Max value to a higher number like 8 or 10 let’s also increase the two minimum value and now if I select the cube again and try to move it then you will begin to notice the displacement effect applied to the different vertices and the edges of the buildings in a much better way however since I already told you that we need to create a scene where a meteor will be hitting the building and it will break away at that point and to achieve this effect we have to capture the normal of the face of the building where it breaks off or shows the explosion and for this we’ll be using the capture attribute node so press shift plus a go to attribute and select the capture attribute node let’s place it over here and now this capture attribute node will basically capture the information of the normal or basically the perpendicular of the faces of the building which will explode or the one that will break away and since we’ll be using it to capture the normal so I’ll change the data type from float to Vector also since we want to calculate the normal of the faces we’ll change the domain from point to face and now I’ll connecting the normal node to the value socket here so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the normal node let’s place it over here and connect it to the value socket now for the out but we’ll be connecting this attribute node to a vector math node placed over here so press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the vector math let’s place it over here and change the operation to scale now I’ll take this attribute socket and connect it to the vector and this value socket to the value in the scale node now this will basically change the scale of your buildings according to the input of the normal that it receives from this node and also as per the multiply effect from here and now if I select the cube press G to move it then you can see here that it’s creating this displacement and the buildings appear to explode or break away as it touches the cube however one thing that you can see here is that all the buildings are breaking away and to fix this problem we have to change the values in the map range node first of all change the 2ax value to zero and now you can use the rest of the values and try to change them in order to increase the explosion effect for example if I select the two minimum value and try to increase it then you can see here how the explosion effect is also increasing similarly if I try to change the other values then we’ll also get some similar results the only thing to take care of in the map range node is that the two max value should be zero and then you can try try to change these other values and to make it look realistic I’ll reduce the from Maximum value which is basically controlling the breaking away effect of the buildings so I’ll reduce it slightly but I’ll be increasing the value of the two minimum from here which is creating this explosion effect so let’s keep it to something like 1.2 or 1.3 and now it looks like this let’s also add a light here to see the building properly so for this press shift plus a go to light and select the sunlight press G and Zed and move it upwards like this let’s move it in the X Direction over here and increase the strength to a higher number like 10 or maybe 30 press R to rotate it let’s also slightly reduce the strength to something like 15 or 20 and now we can see the buildings properly with the cube and also the explosion part and now if I select the building again then using this multiply option over here you can increase the explosion effect like this however to make it look realistic we’ll be keeping it to something like 12 or 13 and now it looks like this so try to change these values here in the map range node and in the multiply value socket and in this way you will be able to create the perfect explosion effect for the buildings Here and Now moving ahead in order to make this Cube look like a metor I’ll first scale it down by going to the edit mode and scale it down like this then in the geometry nodes editor click on the new button and to give it a spherical look we’ll be adding the subdivision surface node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the subdivision surface let’s place it over here and to make it look more spherical I’ll change the level value from 1 to two now this Mator will be having two parts the first one will be this rock and the second part will be the smoke coming out of it and to create the smoke Trail we need to extrude some faces emerging out of the Rock part and for this we’ll be using the extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the extrude mesh node let’s place it over here and now I’ll be using the index value of different faces to create the smoke Trail and for this I’ll first add the index node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the index node let’s place it over here and to connected to the extrude mesh node we’ll be using the compare node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it over here since the index value is an integer so I’ll change the input type from float to integer now I’ll take this index socket and connect it to the value a then I’ll take the result socket and connect it to the selection Here and Now what it basically does is that it will exclude only those faces whose index value is greater than or equal to the value of B and since we already discussed it in one of the previous chapters that the index value starts from zero as a result because of the value of B set to zero all the faces are being extruded here however to extrude only some particular faces we have to increase this value so I’ll increase it like this and now you can see here that only some of the faces are getting extruded and to reduce the number of faces that are extruded we’ll again increase the value of B from here and get we are doing all this in order to make the smoke Trail so let’s increase the value of B from here and I’ll keep it to something like 90 or 91 like at a value of 90 it will extrude all the faces whose index value is greater than the value of B which is 90 and as a result you can see here that all these faces are extruded here but suppose I need only these three faces to be extruded then for this I’ll increase the value of B further and at a value of 92 you can see here that only these three faces are extruded and now to increase the amount of Extrusion I’ll go to the offset value here and increase it let’s also turn off the individual from here and now it looks like this let’s keep the offset value to something like 15 or 20 now let’s rotate it also so tab into the edit mode press a to select everything then R and Zed and rotate it in the Z Direction like this now to convert this into smoke we’ll be adding the mesh to volume node this will convert the mesh object into volume in order to make the smoke so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the mesh to volume and let’s place it over here and you can see here that the metor that we were creating is now converted into volume now you can also control the density of this volume from the density option here but we’ll be keeping it to a value of one and now to distribute some points all over the volume we’ll be using the distribute points in volume node so press shift plus a go to point and select the distribute points in volume let’s place it over here and now you can see that there are these points distributed all over the volume also you can control the density from this density option over here and the number of points will increase or decrease like this now even though we can see the points here but in order to make the meteor we need to see it in the mesh form and for this we have to convert it into mesh however in case of points you can’t directly convert into mesh you first have to convert the points into volume and then you can convert the volume to mes so first press shift plus a go to points and select points to volume place it over here now again press shift plus a go to volume and in operations select the volume to mes let’s drop it over here now you can see here that due to the points that we added by using the distribute points in volume node the meteor appears like this however we need only the smoke trail part to have the points distributed or in simple words you have to make this Rock part look solid like a sphere and for this we’ll be using the joint geometry node so press shift f plus a go to geometry and select the joint geometry node let place it over here and now the details of this Rock part is carried by the subdivision surface node so I’ll take this mesh socket and connect it to the geometry socket here and yes we should also scale it up so tab into the edit mode press s to scale it up and left click to finalize now if you want to increase this smoke trail part then for this you can go to the extrude mesh node here and try to increase the offset value so let’s increase it to something like 25 or 30 and now it looks like this let’s also increase the density of the points from the density option over here so let’s increase it to a value some close to 1.5 and now we’ll give some material to this material that we created and we’ll be starting with The Rock part first so let’s create a new material in the material properties and to apply this material to the Rock part we’ll be adding the set material node here so press shift plus a go to material and select the set material node and we’ll place it after the subdivision surface node now click here and select the material and now moving to the creation of the material let’s convert this window to the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader editor from here and now for the material we’ll be adding the musk grave texture so press plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it over here and to convert it into the musk grave texture simply turn off the normalize option here to view the texture hold on control shift and left click on the noise texture and now here we have the musk grave texture or basically this noise texture with the normalized option turned off applied to the Rock part and now to give it some texture of fire I’ll first connect the principal bstf in this node system then I’ll go to the emission and connect this Factor socket to the emission strength now I’ll go to the color option here and let’s change it to yellow color however as you can see here the texture doesn’t look realistic at all and to fix this problem I’ll go to the noise texture here and try to increase these values first of all I’ll increase the detailing to its maximum value of 15 then I’ll go to the roughness and let’s increase it to something like 0.8 or 0.9 now the texture is starting to look better then if I go to the scale option and increase it the texture will begin to change like this let’s keep it to a value of somewhere close to 10 and now if you want to increase the emission strength of the yellow color then for this you can use the map range node so press shift plus a go to converter and select the map range and we’ll drop it over here now with the help of this two max value you can control the emission strength of the yellow color if you want very high emission strength then you can increase it to something like 20 or 30 but we’ll be keeping it to a value of something around 5 or 10 and here it looks perfect and now moving towards the material for the smoke part we’ll go to the material properties and create a new material it’s also changed its name to smoke and in the Shader editor instead of the principal bstf node we’ll be using the principal volume node so press X to delete it then press shift plus a go to Shader and select the principal volume node let’s place it over here and connect the volume socket to the volume of the material output now the reason why you can’t see the smoke material here is that we have not added any set material node in the geometry nodes editor for the smoke material to add it here I’ll create a duplicate of this set material node by pressing shift plus d let’s place it here for a while and we’ll be connecting it after the volume to mesh node so let’s drop it over here and change the material to the Smoke material it appears like this because currently we have turned on the EV render engine but to see the smoke material properly we have to change the render engine to Cycles so go to the render properties and change the render engine from EV to Cycles now now the smoke is visible here we’ll be reducing its density to a much lower number from the principal volume option here so let’s keep it to something like 0.1 or 0.2 and to give it some color you can go to the emission color option here and suppose I change the color to yellow or orange then the emission color will change however since the value of emission strength is zero as a result you can’t see the color of emission here so let’s increase it to a slightly higher number like 0.1 or 0.2 and now the color of emission is slightly visible on the smoke that we created let’s skip it to a mix of yellow and orange and to make it look better we can inre the black body intensity option here so if I increase it to something like 20 or 25 then now it looks like this now although it looks good but there’s still some changes that we can do here in order to make it look better for example we can cover this entire Rock part of the meteor with fire to make it look better and for this go to the geometry nodes editor and we’ll be adding the set position node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in right select the set position node we’ll drop it in between the subdivision surface node and the extrude mesh node and now to cover it up entirely with fire we’ll basically use this node by giving some random offset values to the position of different vertices and to do this properly we’ll be adding a vector math node here so press shift plus a go to utilities and in Vector select the vector math let’s place it over here connect the vector socket to the offset and for the first Vector we’ll be using the position node and for the second Vector we’ll be using the random node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the position node let’s place it over here and connect it to the vector socket to make the offset random we’ll be using the random value node so press shift plus a go to utilities and select the random value node let’s place it over here and change the input type to Vector let’s it’s connected to the second vector and now this is how it looks you can use the maximum values in the random value node to change the way how the metor looks so let’s SK it to something like seven or eight and now this is how this meteor is looking right now and if you want to make it look better in terms of the fire color then you can go to the emission color and change it to more of orange color then I’ll increase the emission strength to a higher number like seven or eight let’s also reduce the black body intensity to something like 1 or two and this will give an explosive look to the meteor in the scene let’s keep the emission strength to something like five and now it looks like this also if you want to expand the smoke trail that we created here then for this you can go to the extrude mesh option here and try to increase the offset value from here so if I increase it to something like 35 or 40 then the length of the smoke tril will increase let’s also increase the density from the distribute points in volume node so we’ll keep it to something like 1.6 or 1.7 and now it looks like this so it completely depends upon you about which color you need and the emission strength if you’ll reduce it it looks like this and if you increase it to a higher value the amount of emission will increase and this will give it more of an explosion like appearance I’ll keeping it to somewhere near four and five and you can also try to control the density with this density option here and with this our scene is now looking perfect so we’ll finalize this and you can try to move this meteor by pressing G and when I move it away you can see here that there’s no displacement or any effect on the buildings but if I bring it closer to them then at some point they begin to break off and show the destruction effect like this you can even try to create an animation out of it like initially you can fix the position of this meteor here and then it will move towards the buildings like this and then the buildings will explode so try to do different things with this you can change the parameters of the smoke Shader then you can also change the number of faces that will extrude to form this smoke trail with the help of the greater than option here then you can also use the offset value here to increase or decrease the length of the smoke Trail so try to play around with these values try to create a simple animation out of it and yes it might be possible that you couldn’t memorize the function of each and every geometry note right now but you don’t need to worry because in most of the cases you won’t be needing all the geometry notes together it’s always advisable to understand the reason of adding any note and if you understand that properly then you will get a proper knowledge of that particular omry node and this will help you to master the geometry nodes in blender and yes this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in this chapter we’ll be learning all these Topics in complete detail and we’ll be creating this simple looking sci-fi Corridor scene with the help of geometry nodes let’s first open the geometry nodes worksspace so click here and this is the geometry nodes workspace if you want you can increase the area of the 3D viewport by closing the spreadsheet so we’ll close it for now and we’ll reopen it only if it is required so to close this take your cursor over here and this double-headed Arrow will appear then if I right click and select join areas and now I have to take this Arrow to that window which we want to close so with this arrow on the spreadsheet I left click and now we have only the 3D viewport in the scene and now moving to the geometry notes the first note that we going to understand today is the icosphere node so click on the new button here and to add the node press shift plus a go to mesh and in Primitives select the icosphere node let’s drop it over here and now what this icosphere node does is that it basically creates this icosphere mesh in your scene the icosphere is is basically a mesh type which you can also add by going to the 3D viewport and if I press shift plus a then in the mesh category you can see that we have an option of adding the ecosphere and similarly in Geometry nodes if you want an icosphere in your scene then you can use this node the special thing about icosphere is that it is completely based on these triangle faces if I switch to the wireframe mode then here you can see that all the faces of the icosphere are made up of triangles and this is the unique thing in the icosphere then here in the icosphere node you also have some more options like the radius which basically controls the size of the icosphere then you have the number of subdivisions which will increase the number of these triangle faces and it makes it look like a spherical ball so you can control these settings from this note and now we’ll move towards the next topic of today’s chapter which is the Dual mesh node to add it over here press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the Dual mesh node let’s place it over here and now we see some changes in the geometry of the ecosphere now what this dual mesh node does is that it basically converts vertices into faces and faces into vertices to understand it better I’ll turn on the annotate tool from here and yes whatever annotations I’m making here you don’t need to repeat them in your file because I’m doing it here only to explain the concept to you now to ensure that whatever annotations I make appear on the surface of the object only I’ll press n to open the toolbar and here in the tool option I’ll change the placement to surface now if I remove this note from here then you can see that we have a point over here then we have one point here then the third point is located here here’s

    the fourth point and similarly the fifth one is here also we have one point at the center now if we take this du M node and connect it over here and now if I change the angle then you can see that at the position of each vertex we have a new face and this is the use of the Dual mesh node you can check this with other vertices also at each placement of the previous vertex we have a new face created over here and if I remove It Again by holding alt and left click then from this angle also you can confirm that we had this vertex here but after connecting the Dual mesh node we have this new face created over here and this is the use of the Dual MH node it simply converts the vertices of your object into faces and faces into vertices and now I’ll remove these annotations from here so I’ll select the annotate eraser tool and let’s erase all of this and now let’s also try this dual mesh node on a cube object so I’ll delete the iOS spere from here and connect the geometry socket to the mesh socket in the Dual mesh and now you can see here that the Dual mesh node is now applied to the default Cube if I remove it from here by holding alt and left click then this is how the original Cube looked and to convert the faces into the vertices and vertices into faces I’ll take this du mesh node and connect it over here and now to make it look like a real Cube we’ll be subdividing the mesh and to do this we’ll use the subdivide mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the subdivide mesh let’s place it over here let’s also increase the levels from here and now this is how it looks and another thing that you can notice here is that by using this dual MH node a w effect is applied to the edges of the cube because if I hold the alt button and remove it from here then this was our original cube with no bevel effect and after connecting it we have this bevel look on this Cube object and now if you remember in the previous chapter we learned about the split edges node which were used to split the edges of your object and basically separate out the faces so if I add it here by pressing shift plus a and in the mesh go to operations and select the split edges place it over here and now to see the effect we’ll be adding the scale elements node it will help us to scale down the faces indiv visually on this Cube so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the scale elements node let’s place it over here and now with the scale option over here I can control the size of the individual faces so because of the split edges node the faces are now separated and to scale them down we use the scale elements node and now moving ahead the next topic of today’s chapter is the triangulate node now to understand it we’ll be adding a plane in the scene so in the 3D View putut Press shift plus a go to mesh and select the plane let’s move it in the y direction and place it over here now tab into the edit mode and to increase the number of vertices right click and subdivide let’s the number of cuts from here and let’s keep it to something like three or four now let’s come out of the edit mode and in the geometry notes editor click on the new button and now we’ll add the triangulate node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the triangulate node let’s stop it over here and to see the changes click on this drop- down menu and turn on the wireframe in the geometry option and now you can see here that the triangulate node will basically triangulate the faces of your object if I hold on alt and remove it from here then previously we had these square faces in the plain object and after using the triangulate node it converts the square faces into these triangles and this is the use of the triangulate node now I’ll delete it let’s select the cube again and now let’s see what happens if I use the triangulate node with this Cube object so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the triangulate and we’ll drop it after the subdivide mesh node and now you can see here that instead of triangle faces we are now having these hexagonal faces and this is because we are using the Dual mesh node to explain it in a better way I’ll first remove the dual M node from here and now here we have these triangle faces because of the triangulate node and as I already told you before this to M node will basically convert the vertices into faces and faces into vertices so if I select the annotate tool again and let’s also increase the thickness from here so that the annotations are properly visible and now if I Mark the faces which are present on this Cube like this let’s mark some more faces also like this and now if I take the Dual mesh node and drop it over here then you can see that the faces are now converted into vertices and because of this we are having these hexagonal faces here and now I’ll erase all these annotations by selecting the annotate eraser tool from here and erase all these points let’s go back to the select mode and now we we be moving towards the next topic of today’s chapter which is the separate geometry node to add it here press shift plus a go to Geometry add in operations select the separate geometry node let’s place it over here and you can use this node to see only a particular face Vortex or edge of your mesh object to understand it better I’ll drop it over here and with the selection socket here I can basically input which particular phase point or Edge I need to see in my scene so suppose I need to see only the bottom phas which is present here and one thing that we know about this face is that it’s normal or basically the perpendicular is in the negative Z axis and to put this information in the selection socket here we’ll be adding a normal node and a compare node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the normal let’s place it over here and to add the compare node press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it over here and since we are using the normal so we’ll change the input type to Vector let’s connect it to the vector a and now to see only this pH whose normal is in the negative Zed axis I’ll change the operation to equal and in the value of vector B I’ll change this third value that is the Z AIS to minus one and this is because the normal is in the negative Z axis and now I’ll connect the result socket to the selection in the separate geometry node the reason why we can’t see anything here is that by default the domain here is selected to point and to see the face I’ll change the domain to face and now you can see here that only the bottom face whose normal is in the negative Z axis is visible in the 3D view port and now one thing to notice here is that you have two output options in the separate geometry node the first one is the selection and this will basically give the output based on what you have entered as the input through the selection socket and the second one is the inverted which will basically Ally invert the selection or in simple words it will give the output of all the faces except the one that we selected to practically understand it if I take this inverted socket and connected to the mesh socket then now you can see here that all the faces are visible except the bottom face that we used as the input here and this is the use of the inverted socket in the separate geometry node but for now I’ll change it to selection again and this is because we’ll be using this pH with this pattern of hexagonal faces as the base of the Sci-Fi Corridor that we’ll be making in this chapter now to make the rest of the corridor we need the other faces also only this base will be having this pattern and the other faces will not be having any such pattern and will just be the simple faces of a cube and for this we’ll be using the joint geometry node in the geometry noes editor so press shift plus a go to geometry and select the joint geometry let’s place it over here and now if I take the inverted socket which is carrying the information about the rest of the faces and connect it to the Joint geometry node then in this case we still have the bottom face with this hexagonal pattern and we have normal faces for the rest of the object and this is because I have converted the inverted socket directly to the Joint geometry since we have not connected it to the triangulate node or the Dual mesh node as a result the hexagonal pattern is not visible on the rest of the faces however you can see here that this face is not completely covering the base of the corridor and to fix this you simply have to turn on the key boundaries option in the Dual MH node and now moving ahead you can also extend this Corridor by going to the edit mode press three for face select and if I select this pH press e to extrude it then now you can see here that this pattern is also extending however if I extrude the face too much then you can see here that the pattern will begin to show this stretching effect So to avoid this problem you can either extrude it by a small uniform distance like if I press G and Y to move this face like this then you can fix the position at that point where the base looks perfect or else if you have extruded it too much then you can add some Loop Cuts so if I press cr+ R and use the scroll wheel to increase the number of loop Cuts then now you can see that we again have this hexagonal pattern all over the base and let’s extrude it a little bit more so I’ll zoom out enable the face select mode and I’ll select this face and again extrude it like this let’s add some Loop cuts by pressing crl plus r and I’ll be keeping two Loop Cuts then left click to finalize and right click to cancel the movement and now we again have this hexagonal pattern at the base let’s also extrude one face in the X Direction like this so I’ll select this face press e to extrude it let’s add some Loop cuts by pressing crl plus r and I’ll be adding four to five Loop Cuts left click to finalize and right click to cancel the movement and now we have the simple Corridor with this hexagonal pattern applied to all the faces on its base also to get a view of the inside of the corridor you simply have to zoom in like this and adjust your camera let’s zoom in again and adjust the camera accordingly and at one point you will get that view from where you can see the inside side of the corridor you can also see this hexagonal pattern that we applied on the base and now moving ahead we have two issues in the scene the first one is that this hexagonal pattern is completely flat and the second issue is that there is nothing below the base as a result you can easily see through it and so to make them look thicker we’ll be adding the extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the extrude mesh node we’ll drop it after the scale elements node and now you can see that the Extrusion effect is applied to the hexagonal pattern on this bottom face you can control the Extrusion from the offset option here so let’s reduce it and we’ll be keeping it to a negative value of something like – 0.02 or- 0.01 and now this hexagonal pattern has some visible thickness in it and now another thing is that we are having nothing below this hexagonal pattern of the base as a result we can see through it like this gray area of the 3D view port and to fix this problem we’ll be adding the original bottom face here just like the rest of the faces and if you remember the information about the bottommost face was stored in the selection socket of the separate geometry node so if I take it and connected to the Joint geometry node then now we’ll have a simple face added to the bottom along with this hexagonal pattern and you can even see the difference between both the cases like if I break the node connection between the selection socket and the joint geometry by holding control right clicking and dragging like this then in this case you can easily see through the empty spaces in between these hexagonal faces and if I connect it again then you can no more see through the empty spaces in between these hexagonal faces now let’s also come out of the edit mode now moving ahead we’ll be creating some pillars to place on the sides of the corridor but before that I’ll fix this position inside the corridor for this I’ll bring my camera view over here and to do this press contr plus alt and zero in the numpad and now here here we have the camera view in fact even if I try to change my view like this then I can return back to the previous View by pressing zero on the numpad because now my camera is placed over here you can also adjust the camera view by selecting the camera in the scene collection and if I press n then in the item category I can change the location and the rotation of this camera so in order to get a proper view I’ll first go to the rotation and we’ll be rounding off these rotation values so the rotation in the x-axis is very close to 90° so I’ll type 90 then for the Y AIS we’ll change it to 0° and in The Zed AIS let’s keep it to 90° now in the location I’ll change the Z axis to 0 m and now with the help of these values in the X and Y axis I can change the camera view like this in the y axis the position looks perfect let’s also change it in the x-axis and I’ll keep it to something like 14.5 M which is approximately equal to the location in the y- axis so you can try to adjust these values on your own depending upon the position and the view of your camera and now to add the pillars here let’s first change the view press shift plus a go to mesh and add the cylinder let’s move it in the X Direction like this and now to place it on the sides of the corridor we we’ll be using the instance on points node so I’ll select the corridor again go to the geometry nodes editor press shift plus a go to instances and select instance on points let’s place it over here and now we’ll be placing the cylinder on the different points of the base so I’ll take the selection socket and connect it to the points and then I’ll be assigning the cylinder as the instance object so I’ll go to the scene collection left click and drag the cylinder into the geometry nodes editor and now we have the object info node with the cylinder object selected now I’ll take the geometry socket and connect it to the instance and to view the cylinders here take this instance socket and connect it to the Joint geometry node so here we have the cylinders placed at different points on the bottommost face let’s adjust their size so with the cylinder selected I’ll tab into the edit mode press s and Z to scale it up in the Z axis then to reduce its thickness press s and shift plus Z and scale it down in the X and Y axis like this let’s also scale it down in the Zed axis slightly by pressing s and z and scale it down like this let’s also move it slightly upwards so press G and z and place it over here and now it looks like this let’s come out of the edit mode and to view the corridor from inside press zero on the numpad for the camera view and from this View you can also clearly see that their thickness is too high so I’ll select the cylinder again tab into the edit mode and let’s scale it down again in the X and Y AIS so press a to select all then press s and shift plus Z and scale it down like this come out of the edit mode Let’s again go to the camera view and now this is how these pillars are placed and now to remove this wireframe display from here I’ll go to this drop- down menu again and turn off the wireframe in the geometry option now to give some basic material to this pillars I’ll again select that cylinder and I’ll change this window of the geometry notes editor into the Shader editor so click on this icon and select the Shader editor click on new button and to see the texture let’s turn on the render view to get a proper Lighting in our scene click here and turn off the scene world now to give it some basic texture we’ll be adding the wner texture so press shift plus a go to texture and select the wner texture let’s place it over here and to view the texture press control plus shift and left click on the vulner texture also to add the texture coordinate and the mapping node press ctrl+ T and take this object socket and connect it to the vector and now here we have these simple spots visible as the texture on the cylinder and to make it look better we’ll try to change the distance metric option in the Warner texture and adjust the scaling to view the changes in the texture so right now the first one is selected but if I select the second option then the texture looks like this and if I increase the scaling from the scale option here then this is how the texture is looking right now however this texture is also not looking good so I’ll select the third option in the distance matric and change the scale like this and I think that we should keep this texture for the pillars also if you want you can combine this Warner texture with the noise texture to get a better result so if I press shift plus a go to texture and select the noise texture let’s place it before the Warner texture and now the texture looks like this let’s try to change the value of scaling from here to get some better results and here I think that it looks perfect so we’ll finalize this to give it some color I’ll First Connect this principal bsdf here and then I’ll be adding the color ramp so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp let’s place it over here and now you can use these pointers to change the amount of black and white color in your texture and you can also change these Colors by increasing the brightness and setting different colors so for the first color I’ll keep it to dark green so let’s reduce the brightness from here let’s also change the position of this pointer like this and for the Second Color I’ll select this pointer and change the color from here and I’ll be assigning the light blue color to it and now this is how the pillars of a Sci-Fi Corridor are looking right now now let’s go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and this is how our scene is looking right now and now if you want to add some 3D bump effect then for this go to the Shader editor press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump node let’s place it over here and connect it to the normal now I’ll take the distance socket of the Warner texture and connect it to the height socket in the bump node and now this is how our texture on the pillars is looking right now let’s reduce the strength of the bump effect from from here and we’ll be keeping it to something like 0.4 or 0.5 and now we’ll be working on the side walls right now they looking very simple but to give them a Sci-Fi look we’ll first extrude the face and then insert it with the help of geometry nodes so to do this first I’ll change this Shader editor into the geometry nodes editor and select the corridor then to extrude these faces I’ll be adding an extrude mesh node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the extrude mesh node let’s place it over here and as I already told you before the information about the side walls and the ceiling is here in the inverted socket so I’ll select this inverted socket and connect it to the mesh socket let’s also turn on the wireframe display to see the changes that we make here so click on this drop- down menu and turn on the wireframe from here now to view the changes I’ll take this mesh socket and connect it to the Joint geometry node and right now you can’t see any changes in the scene and that’s because the offset value in the extrude mesh node is set to positive 1 as a result the Extrusion is being applied to the outside faces so if I reduce the offset from here you will begin to notice that the amount of Extrusion is reducing and if I take it into a negative value and go to the camera view then in the this case the Extrusion is being applied inwards but since we want to create an insert effect on the faces so I’ll change the offset value to zero and now to insert these extruded faces we basically need to scale them down so for this we’ll be using the scale elements node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the scale elements node let’s place it over here and to make sure that the scaling is done only on the extruded faces I’ll take this top socket and connect it to the selection socket here and now if I slightly reduce the scaling you will notice that the faces are now begin to showing this inser effect so we basically added this extrude mesh node and set the offset value to zero so that we can create this extruded pH and then we connected it to scale elements to create this insert effect also one more thing to notice here is that in the geometry nodes editor we have connected the inverted socket to the join geometry node Twice first we directly connected it to the geometry socket and just now we connected it to the extrude mesh node and the scale elements and again connected it to the join geometry node so I’ll remove the initial connection so hold down the control button right click and drag like this and now we have only a single Connection in between the inverted socket and the joint geometry node now if you want to make it look more complex then you can again apply the Extrusion to these inser faces for this I’ll create a duplicate of this extrude mesh node by pressing shift plus d and place it over here let’s again take this top socket and connect it to the selection and now I can control the Extrusion from the offset value here let’s keep it to something like 0.2 or 0.1 and now this is how our scene looks we have these extruded faces on the side walls of the corridor and also on the top or basically the ceiling of the corridor now moving ahead let’s assign some material to the walls of the corridor and for this we’ll be using the set material node so press shift plus a go to material and select the set material node let’s place it over here now go to the material properties let’s create a new material and I’ll change the name of this material to walls right now we’ll only keep the basic white color to it and now I’ll go to the set material node and select the walls material now moving ahead we’ll also be placing some lights at the ceiling at these extruded faces and to achieve this we’ll first be placing points with the help of mesh to points node at the center of each face and then we’ll replace the points with a light object to do this go to the geometry nodes editor and we’ll be adding the mesh to points node so press shift plus a go to mesh and in operations select the mesh two points let’s place it over here and now we’ll be connecting it to the inverted socket which is carrying the information about the walls as well as the ceilings so I’ll take this socket and connect it to the mesh however since we only need to add the points on the ceiling so for this we’ll be using the compare node and the normal node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in math select the compare node let’s place it over here now let’s also add the normal node so press shift plus a go to geometry and in read select the normal node let’s place it over here and since we’ll be using the normal as the input so I’ll change the input type from float to Vector now I’ll connect this normal socket to the vector a and now since we need the points to be added at the ceiling on the top and we know that its perpendicular or basically the normal is in the positive Zed axis so I’ll change the value of vector B in the Z axis to positive 1 also I’ll change the operation to equal and connect the result socket to the selection also since we want the points to be added at the faces of the ceiling so I’ll change the domain from vertices to faces and now we’ll be connecting it to the Joint geometry node so I’ll take this point socket and connect it to the geometry socket in the joint geometry and now here we have these small points added on the top and to replace them with a light object we’ll be using the instance on points node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the instance on points let’s place it over here and now we’ll be creating the ceiling lights to be placed as the instances so I’ll change the view and press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube now the cube is placed at the position of the 3D cursor at this point however since we have this Corridor here we are not able to see it properly and so I’ll be telling you a shortcut which you can use to focus only on a selected object and the the shortcut is to press this forward slash key in the keyboard so if I press it then now everything else will disappear except for the selected object so to convert it into a seing light I’ll tap into the edit mode press s and z and scale it down like this now press three for the face select mode and select this bottom face press e to extrude right click to cancel the Extrusion then to insert this extruded pH press I and insert it like this left click to finalize let’s also extrude it inwards so press e and extrude it inwards in the Zed axis like this left click to finalize and now this is how the basic structure of the C light is looking we’ll be assigning an emission material to this extruded face so that it will emit the light and we’ll be having some different material for the rest of the cube so first we’ll be creating a simple material for our sealing light so go to the material properties click on the new button and let’s change the base color to dark gray by reducing the brightness from here if you want you can even assign some other color like dark blue or green but right now I’ll be assigning the dark gray color and let’s also increase the metallic strength from here and now for the emission material I’ll click on the plus button then create a new material and let’s open the Shader editor so click on on this icon and select the Shader editor let’s zoom out and here we have the default material added here now I’ll be deleting the principal bstf by pressing X and we’ll be adding an emission Shader so press shift plus a go to Shader and select the emission let’s place it over here and connect it to the surface socket let’s change the color of emission from here so we’ll give it slightly blue color and change the strength to a very high number like something around 10 and to assign this material to this face click on the sign button here and with this the seing lights are completely ready now let’s come out of the edit mode and now to get back the corridor that we created in the scene press the forward slash button again now I’ll select the corridor go to the geometry notes editor from here and to place the light on the ceiling we’ll be connecting it to the instance on points node here so take this cube. 001 which we use for creating the light and drop it in the geometry nodes editor now I’ll be connecting this object info node to the instant socket here and now here we have the light placed at the ceiling of the corridor let’s also scale it down from the scaling option here so first I’ll select the X and Y AIS and reduce it like this let’s also scale it down in the Z axis slightly so we’ll scale it down to something like 0.7 or 0.8 and now we’ll be hiding this main light from the scene as well as the render view so go to the scene collection click on this I button and it’s no more visible in the 3D view port and I’ll click on this camera button to hide it from the render view also go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad now here we have the ceiling lights placed at the top and to view the effect of lighting I will open the drop- down menu here and turn on the scene World it looks like this because currently we have turned on the EV render engine so in the render properties I’ll change the render engine to cycles and now this is how the lighting effect is looking in the corridor right now and now we’ll be working on the texture of walls so I’ll select the corridor go to the material properties and with the wall selected I’ll go to the Shader editor from here let’s zoom out and here we have the default basic material applied to the walls now to give it a Sci-Fi look we’ll be using the Warner texture so press shift plus a go to texture and select the Warner texture let’s place it over here press contrl plus P to get the texture coordinate and the mapping node now I’ll take this object socket and connect it to the vector and to view the texture on the walls hold on control shift and left click on the wner texture now this is how the basic Warner texture is looking on the walls but to get a different texture I’ll change the distance metric option to the third one and to give it a Sci-Fi look we’ll be adding the color ramp to change the amount of black and white color so press shift plus a go to converter and select the color ramp let’s place it over here change the interpolation to constant and now I can use these pointers to create this pattern on the walls let’s also scale it up from the scale option here so I’ll keep it to something like8 or 9 let’s change the position of the white pointer again and now it looks like this to give it a 3d effect we’ll be adding the bump node so I’ll take this principal bstf and drop it over here press shift plus a go to vector and select the bump node let’s place it over here and connect the normal socket in the bump node to the normal in the principal bstf and for the texture I’ll take the distance socket and connect it to the height in the bump node and with this we have the bump effect applied to the texture and now we’ll work towards finalizing the scam so I’ll go to the render properties and change the render engine back to EV to get a proper lighting we’ll be adding some lights throughout the corridor so for this go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad and here we have this default light placed in the scene so I’ll select it press G to move it and we’ll place it over here then we’ll be creating lots of duplicates of this light so press shift plus d move it in the wi Direction and place it over here press shift plus v again place it over here and we’ll be repeating these steps until we have added these lights throughout the corridor so the shortcut to do this is to select all the three Lights by holding shift select the remaining two lights and now if I press shift plus d to create the duplicate we’ll have the duplicate of three lights let’s place it in the y direction like this now press shift plus d again place the lights over here now I’ll select This Light press G and move it over here let’s select these two press shift plus d move the lights like this then press shift plus d one more time and we’ll place them over here now let’s change the view and this this is how these lights are placed in the seene in order to get them inside the corridor I’ll select all these lights press G and Zed and move them down like this then left click to finalize press zero to go to the camera view and now we have this lighting setup in the scene let’s change their brightness and color so I’ll select a random light from here go to the object data properties and right now the power is set to 1,000 watt but since we are having so many lights in the scene so I’ll reduce the power to something like 100 wat let’s also change the color of light and I’ll change the color to red color and because of this red color we also have these amazing Shadows on the walls of the corridor similarly we’ll do the same with all the other lights we’ll change the power to 100 wat and assign some random colors so I’ll select this light. 011 reduce the power to 100 wat change the color to green color similarly for the next Light Select it reduce the power to 100 and we’ll change the color to the dark blue color this time now I’ll select the next light change the power to 100 wat and let’s change the color to yellow color now I’ll select the next light go to the power option and reduce it to 100 again let’s change it to light blue color similarly the next slide select it from here go to the power option and change it to 100 wats and this time I’ll change the color to red color again let’s select the next light reduce the power to 100 ws and for this one we’ll be keeping the yellow color now I’ll select the light. 005 change the power to 100 W and yes one thing to notice here is that we are done with all the lights on this side of the corridor where we have the camera and now we are editing the lights on this part of the corridor you can see the light of different colors in all these parts however here we still have the white color which means that we have to edit the colors and the powers of all these lights so I’ll change the color of this light also and let’s assign the green color now i s the light do 004 change the power to 100 wat and similarly I’ll change the color to dark blue now I’ll select the light. 003 reduce the power again go to the color option and change the color to red color next slide reduce the power to 100 W change the color to yellow and yes it’s completely up to you which random colors you want to assign to each light and now I’ll go to the light. 001 reduce the power to 100 wats change the color to pink color and finally I’ll select the last Light reduce the power to 100 wat and change the color to red color let’s go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and this is how our sci-fi corridor is looking right now now if you want you can even create a simple animation where you will be navigating through the Sci-Fi Corridor and for this we’ll be using the walk navigation and yes because we no longer need the geometry notes so I’ll open up the layout workspace again from here and this is how our scene looks now let’s turn on the render view go to the camera view by pressing zero on the numpad and this is how it looks now for the walk navigation click on The View option here go to navigation and here we have the walk navigation so I’ll select this and now if I move my cursor you will notice that our camera view is now changing just like you experience in the open world games such as GTA and in fact you can use the W ASP keys in your keyboard so if I press W then you can see that we are navigating forward in the corridor similarly I can press s to go backwards a to move towards the left D to move right and in this way we can create a simple animation by navigating through the Sci-Fi Corridor to get back to the same position where we were before I’ll simply click the right Mouse button and to create an animation we first need to assign a shortcut to use the walk navigation and yes let’s also turn on the solid modes from here so that we can easily navigate around the Sci-Fi Corridor without any lag in between so to assign the shortcut to the walk navigation click on The View option then go to navigation and if I take my cursor to the walk navigation and right click then it will give me some options and on the second number I have the assigned shortcut so I’ll select this and now it’s asking me to press a key which is to be used as a shortcut to enable the walk navigation but one thing to keep in mind is that we should assign that key which is not used as a shortcut somewhere else so I’ll be assigning the shortcut shift plus q and now the shortcut is saved so if I go back to the 3D view put and press shift plus Q then now the walk navigation is activated and to create that animation I’ll go to the timeline editor and we need that the animation should be created automatically as we move through the Sci-Fi Corridor and for this I’ll be turning on this auto key option which will automatically add the key frames whenever I make some changes in the scene let’s also change the ending frame to a higher number like 1,000 now I’ll play the animation by pressing space bar and to start the walk navigation press shift plus Q press W to go ahead and we’ll be creating an animation like this left click to finalize and now we have the animation ready press space bar to stop the animation in the timeline editor and now if I go to the frame number one and play the animation then you can see that after some frames it will begin to show this animation where we are navigating through the Sci-Fi Corridor and at a frame of somewhere near 350 the animation will stop however you can see that at somewhere near frame number 200 if I play the animation then the navigation is not proper and to fix this we’ll again go to the frame number one and recreate the animation but before that we need to delete the animation that we just created so I’ll select the camera go to the time line editor press a to select all the key frames and X to delete key frames now I’ll press the space bar press shift plus Q to enable the walk navigation and we’ll walk around the SciFi Corridor like this then left click to finalize and press space bar to stop the animation and you can see here that we have animation of somewhere near 400 frames and to view the animation I bring this pointer to somewhere near 130 frames and then press space bar and this is how the animation looks now and you can even render the simple animation so for this I’ll first change the start value to 130 and that’s because the key frames are starting from somewhere near 130 now hold on middle Mouse button and drag like this and you can see that the last frame is somewhere near 385 or 390 frame so I’ll change the end value to 385 let’s also go to the render view to see how the animation looks so press space bar to view the animation and this is how it looks and yes one more thing to notice here is that at somewhere around 260 frame if I play the animation then you can see here that the change from frame number 265 and frame number 266 is very quick and to fix this problem we’ll be adding some Gap in between so for this first I’ll increase the end frame to 390 now I’ll select only these key frames here press G and move it like this and now if I play the animation again then you can see that we are getting getting a much smoother movement or a much better animation than before so I’ll take the pointer back to the frame number 130 and let’s play the animation again so with this our scene is finally ready and if you want to render this animation then go to the output properties and in the file format we’ll change it from PNG to this ffmpeg video type and you can even change the location where you want to save this video from the output path option here so you can click on this folder icon and select any particular folder and when you’re done with all this you can even set the resolution from here right now it is set to 1920 in the X and 1080 in the Y meaning that it will be in the landscape mode just like normal YouTube videos but if you want it to be in the portrait mode or basically that form in which you watch the Youtube shorts or Instagram reads then for this you simply need to reverse these values so I’ll go to the resolution in the X and change it to 1080 and for the Y I’ll change it to 1920 and the resolution is now changed and then to render that animation click on the render button and select render animation from here and yes this brings us to the end of this [Music] chapter in this chapter we’ll be understanding all these topics in complete detail and we’ll be using them to create the simple scene with this billboard along with the text added to it so to begin with let’s go to the geometry notes editor let’s expand the area of the 3D view Port like this and now the first topic for today’s chapter is understanding the string to curve node so in the geometry nodes editor click on the new button and to add the string to curve node press shift plus a go go to utilities and in text here we have the string to Curves node so I’ll select this and place it over here now here the string means some characters or basically some text and this note allows us to see that text in the 3D view port and here you have the string option where I can type any random text which I want to be displayed in the 3D view Port so suppose I type JB 3D Studio and press enter to confirm then here we have the text added in the scene now in the string to Curves node you have several options to change the way how your text looks if you remember we understood about the 3D text in blender in this chapter of the course and all these settings that you are seeing here are very similar to the ones that we covered in that chapter so the first option that you have here is the font option and to select any particular font then click on this folder icon and this will display a list of all the fonts that are saved in your PC so suppose I select any random font like this one and click on open font then you can see here that the text font now changes so you can set any particular font with this option here now the next important thing is the string option here it basically takes the input which is the text that you want to see in the 3D viewport then you have the size option which will basically control the size of your text and then you have character spacing but before that let’s also go to the top view by pressing seven on the numpad let’s zoom in and now this character spacing basically means the spacing in between your characters so if I increase it the spacing or basically the distance between any two characters in the text will increase like this let’s change it back to one and then you have the word spacing which basically means the spacing or basically the distance between the words in your text so you can use this to change the distance between the words now here you have the line spacing but if I change it you won’t see any difference in the text and that’s because we are only having a single line in the text so we’ll see this option later on and now here you have the text box width and it basically means the width of the invisible text box that is around the text in our scene by default it is set to value of zero meaning that the width of the text box is infinite right now however if I increase it to a slightly higher number like 0.6 or 0.7 then now you can see that the width of the text box is now changed and as a result the words of the text are now in different lines to understand it better I’ll change it back to zero I’ll enable the annotate line tool from here and right now since the text box width is zero as a result the width of the text box in the xaxis is infinite right now however if I change it to 0.5 M then now this width has decreased and as a result the text appears in a box like this and this is the use of the text box width node and now since we have more than one line in the text so we can also look at the line spacing option here the line spacing means the spacing or basically the distance between any two lines in the text and for now I’ll change the width back to zero let’s also remove all these annotations by selecting the annotate eraser and I’ll remove all this let’s go to the select tool again and so this is how you can add some text in your scene with the help of geometry noes now if you want to fill your text then for this you can use another node which is the fill curve node so press shift plus a go to curve and in operations select the fill curve let’s place it over here and now you can see that we now have this fill effect applied to the text and now moving ahead we’ll be making a billboard and place the text over it so in the 3D viewport press shift plus a go to mesh and select the cube let’s tab into the Ed mode press s and Zed and scale it down in the Z Direction like this let’s also scale It Up by pressing s and scale it up like this let’s scale it down in the Zed axis again and now it looks like this now we apply the insert to the top face so press three for face select mode select the top face press e to extrude right click to cancel the movement and now to insert this extruded face press I and insert it like this left click to finalize let’s also extrude it slightly inwards so press e and let’s extrude it in the Zed axis like this and now one more thing to notice here is that currently this billboard is square in shape to make it rectangle press a to select all the faces press s and x and scale it up in the x-axis like this let’s come out of the edit mode and with this our billboard is now ready now to place the text over it I’ll select this text and to view it properly we’ll go to the render view let’s also give it some different material so go to the material properties and let’s change the base color to the black color by decreasing the brightness from here to assign this material to the text go to the geometry nodes editor press shift plus a go to material and select the set material node let’s place it over here and select this black material now to move it upwards by using the geometry nodes we will be using another node which is the translate instances node so press shift plus a go to instances and select the translate instances node let’s place it over here and now I can use these values to change the position of the text in the scene now to move it upwards I’ll go to the translation value in The Zed axis and we’ll slightly increase it to that particular value where it just intersects with the billboard to get a better view press seven on the numpad to go to the top view now let’s also move it in the x-axis so I’ll go to the translation in x-axis and change it like this let’s also move it upwards in the Y AIS and place it over here and with this we have the simple billboard with some text added over it with the help of geometry nodes now moving ahead to the next topic which is a string node and it’s basically used as an input to connect to the string socket here so to add it press shift plus a go to input and in constant select the string node let’s place it over here and just like you had the option to enter the text here similarly in the string node you can enter any text here and then you can connect it to the string socket like this now you might be thinking that what exactly is the use of the string node when you can directly put the text in the string socket of the string to Curves node and the answer to this is that you can use multiple string nodes and connect it to the string socket to have more than one text in your scene however from the string option in the string to Curves node you can only add a single text so to add multiple text I’ll select the string node press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here let’s change the text and I’ll type random and press enter to confirm now to connect both of them together we have to use another node which is the joint string node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in text here we have the joint strings node so I’ll select this and place it over here now I’ll be connecting these two string nodes to the string socket here so I’ll take this one and connect it here similarly this one and connect it here now for the output I’ll be taking this string socket and connected to the string socket in the string to Curves node and now we have two different text in the scene however in the joint strings node you can see here that apart from the string socket we also have a delimeter socket and by using this I can tell this node that exactly what we want to insert between the two texts if I go to the delimeter and enter this exclamation mark then now you can see that the two texts are now separated with this exclamation mark and now moving ahead we’ll be creating some text which we’ll Place below this jb3d studio text so for this I’ll first delete this string node which is having the random text also I’ll select the joint strings node and delete it from here let’s connect the string node to the string socket in the string to Curves node now for the text to be placed below the main text I’ll select all these nodes and create a duplicate of them so let’s select them like this press shift plus d to create a duplicate and let’s place them over here now to view both the text in the scene we’ll be using the joint geometry node so press shift plus a go to geometry and select the joint geometry let’s space it over here and now I’ll connect the geometry socket of the first text to the Joint geometry node and similarly I’ll take this socket and connect it over here now for the output let’s connect the joint geometry node to the group output now the reason why you can’t see two different text in the scene is that right now the second note system is also having the same information as the first one for example the position in the translate instances node and the data in the string node all this is completely same so first of all I’ll go to the translate instances node and let’s change the translation in the Y AIS and now you will begin to see that we have two different text in the scene to change this text I’ll go to the string node and you can type anything over here so I’ll type random and press enter to confirm now if you want multiple strings to be added in the second text then for this I’ll select the string node press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here let’s change the string to something else so suppose I type Master course and press enter to confirm and to connect both the text I will be adding The Joint strings node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in text select the joint strings node let’s place it over here now I’ll take this string socket and connect it to the strings similarly I’ll take this string socket and connect it over here for the output I’ll connect the joint strings node to the string socket like this now let’s also change the first string and I’ll type blender and press enter to confirm to separate the two strings I’ll go to the Daily meter option here and suppose I want to add an underscore between them so I’ll type it and press enter and now the two strings are separated by the underscore like this now you can even add more than two strings and connect it to to the Joint strings node so suppose I select this string press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here let’s change the string to something else like YouTube and press enter to confirm now I’ll take the string socket and connect it over here and in this way I added three different strings separated by the underscore now one more thing to notice here is that if I go to the word spacing option here and try to change it you won’t notice any difference in a text and that’s because the entire string is being created like a single word and that’s because we have not added any space in between any two words so suppose if I go to the second string and in between master and course I press space bar and enter and go to the word spacing again and try to change it then you will notice that it is now treating this blender uncore Master as one word and this score YouTube as the second word so the number of words basically depends on the space added while typing the text now if you want you can even place the second word below the first one for this I’ll go to the text box width and if I slightly increase it you can see here that we are now having the second word which is course YouTube placed below the first one which is blender unor Master if you want to scale it down you can go to the size option here and reduce it like this and if you want to change its position then you can go to the translation option and then move it in the x-axis like this and so this is how you can place different text or basically different words in your scene with the help of geometry nodes now we’ll also be creating some more string nodes so I’ll select this one press shift plus d to create a duplicate and place it over here let’s change this to animation and press enter to confirm let’s connect it over here and this is how it looks however suppose you want that it should change the line after each and every word so for this you can go to the delim meter option here and after the underscore I’ll press the space bar and if I press enter enter then now we’ll be having each of these words placed in a different line this is because each one of these is now being treated as a separate word since we have added a space in the delim meter and for now I’ll go to the second string and I’ll remove the space in between the master and course now press enter to confirm and in this way we are having four different words separated by this delim meter which is having the underscore that you can see and because of the space that we added all of them are placed in different lines you can even increase the text box width in order to change the position of these words like this but for now I’ll be keeping it to 0.5 M and this is how it looks now moving ahead let us discover the slice strings node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in text here we have the slice string node so I’ll select this and we’ll place it after the upper text or basically the main text and with this you will notice that some part of the text has now disappeared and this is because the slice string Noe is basically used to slice or trim some part of your text I’ll go to the top view and now you can see here that currently in this main text we are having 10 characters the first character is J second is B then the third one is the space then this is the fourth one then fifth then we again have a space so it will be the sixth character then similarly 7th 8th 9th and 10th meaning that right now the text is having 10 characters and so we can say that the length of this string is 10 also in the slight string note you have this length parameter which is set to 10 and if I increase it to 11 then now the length of characters will increase this letter I will appear which is basically the 11th character of the string so to get all the 12 characters I’ll change the length to a value of 12 and now we have the entire text then in the SCE string node you also have this position parameter which basically means that whatever value we add in in the position it will display the string starting from the index value of that number for example right now the position value is set to zero and as a result the text that appears here will start from that character which has an index value equal to zero and always remember that the indexing of the characters in string starts from zero and goes on like 1 2 3 4 so you can see here that the first character which is J is having the index value of zero then the second character of B will have the index value equal to 1 and similarly the indexing will go on like this and for the last which is the 12th character the index value will be equal to 11 so for string of 12 characters the indexing will be from 0 to 11 or in general terms we can say that for a string having n number of characters the indexing will be from 0 to n minus 1 now if I go to the position socket and change the value to one then now the string will be displayed starting from the character having the index value equal to one in fact by changing the position values here we can even create a simple animation of the text in the scene and to do this I’ll change the position back to zero then I’ll go to the timeline editor and we’ll make an animation where initially at the frame number one there will be no text visible because we’ll change the position value to 12 then at somewhere near frame number 40 we’ll take the position value back to zero and then we’ll be having the simple animation of the text so let’s do it practically to understand so at the frame number one I’ll go to the value of position and change it to 12 and to insert a key frame with a cursor hovering over the position parameter press I and the key frame is inserted here then I’ll go to the frame number 40 change the value of position to zero press I to insert a key frame and here we have the second key frame inserted now I’ll go to the frame number one and press the space bar to play the animation and this is how the animation looks now we can even make a loop animation out of it where it first appears in the scene and then disappears again so for this I’ll go to the timeline editor select the second key frame and I’ll be creating a duplicate of it by pressing shift plus d and place it at the frame number 50 and the reason why I did this was that by creating a duplicate of this key frame the text won’t suddenly disappear as we’ll be able to see the complete text for a fraction of second so now at the frame number 50 we have this key frame with a position value of zero and to make the text Cod disappear I’ll take the pointer to the frame number 90 change the value of position back to 12 and to insert the key frame press I let’s also change the end frame from 250 to 90 and now I’ll play the animation so the text Will first appear and then disappear like this now moving ahead we’ll be discovering the special characters node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in text here we have the special characters node so I’ll select it and place it over here now this node is basically used to add characters which you can’t otherwise add from your keyboard here we have two options the first one is the line BR and the second one is the tab if I take the line brake socket and connect it to the delimeter in the joint strings node then what it basically does is that it will change the value of delimeter from underscore space to a new for each of the string to explain it in a better way I’ll remove the connection from here and in the delimeter I’ll enter the exclamation mark now since I have entered this exclamation mark in the delim meter as a result each of the strings is getting separated by this exclamation mark in between however if I connect the line breake to the delimer then in this case the delimeter is getting an input of line break and as a result there will be a new line after each string similarly in the special characters node you also have an option of tab so if I take it and connect it to the Daily meter then the spacing in between the different strings will be as if you press the T key in between them so this is the use of the special characters node for now I’ll take the line brake socket and connect it to the Del meter now moving ahead the next node that we’re going to explore is the value to string node to add it here press shift plus a go to utilities and in text here we have the value to string node let’s place it over here and now this node is basically used to convert some value which is basically a number and give the output as a string to explain it in a better way I’ll select all these nodes from the string to Curves node to the set material let’s create a duplicate of them by pressing shift plus d let’s place them over here and now I’ll be connecting the string socket of the value to string node to the string socket here now to view the output I’ll take this geometry socket in the set material node and connect it to the Joint geometry node let’s move the text in the x-axis with the help of this translate instances node and here you can see that we have this number zero written as a string on the billboard now in the value to string node you can change the value to any number like 10 or 12 and then you have the option of decimals and if I increase it this will basically add the specified number of decimal places in the number like this now suppose I want to use this node in order to create a simple animation where this number will be showing the number of subscribers from 0o to a particular number then for this I’ll change the value back to zero and let’s also reduce the number of decimals to zero because obviously the number of subscribers can’t be in decimals so to create the animation I’ll take the pointer back to the frame number one and to insert a key frame with the value set to zero I’ll take my cursor over it press I to insert the key frame now I’ll take the pointer to the frame number 90 and I’ll change the value to the final number of subscribers so I’ll keep the value to 700 because this is the number of subscribers that I remember the last time I checked the subscriber count and to insert a key frame at this value press I and now if I go to the frame number one and press the space bar to play the animation then this is how it looks the number increases from a value of 0 to 700 now let’s also add a text subscribers below it with the help of the string node so I’ll select this press shift plus d to create a duplicate and let’s place it over here I’ll change the text from animation to subscribers and since we are using two different strings so we have to use the joint string node so I’ll select this one press shift plus d to create a duplicate and let’s place it over here now I’ll take this string socket in the value to string node and connect it over here here similarly I’ll take this string socket also and connect it here for the output we’ll connect the joint string node to the string to Curves node now here you can see that we have the text added showing 700 and subscribers separated by the exclamation mark to remove this exclamation mark and to get both of the strings in different lines we’ll be using the special characters node so press shift plus a go to utilities and in text here we have the special characters node so I’ll select it and place it over here let’s connect the line brake to the deleter in the joint string to align them properly I’ll change the alignment from left to Center let’s also reduce their size from here and to bring them down in the y- axis I’ll go to the translate instances node and reduce the translation in the y- axis and now this is how it looks the reason why we can’t see the upper text is that we created an animation where the text is not visible initially then at somewhere near frame number 40 and 50 the upper text is visible and then it again disappears as it reaches the last frame so I’ll take the pointer to the frame number 45 to view all the text in the scene now let’s finalize the scene by giving some material to the text so in the material properties I’ll go to the emission let’s increase the strength to a higher number like 8 or 10 let’s also change the color of emission and I’ll change it to orange color now the reason why you can’t see the emission effect properly is that in the render properties we have turned on the EV render engine and therefore we need to change a setting here in order to view the emission properly and that particular setting is the bloom setting here so if I turn it on then now you can see the emission in a much better way than before and right now all the text is having the same material which is this orange emission material and to change this material I’ll go to the material properties let’s create a new material from here so I’ll go to the emission change the strength to something like 10 and for the color I’ll be selecting the blue color now let’s assign this material to this text part of blender Master course YouTube animation and you can see here that this node connection is connected to this set material node so I’ll go to the material here and change it to material. 001 and with this we have a different material applied to this text and now let’s also give some basic material to this billboard so I’ll select this go to the material properties and click on the new button I’ll change the base color to Black by reducing the brightness from here and if you want you can even change the color of this particular face where the text is placed to something like dark blue so for this I’ll tab into the edit mode and let’s select this face go to the material properties and let’s create a new material I’ll go to the base color let’s keep it to blue color and reduce the brightness from here to assign this material to this face click on the assign button and now this is how the billboard looks now it kind of looks like a tablet which has this glowing text

    over it and so in this way you can create the text with the help of geometry nodes and yes to ensure that in the render properties you have turned on the bloom settings from here if I turn it off you can see how it looks very dull and uninteresting but if I turn it on then now it looks amazing now let me also show you show you one more thing which is the screen space Reflections here if I turn it on you will notice that the reflection of light from the text are now falling on the billboard previously when it was turned off then there were no such Reflections visible on the willboard and by turning this setting on you will get the perfect Reflections in the EV render engine let’s also check out the final animation one more time so I’ll take the pointer to the frame number one and play the animation by pressing the space bar and this is how it looks I’ll do one more change here which is to select the slice string node connected to the main upper text let’s also select the text in the scene and in the timeline editor I will remove this animation in the second part where the text disappears so for this I’ll select the last pointer press X to delete it so now let’s replay the animation from the frame number one and this is the final animation and yes this brings us to the end of this chapter today we learned about using the text in blender with the help of geometry nodes we learned about different tools for placing the text animating it added this emation material to it and even learned about some important settings in the render properties

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Peace of Mind 21 Simple, Zero-Cost Tips to Manage Stress and Anxiety

    Peace of Mind 21 Simple, Zero-Cost Tips to Manage Stress and Anxiety

    Stress and anxiety have become common companions in our fast-paced lives, but relief doesn’t have to come with a price tag. Sometimes, it’s the simplest habits that create the most profound changes. Learning to manage mental health through accessible, zero-cost methods empowers you to regain control and ease your mind. After all, peace of mind isn’t just a luxury—it’s essential for a balanced life.

    With the right strategies, you can lower stress levels and curb anxious thoughts, no matter how chaotic life becomes. From deep breathing techniques to physical exercise and journaling, there are ways to restore emotional equilibrium without expensive therapy or fancy gadgets. Small, consistent efforts are often all it takes to move from survival mode into a space of inner calm.

    In this post, we’ll dive into 21 stress-relief practices that cost nothing yet offer immense value. These simple routines—backed by science—can help you cultivate mindfulness, emotional resilience, and peace of mind. As psychologist Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn notes, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Let’s explore how to build these healthy habits into your daily life.

    1 – Practice Deep Breathing

    Deep breathing taps into your body’s natural relaxation system by slowing your heart rate and stabilizing blood pressure. When you deliberately breathe deeply, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, often called the “rest-and-digest” mode, signaling your brain that it’s safe to relax. Techniques such as the 4-7-8 method—where you inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7, and exhale for 8—are particularly useful in calming anxiety. The simplicity of deep breathing makes it a tool you can use anytime, whether you’re stuck in traffic or preparing for an important meeting.

    Consistent practice can bring lasting benefits. Research published in the book The Healing Power of the Breath by Dr. Richard Brown and Dr. Patricia Gerbarg suggests that deep breathing exercises improve emotional regulation and mental clarity over time. It’s not about doing it perfectly but practicing regularly. The beauty lies in its accessibility—no special equipment, no extra time needed. Just a few intentional breaths can create a ripple effect, shifting your body from stress to calm.

    Keywords: deep breathing, relaxation response, anxiety relief, mental clarity

    Hashtags: #DeepBreathing #MentalWellbeing #StressRelief

    2 – Engage in Physical Exercise

    Physical movement does more than keep you fit—it gives your brain a natural high. Exercise stimulates the production of endorphins, chemicals in the brain that act like mood elevators. Whether it’s a 15-minute brisk walk or a quick yoga session, these activities trigger positive changes in your mental state, improving focus and reducing stress. Exercise also lowers levels of cortisol, the hormone responsible for stress, helping you feel more grounded.

    Exercise doesn’t have to be intense or time-consuming to be effective. According to Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by Dr. John Ratey, even light exercise can sharpen your mind and reduce anxiety. Regular movement—whether a solo walk or a social run—encourages emotional stability, giving you the tools to handle life’s pressures better. Consistency is key; when exercise becomes part of your routine, managing stress becomes second nature.

    Keywords: exercise, endorphins, cortisol, mental health, anxiety relief

    Hashtags: #ExerciseForMind #Endorphins #StressManagement

    3 – Maintain a Journal

    Journaling offers a structured way to offload your thoughts and emotions, turning your mind’s chaos into clarity. Writing allows you to identify stress triggers and recurring thought patterns, which can often go unnoticed. As you externalize your worries, journaling can foster a sense of emotional release, providing insight into your feelings and helping you develop healthier coping mechanisms.

    Psychologist James Pennebaker, in his book Opening Up by Writing It Down, highlights the therapeutic power of expressive writing. Studies show that people who journal experience fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety over time. Journaling also cultivates mindfulness, helping you stay present and acknowledge your emotions without judgment. Whether you jot down a gratitude list or write about a difficult day, keeping a journal promotes emotional self-awareness and long-term resilience.

    Keywords: journaling, emotional release, mindfulness, stress triggers, self-awareness

    Hashtags: #JournalingForMentalHealth #MindfulWriting #StressReliefTips

    Conclusion for Points 1-3: Building Daily Mental Habits

    Incorporating deep breathing, regular exercise, and journaling into your life doesn’t require significant time or financial investment—just a bit of intentional effort. These habits offer small but meaningful ways to shift your mindset and build resilience. With practice, you’ll likely notice that stressful moments feel more manageable, and a sense of calm becomes easier to access even during busy days.

    As you embrace these techniques, remember that the goal isn’t perfection but consistency. Each time you choose to pause, move, or reflect, you’re strengthening your mental toolkit. Over time, these zero-cost strategies will form a safety net for your emotional well-being, helping you navigate life’s ups and downs with more grace and control.

    Keywords: mental toolkit, emotional resilience, zero-cost stress relief, calm mindset

    Hashtags: #DailyMentalHabits #EmotionalResilience #CalmMind

    4 – Practice Mindfulness Meditation

    Mindfulness meditation invites you to stay grounded in the present moment, training your mind to let go of distractions and future anxieties. Instead of being overwhelmed by thoughts, you observe them without judgment, creating mental space and fostering inner calm. This practice can disrupt cycles of overthinking, which is often the root cause of anxiety. Even a few minutes of mindfulness each day—whether focusing on your breath, bodily sensations, or sounds—can bring noticeable improvements. Apps like Insight Timer or Headspace offer free guided sessions to ease beginners into the practice.

    Scientific studies, such as those cited in Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, have shown that regular mindfulness practice reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression while enhancing emotional regulation. Moreover, mindfulness is versatile—you can incorporate it into daily tasks, such as mindful eating or walking, to stay present throughout the day. Over time, this habit rewires your brain to respond calmly to stressors, improving both mental and emotional well-being.

    Keywords: mindfulness meditation, emotional regulation, anxiety relief, guided meditation

    Hashtags: #MindfulnessMeditation #StayPresent #CalmMind

    5 – Get Adequate Sleep

    Quality sleep is essential for managing stress and maintaining mental well-being. Sleep deprivation elevates cortisol levels, exacerbating anxiety and emotional instability. Aiming for 7–9 hours of sleep each night helps restore your mind and body, making it easier to face challenges with clarity. Building a consistent sleep routine—such as going to bed at the same time daily—can regulate your body’s internal clock and improve sleep quality. Small adjustments, like dimming lights before bedtime or using white noise, can further create a restful environment.

    Experts like Dr. Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, emphasize the link between adequate sleep and emotional resilience. Without proper rest, even minor stressors can feel overwhelming, while consistent sleep enhances cognitive performance and emotional stability. Incorporating relaxation techniques, such as meditation or journaling, before bed can also reduce pre-sleep anxiety, ensuring you get the restorative sleep needed to manage stress effectively.

    Keywords: sleep hygiene, emotional resilience, stress relief, bedtime routine

    Hashtags: #SleepForWellbeing #RestfulSleep #StressManagement

    6 – Limit Caffeine and Sugar Intake

    High consumption of caffeine and sugar can make your mind race, contributing to jitteriness, anxiety, and energy crashes. While coffee or sweets might offer temporary boosts, they overstimulate the nervous system, amplifying stress responses. Reducing intake can bring more stability to your mood and energy levels throughout the day. Instead of sugary snacks and caffeinated drinks, opt for herbal teas like chamomile or green tea, which provide calmness without the crash. Whole foods such as fruits and nuts offer sustained energy without spiking blood sugar levels.

    Dr. Michael Pollan, in Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World, explains how caffeine alters brain chemistry, increasing alertness but also stress. Gradually cutting back can help your nervous system recalibrate, making you feel more centered and less prone to mood swings. When you limit stimulants, your body can maintain a steady rhythm, resulting in improved emotional well-being and reduced anxiety.

    Keywords: caffeine, sugar, emotional stability, anxiety management, herbal tea

    Hashtags: #LimitCaffeine #BalancedEnergy #CalmMindset

    Conclusion for Points 4-6: Fostering Healthy Lifestyle Choices

    Mindfulness meditation, quality sleep, and mindful consumption of caffeine and sugar are lifestyle adjustments that support emotional balance. These practices aren’t about imposing restrictions but cultivating habits that make your life more manageable and enjoyable. Small changes—like reducing caffeine or setting a bedtime routine—can help you feel more centered and less susceptible to stress.

    The key is consistency. By practicing mindfulness regularly, prioritizing sleep, and moderating dietary stimulants, you create a stable foundation for managing life’s pressures. These habits complement each other, creating a virtuous cycle of emotional well-being. Over time, they will transform how you experience stress, helping you maintain peace of mind and face challenges with greater resilience.

    Keywords: healthy habits, emotional balance, lifestyle adjustments, resilience

    Hashtags: #HealthyLifestyle #PeaceOfMind #EmotionalBalance

    7 – Practice Gratitude

    Gratitude shifts your focus from what’s lacking to what’s abundant in your life, helping to combat negative thinking patterns that fuel stress and anxiety. Writing down three things you are thankful for each day in a gratitude journal can rewire your brain to notice the positive aspects of life. This simple yet powerful practice fosters emotional resilience by promoting a mindset that appreciates small joys, even during challenging times.

    Studies from The Psychology of Gratitude by Robert Emmons show that practicing gratitude consistently improves mental well-being, increasing happiness and reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Gratitude also cultivates mindfulness, as it encourages you to be present with your blessings. Over time, this habit creates a mental buffer against stress, enabling you to face difficulties with greater optimism and inner peace.

    Keywords: gratitude, positive mindset, emotional resilience, anxiety relief

    Hashtags: #GratitudePractice #PositiveMindset #MentalWellbeing

    8 – Connect with Nature

    Spending time in nature offers restorative benefits for both the mind and body. Natural environments provide a calming effect, reducing stress hormones like cortisol and promoting relaxation. Activities such as walking in the park, gardening, or even sitting on your balcony with a view of trees can give you a mental reset. Nature invites mindfulness, allowing you to disconnect from daily pressures and reconnect with the world around you.

    The research highlighted in The Nature Fix by Florence Williams suggests that exposure to nature reduces anxiety and enhances cognitive functioning. Time spent outdoors can lift your mood and help regulate emotions, providing a much-needed escape from the demands of modern life. Whether it’s a weekend hike or a 10-minute walk during lunch, regular interaction with nature is a powerful and free way to support mental health.

    Keywords: nature therapy, stress reduction, mindfulness, emotional well-being

    Hashtags: #NatureForWellbeing #StressRelief #MindfulOutdoors

    9 – Build a Support Network

    Social connections are essential for maintaining mental well-being, especially during times of stress. Having a support network—whether through close friends, family, or community groups—provides emotional relief and helps you feel understood. Talking through your challenges with someone you trust can reduce feelings of isolation, offering perspective and practical advice. Even virtual connections through online communities can foster meaningful relationships that provide encouragement and a sense of belonging.

    In Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew Lieberman, the author explains that humans are inherently social beings, and strong relationships improve emotional regulation and mental health. Surrounding yourself with a supportive network helps you manage anxiety by offering reassurance during tough times. Whether it’s a quick chat or scheduled time with loved ones, nurturing social bonds creates a reliable safety net for coping with stress.

    Keywords: support network, emotional connection, social relationships, anxiety relief

    Hashtags: #SocialSupport #EmotionalWellbeing #AnxietyRelief

    Conclusion for Points 7-9: Strengthening Emotional Support Systems

    Practicing gratitude, engaging with nature, and building a support network are essential strategies for managing stress and anxiety. These habits foster positive mental health by encouraging appreciation, promoting relaxation, and creating social connections that offer emotional support. Collectively, they help you cultivate a balanced lifestyle that reduces stress and increases resilience.

    Consistency in these practices leads to lasting results. Gratitude rewires your brain for positivity, nature provides an accessible way to recharge, and strong social bonds offer emotional stability during life’s challenges. Together, these habits create a comprehensive approach to mental well-being, ensuring you feel supported, grounded, and capable of managing whatever life throws your way.

    Keywords: emotional stability, resilience, gratitude, support systems, mental well-being

    Hashtags: #MentalHealthSupport #GratitudeAndNature #StressManagement

    10 – Practice Progressive Muscle Relaxation

    Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) helps release physical tension by systematically tensing and relaxing muscle groups. This method fosters body awareness, helping you identify where stress builds up physically. Start from your toes and work your way up to your neck and shoulders, holding the tension for a few seconds before releasing it slowly. By focusing on each muscle group, PMR creates a calming effect, reducing stress and promoting better sleep.

    PMR is supported by clinical research cited in The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook by Martha Davis, Elizabeth Robbins Eshelman, and Matthew McKay. Studies show that regular practice lowers muscle tension, heart rate, and cortisol levels, making it highly effective for people dealing with chronic stress or anxiety. Incorporating PMR into your evening routine can improve sleep quality, while a quick session during the day can serve as a mental reset.

    Keywords: progressive muscle relaxation, tension release, stress relief, better sleep

    Hashtags: #MuscleRelaxation #StressReduction #PMR

    11 – Set Realistic Goals

    Setting realistic goals helps prevent overwhelm by giving you a clear, achievable path forward. Unrealistic expectations often lead to stress and anxiety, especially when tasks feel endless or unattainable. Breaking goals into smaller, manageable steps allows you to track progress and maintain motivation. For example, instead of aiming to “get fit,” set a goal to exercise for 15 minutes, three times a week. These small wins build momentum and foster a sense of accomplishment.

    Dr. Edwin Locke’s Goal-Setting Theory, explored in A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance, emphasizes that goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Celebrating incremental successes reinforces positive behavior and keeps anxiety at bay. A structured, realistic approach to goal-setting creates a sense of control, boosting your confidence in managing future challenges effectively.

    Keywords: realistic goals, goal-setting theory, motivation, stress reduction

    Hashtags: #RealisticGoals #StressManagement #SMARTGoals

    12 – Limit Media Consumption

    Constant exposure to negative news and social media feeds can overwhelm your mind, amplifying anxiety and stress. Limiting media consumption helps create boundaries between you and emotionally draining information. Allocating specific times to check updates—such as once in the morning and once in the evening—reduces the risk of information overload. Choosing reliable, balanced sources ensures you stay informed without becoming overwhelmed by sensational news.

    In Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, the author emphasizes the importance of intentional media use to safeguard mental well-being. Studies show that overexposure to distressing news can trigger chronic stress responses. Taking breaks from screens and engaging in offline activities helps restore emotional balance and creates mental space for relaxation. This practice is essential for maintaining a calm mindset in a media-saturated world.

    Keywords: media consumption, information overload, digital minimalism, emotional balance

    Hashtags: #MediaBoundaries #DigitalMinimalism #MentalWellbeing

    Conclusion for Points 10-12: Creating Intentional Routines

    Progressive muscle relaxation, realistic goal-setting, and mindful media consumption are powerful ways to regain control over your stress. These techniques promote mental clarity and emotional well-being by reducing tension, breaking down overwhelming tasks, and creating healthy media habits. Together, they help you establish intentional routines that protect your peace of mind.

    Incorporating these practices into your daily life offers long-term benefits. Relaxing your body through PMR, setting manageable goals, and limiting news exposure cultivates resilience against stress. The key is consistency—small, deliberate changes compound over time, allowing you to face life’s challenges with confidence and calm.

    Keywords: intentional routines, emotional resilience, media boundaries, stress relief

    Hashtags: #IntentionalLiving #StressManagementTools #EmotionalResilience

    13 – Practice Visualization

    Visualization is a mental technique that involves focusing your mind on calming images or desired outcomes, helping reduce anxiety and stress. By imagining a serene beach, a quiet forest, or yourself successfully overcoming a challenge, you guide your thoughts away from worries. Visualization activates the brain’s relaxation response, lowering heart rate and tension. This practice can be especially effective before stressful events, like public speaking or job interviews, to foster calm and confidence.

    Experts like Dr. Herbert Benson, author of The Relaxation Response, explain that visualization improves mental health by engaging both your imagination and nervous system. When practiced consistently, it rewires your brain to respond more positively to stressors. Guided visualization, available through many free apps, makes it easy to integrate this technique into your daily routine, enhancing emotional resilience over time.

    Keywords: visualization, relaxation response, anxiety relief, mental imagery

    Hashtags: #VisualizationPractice #CalmMind #PositiveThinking

    14 – Engage in Creative Activities

    Creative activities offer a powerful way to channel emotions, giving you an outlet to release stress and anxiety. Hobbies like painting, drawing, journaling, or playing music immerse your mind in enjoyable tasks, shifting your focus away from worries. Creativity sparks joy and provides a sense of accomplishment, whether through learning a new instrument or completing a small art project. This process also encourages flow—a mental state where you lose track of time, deeply engaging with the present moment.

    In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron highlights how creativity heals emotional blocks and reduces stress. Research supports the idea that creative expression helps regulate emotions by providing a healthy outlet for stress. It’s not about creating a masterpiece but engaging in activities that bring joy and relaxation. Regular participation in creative hobbies nurtures mental well-being, adding a fulfilling dimension to your stress management routine.

    Keywords: creative expression, emotional regulation, stress relief, flow state

    Hashtags: #CreativeOutlet #StressReliefThroughArt #MentalWellbeing

    15 – Practice Self-Compassion

    Self-compassion involves treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer a friend in difficult times. Acknowledging your feelings without judgment and offering yourself grace helps reduce anxiety and prevent burnout. When you practice self-compassion, you embrace imperfection as a normal part of life, reducing the pressure to meet unrealistic expectations. This mindset shift fosters emotional resilience, allowing you to navigate challenges with greater ease.

    Dr. Kristin Neff, in her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, emphasizes that self-compassion improves mental well-being by reducing self-criticism and increasing emotional balance. Acknowledging that everyone struggles at times brings comfort and shifts your perspective. Incorporating self-compassion into your routine—whether through journaling, mindfulness, or positive affirmations—builds a solid foundation for managing stress and cultivating long-term emotional health.

    Keywords: self-compassion, emotional balance, positive affirmations, stress reduction

    Hashtags: #SelfCompassion #BeKindToYourself #EmotionalResilience

    Conclusion for Points 13-15: Embracing Emotional Wellness Practices

    Visualization, creative activities, and self-compassion offer valuable ways to cultivate emotional well-being. These practices allow you to engage your mind in positive experiences, express emotions healthily, and treat yourself with kindness. Together, they provide a comprehensive toolkit for managing anxiety and building resilience in the face of stress.

    The power of these practices lies in their ability to transform your inner world. Visualization rewires your thoughts toward positivity, creative expression provides relief from emotional burdens, and self-compassion offers the grace to embrace imperfection. Consistent application of these techniques helps you navigate life with greater calm, confidence, and emotional balance.

    Keywords: emotional wellness, self-care practices, resilience, anxiety relief

    Hashtags: #EmotionalWellness #SelfCareTools #PositiveMindset

    16 – Declutter Your Space

    Your physical environment plays a crucial role in your mental well-being. A cluttered space can contribute to feelings of overwhelm, increasing stress and reducing productivity. Decluttering your home or workspace fosters a sense of order, giving you more control over your surroundings. Start small by tackling one area at a time—like a desk or closet—breaking the task into manageable steps. This process not only clears your space but also frees up mental energy.

    Marie Kondo, in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, emphasizes that organizing your space can lead to emotional clarity and mental peace. A tidy environment promotes relaxation by reducing distractions, making it easier to focus on the tasks that matter. Incorporating decluttering into your routine—such as a weekly 10-minute tidy-up—helps maintain order, creating a calming atmosphere where you can thrive.

    Keywords: decluttering, stress relief, organization, mental clarity

    Hashtags: #DeclutterYourLife #TidySpaceTidyMind #StressRelief

    17 – Listen to Calming Music

    Music is a powerful tool for emotional regulation, with calming sounds helping to reduce stress and anxiety. Listening to ambient music, classical tunes, or nature sounds can slow your heart rate, lower blood pressure, and promote relaxation. You can create a personalized playlist of soothing tracks during stressful moments or as part of your morning or evening routine. Music therapy is widely used to improve mental health and can be seamlessly integrated into daily life.

    In This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin explains how music directly influences our emotional states by engaging different areas of the brain. Whether it’s the sound of rain, piano melodies, or binaural beats, playing calming music improves your mood and brings mental clarity. Over time, listening to such music becomes a valuable stress management habit, offering an easy way to unwind and recharge.

    Keywords: calming music, stress reduction, music therapy, relaxation

    Hashtags: #CalmThroughMusic #StressReliefTracks #MentalWellbeing

    18 – Practice Laughter Yoga

    Laughter yoga combines playful exercises with yoga breathing techniques, creating a unique way to relieve stress and boost mood. Even forced laughter can release endorphins—the body’s natural feel-good chemicals—leading to genuine happiness. The practice encourages you to let go of inhibitions, engage in joyful movement, and connect with your breath, all of which help alleviate anxiety and promote emotional well-being.

    Dr. Madan Kataria, the founder of laughter yoga, emphasizes that laughter has profound physical and psychological benefits. It enhances immune function, lowers cortisol levels, and promotes a sense of community when practiced in groups. Free online laughter yoga sessions make it easy to experience these benefits from home. Incorporating laughter yoga into your life can become a playful yet effective way to manage stress and improve your mental health.

    Keywords: laughter yoga, stress relief, endorphins, mood boost

    Hashtags: #LaughterYoga #BoostYourMood #StressManagement

    Conclusion for Points 16-18: Creating Joy and Order in Daily Life

    Decluttering your space, listening to calming music, and practicing laughter yoga are accessible ways to manage stress and enhance your emotional well-being. These practices promote a balanced lifestyle by addressing both external and internal stressors. A tidy space fosters clarity, soothing music calms your mind, and laughter yoga invites joy into your routine.

    Incorporating these techniques into daily life helps you create a sense of control, relaxation, and happiness. A decluttered environment becomes a foundation for clear thinking while calming music soothes emotions, and laughter yoga provides a lighthearted way to recharge. Together, they form a holistic approach to stress management, ensuring you stay grounded, joyful, and resilient.

    Keywords: stress relief, emotional well-being, holistic habits, joyful living

    Hashtags: #JoyfulLiving #HolisticWellness #StressReliefTips

    19 – Drink Plenty of Water

    Hydration is essential for both physical and mental health. Dehydration can heighten stress levels, impair cognitive function, and increase fatigue, making it harder to stay focused and manage anxiety. Drinking water throughout the day keeps your body functioning optimally, promotes brain function, and supports mood regulation. Aim to carry a water bottle with you or set reminders to ensure you maintain adequate hydration, especially during busy or stressful periods.

    Research from The Mind-Gut Connection by Dr. Emeran Mayer suggests that hydration impacts the body’s stress response, as dehydration can trigger the release of cortisol—the primary stress hormone. Staying hydrated boosts energy and concentration, helping you feel more in control of your mental and emotional state. Developing the habit of drinking water regularly is a simple yet impactful way to enhance well-being and reduce stress.

    Keywords: hydration, stress reduction, energy, mental clarity

    Hashtags: #StayHydrated #StressRelief #MentalClarity

    20 – Engage in Volunteer Work

    Volunteering offers a powerful way to reduce stress by shifting your attention away from personal worries and toward meaningful activities. Helping others promotes a sense of purpose, increases happiness, and fosters social connections. Even virtual volunteering opportunities—such as mentoring, advocacy, or remote support—allow you to engage with your community and make a positive impact from anywhere.

    Studies cited in The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky highlight that volunteering boosts well-being by activating the brain’s reward systems. Acts of kindness release oxytocin and dopamine, reducing anxiety and creating a sense of fulfillment. Volunteering not only helps others but also strengthens your emotional resilience by reminding you that your actions can make a difference.

    Keywords: volunteer work, emotional well-being, purpose, social connection

    Hashtags: #VolunteerForGood #PurposeDrivenLife #ReduceStress

    21 – Practice Positive Affirmations

    Positive affirmations are a simple yet effective tool for shifting your mindset and building emotional resilience. Repeating empowering statements like “I am capable” or “I will overcome this” helps reframe negative thoughts and reduce anxiety. This practice fosters self-confidence, encourages a growth mindset, and builds mental strength over time. Integrate affirmations into your morning routine or write them down as reminders throughout the day.

    Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s classic book The Power of Positive Thinking underscores the transformative impact of positive affirmations on mental health. By consciously focusing on uplifting thoughts, you train your brain to respond to challenges with optimism. Regular use of affirmations cultivates a resilient mindset, equipping you to navigate stressful situations more calmly and effectively.

    Keywords: positive affirmations, mental resilience, self-confidence, stress management

    Hashtags: #PositiveThinking #AffirmationsForLife #EmotionalResilience

    Conclusion for Points 19-21: Cultivating Energy, Purpose, and Optimism

    Drinking water, volunteering, and practicing positive affirmations are three essential ways to foster mental and emotional well-being. Hydration keeps your mind sharp and body energized, while volunteer work offers purpose and meaningful connections. Positive affirmations empower you to face stress with confidence and cultivate a resilient mindset.

    These strategies collectively enhance your ability to manage stress. Staying hydrated promotes physical and cognitive function, volunteering connects you with a greater cause, and affirmations help you maintain an optimistic outlook. Together, they form a comprehensive approach to well-being, ensuring you feel energized, purposeful, and mentally strong.

    Keywords: mental well-being, purpose, resilience, stress management habits

    Hashtags: #WellbeingJourney #OptimismInAction #PurposeAndPositivity

    Final Conclusion: Building a Sustainable Stress-Management Routine

    Managing stress and anxiety doesn’t require expensive solutions—simple, zero-cost strategies can create a profound impact on your mental and emotional well-being. From practicing deep breathing, visualization, and progressive muscle relaxation to setting realistic goals and limiting media consumption, these techniques empower you to regain control over your life. Engaging in creative activities, spending time in nature, and fostering meaningful connections further enhances your emotional resilience.

    Incorporating practices such as hydration, volunteer work, and positive affirmations into your daily routine ensures long-term benefits. These habits build a strong foundation for well-being by addressing both internal and external stressors. Each strategy contributes to a healthier mindset, promoting relaxation, self-compassion, and balance in your everyday life.

    The beauty of these practices lies in their simplicity and accessibility. Whether it’s decluttering your space, listening to calming music, laughing through yoga, or staying mindful, small actions compound over time to create significant improvements in your mental health. By embracing these stress-management techniques consistently, you equip yourself with the tools to face challenges with confidence, clarity, and calm.

    Ultimately, achieving peace of mind is a journey, not a destination. The key is to remain intentional and patient as you develop these habits, knowing that every step you take brings you closer to a life of greater tranquility, joy, and emotional resilience. Remember: “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf” – Jon Kabat-Zinn.

    Keywords: stress management, emotional well-being, peace of mind, resilience, self-care

    Hashtags: #PeaceOfMind #SelfCareJourney #StressReliefStrategies #EmotionalResilience

    Bibliography

    1. Benson, Herbert. The Relaxation Response. HarperTorch, 2000.
      A foundational book on stress management that explores how simple practices like deep breathing and visualization activate the body’s natural relaxation response.
    2. Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. TarcherPerigee, 1992.
      This book discusses how engaging in creative activities can unlock emotional blocks and enhance well-being.
    3. Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hachette Books, 2005.
      A comprehensive introduction to mindfulness meditation and its role in reducing anxiety and fostering emotional balance.
    4. Kataria, Madan. Laugh for No Reason. Madhuri International, 2002.
      The definitive guide to laughter yoga, explaining the science behind laughter’s effects on the mind and body.
    5. Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Ten Speed Press, 2014.
      This book explores how decluttering physical spaces can lead to mental clarity and reduce stress.
    6. Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Dutton, 2006.
      An insightful exploration of how music influences emotional states, helping individuals manage stress.
    7. Lyubomirsky, Sonja. The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Penguin Books, 2008.
      A research-based guide to happiness, focusing on practical strategies like volunteering and gratitude to improve mental well-being.
    8. Mayer, Emeran. The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health. Harper Wave, 2016.
      A deep dive into how hydration, diet, and other lifestyle factors influence emotional health and stress levels.
    9. Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow, 2011.
      This book examines the science and practice of self-compassion, emphasizing its importance in stress management.
    10. Peale, Norman Vincent. The Power of Positive Thinking. Touchstone, 2003.
      A classic work that demonstrates how affirmations and positive thinking can build resilience and reduce anxiety.

    These sources offer both scientific insights and practical advice, making them valuable resources for further study on managing stress and anxiety.

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle On Civic Life: Governance, Regimes, and Citizenship

    Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle On Civic Life: Governance, Regimes, and Citizenship

    The text explores fundamental concepts of governance, citizenship, and societal structure. It investigates the ideal constitution of a state, examining various forms of government such as democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, and aristocracy, while considering their respective strengths and weaknesses. The text emphasizes the importance of virtue, justice, and education in creating a well-functioning and happy society. It discusses the roles of different classes within the state and how power should be distributed, stressing the need for balance and stability. It also considers practical aspects of governance, including the design of cities and the implementation of laws. Ultimately, the text seeks to define the optimal conditions for a flourishing political community.

    Political Society Study Guide

    Quiz

    1. What is Aristotle’s primary argument in Book 1, Chapter 1? Aristotle argues that the city (polis) is a society established for a good purpose and aims at the best possible good. He also claims that political, regal, family, and herile governments differ not only in the number of people they govern, but also in their constitution.
    2. According to Aristotle in Book 1, Chapter 2, why is the relationship between master and slave considered advantageous to both? Aristotle asserts that some beings are naturally suited to command due to their intellect, while others are suited to obey due to their physical strength. He believes this natural hierarchy benefits both parties, providing direction for the slave and service for the master.
    3. In Book 1, Chapter 13, how does Aristotle differentiate the virtues of a man and a woman, and why? Aristotle suggests that while both men and women should possess virtues, they manifest differently. He states that a man’s courage is shown in commanding, while a woman’s courage is shown in obeying, because their roles in society are different.
    4. What are some of Socrates’ defects according to Aristotle in Book 2, Chapter 6? Aristotle criticizes Socrates’ community, arguing that it overlooks the happiness of the military and other essential groups within the city. He also finds fault with Socrates’ views on the division of inhabitants, which includes husbandmen, soldiers, and senators, while not granting husbandmen and artificers a share in the government.
    5. In Book 2, Chapter 7, what is Aristotle’s main criticism of Phaleas’ view of equality of property? Aristotle argues that while equality of property might prevent small crimes, it doesn’t address the root causes of larger crimes like ambition. He says that Phaleas’ regulations only extend to land, whereas someone’s substance also consists of slaves, cattle, money, and chattels.
    6. What does Aristotle say about the Spartans and how they treat women in Book 2, Chapter 9? Aristotle faults the Spartans for neglecting the regulation of women, leading to their excessive indulgence and luxury. He believes this contributes to the state’s love of money and overall instability and is a major flaw within their society.
    7. What, according to Aristotle in Book 3, Chapter 1, does the concept of citizenship entail? Aristotle defines a citizen as someone who has the right to share in the judicial and executive parts of the government. This involvement in decision-making and governance is what distinguishes a citizen from a resident or other member of the community.
    8. In Book 3, Chapter 4, how does Aristotle explain the relationship between the virtues of a good man and the virtues of a good citizen? Aristotle argues that the virtues of a good man and a good citizen are not necessarily the same. While a good man possesses perfect virtue, a good citizen’s virtue is relative to the specific constitution of their state, which may be imperfect.
    9. According to Aristotle in Book 3, Chapter 9, what is the ultimate aim of the city (polis)? Aristotle posits that the ultimate aim of the city is not merely survival or economic exchange, but living well and happily. It’s a community joined together for the sake of a perfect and independent life based on virtuous action.
    10. In Book 3, Chapter 16, why does Aristotle say that law should govern rather than any one citizen? Aristotle states that law should govern because it is “reason without desire.” In other words, law is unbiased and impartial, while individual rulers are susceptible to passions and self-interest, even the best of men.

    Answer Key

    1. Aristotle argues that the city (polis) is a society established for a good purpose and aims at the best possible good. He also claims that political, regal, family, and herile governments differ not only in the number of people they govern, but also in their constitution.
    2. Aristotle asserts that some beings are naturally suited to command due to their intellect, while others are suited to obey due to their physical strength. He believes this natural hierarchy benefits both parties, providing direction for the slave and service for the master.
    3. Aristotle suggests that while both men and women should possess virtues, they manifest differently. He states that a man’s courage is shown in commanding, while a woman’s courage is shown in obeying, because their roles in society are different.
    4. Aristotle criticizes Socrates’ community, arguing that it overlooks the happiness of the military and other essential groups within the city. He also finds fault with Socrates’ views on the division of inhabitants, which includes husbandmen, soldiers, and senators, while not granting husbandmen and artificers a share in the government.
    5. Aristotle argues that while equality of property might prevent small crimes, it doesn’t address the root causes of larger crimes like ambition. He says that Phaleas’ regulations only extend to land, whereas someone’s substance also consists of slaves, cattle, money, and chattels.
    6. Aristotle faults the Spartans for neglecting the regulation of women, leading to their excessive indulgence and luxury. He believes this contributes to the state’s love of money and overall instability and is a major flaw within their society.
    7. Aristotle defines a citizen as someone who has the right to share in the judicial and executive parts of the government. This involvement in decision-making and governance is what distinguishes a citizen from a resident or other member of the community.
    8. Aristotle argues that the virtues of a good man and a good citizen are not necessarily the same. While a good man possesses perfect virtue, a good citizen’s virtue is relative to the specific constitution of their state, which may be imperfect.
    9. Aristotle posits that the ultimate aim of the city is not merely survival or economic exchange, but living well and happily. It’s a community joined together for the sake of a perfect and independent life based on virtuous action.
    10. Aristotle states that law should govern because it is “reason without desire.” In other words, law is unbiased and impartial, while individual rulers are susceptible to passions and self-interest, even the best of men.

    Essay Questions

    1. Aristotle identifies several forms of government, including democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy. Compare and contrast two of these forms, discussing their strengths, weaknesses, and potential for corruption, according to Aristotle.
    2. Aristotle’s views on slavery are considered controversial today. Analyze Aristotle’s justification for slavery, examining the arguments he presents and the assumptions he makes about human nature and social hierarchy.
    3. Explore Aristotle’s concept of citizenship. What are the key characteristics of a citizen, according to Aristotle, and what role does citizenship play in achieving the good life within the polis?
    4. Aristotle emphasizes the importance of education in shaping virtuous citizens and maintaining a stable political order. Discuss Aristotle’s ideas about education, including the types of knowledge and skills that are essential for citizens to possess and the role of the state in providing education.
    5. Aristotle critiques various existing and proposed constitutions, such as those of Sparta and Plato’s Republic. Analyze Aristotle’s criticisms of one of these constitutions, explaining his reasoning and suggesting how he might improve upon it.

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • City (Polis): A political association or community aiming at the highest good for its citizens.
    • Citizen: An individual who has the right to participate in the judicial and deliberative functions of the state.
    • Constitution (Politeia): The arrangement of offices in a state, determining who rules and the ends they pursue.
    • Democracy: A form of government where the many (typically the poor) rule, often characterized by equality.
    • Equality: A concept that can mean numerical or proportional equality. Numerical equality treats all people the same, while proportional equality gives each person what they deserve.
    • Happiness (Eudaimonia): Often translated as “flourishing” or “living well,” it is the ultimate goal of human life and the state.
    • Household (Oikos): The basic economic and social unit, consisting of a family, slaves, and property.
    • Justice: A concept that is thought of differently in the different forms of government. Usually refers to being concerned with the common interest.
    • King/Monarch: A form of government where one person rules for the common good.
    • Nature: The inherent character or essence of something, guiding its development and purpose.
    • Oligarchy: A form of government where the few (typically the wealthy) rule, often in their own self-interest.
    • Political Animal (Zoon Politikon): Aristotle’s term for humans, emphasizing their natural inclination to live in political communities.
    • Regime: The ruling structure and way of life of a political community
    • Slavery: A state of being owned and controlled by another, considered by Aristotle to be natural for some individuals.
    • Tyranny: A perverted form of monarchy where one person rules in their own self-interest.
    • Virtue (Arete): Moral excellence or goodness, essential for both individuals and the state.

    Classical Political Theory: Governance, Citizenship, and the Ideal State

    This briefing document reviews the key themes and ideas presented in the provided excerpts, focusing on political science, governance, the nature of citizenship, and the ideal state. The source material appears to be a detailed treatise, likely originating from classical Greek philosophy, possibly from Aristotle.

    I. The City and Political Society

    • Foundation for a “Good Purpose”: The fundamental principle of a city (polis) is its establishment for a good purpose, rooted in the pursuit of what appears good to human beings. “As we see that every city is a society, and every society Ed. is established for some good purpose; for an apparent good is the spring of all human actions; it is evident that this is the principle upon which they are every one founded.”
    • Distinction of Governance Forms: A clear distinction is made between political, regal (kingly), familial, and “herile” (master-slave) governance. These differ not just in the number of people governed but fundamentally in their constitution. The author refutes the idea that differences are merely quantitative, arguing that a large family is not the same as a small city.
    • Natural Origin of the City: The city is considered a natural development, originating from the union of male and female for propagation and families for mutual advantage (villages). This progression culminates in the city, which aims for a “happy” life, not just survival. “For which reason every city must be allowed to be the work of nature, if we admit that the original society between male and female is; for to this as their end all subordinate societies tend, and the end of everything is the nature of it.”
    • Man as a Political Animal: Central to the argument is the concept of man as a “political animal,” inherently suited for society. Those who are naturally unfit for society are deemed either “inferior or superior to man.” “Hence it is evident that a city is a natural production, and that man is naturally a political animal, and that whosoever is naturally and not accidentally unfit for society, must be either inferior or superior to man.”

    II. Household Management and Social Hierarchy

    • Natural Hierarchy: The author asserts a natural order where some command and others obey, based on intellectual capacity (superior mind for governing) versus physical strength (suited for slavery). This justification extends to gender, where the male is seen as naturally superior.
    • The Role of Women: The excerpts reveal assumptions about the roles of women, emphasizing obedience and a limited capacity for reason. “Thus a slave can have no power of determination, a woman but a weak one, a child an imperfect one.” Their virtue is defined in terms of obedience, contrasting with the courage expected of men. “The courage of the man consists in commanding, the woman’s in obeying.”
    • Slavery: Slavery is presented as a natural institution, beneficial to both master and slave. However, the author recognizes that slaves possess some degree of reason and require training. “Those therefore are in the wrong who would deprive slaves of reason, and say that they have only to follow their orders; for slaves want more instruction than children, and thus we determine this matter.”
    • Virtue and Station: Virtue is not uniform; it varies depending on one’s social role and natural capacity. Those who govern require complete moral virtue, while others need only enough virtue to fulfill their station. The “architect” analogy suggests the leader requires full understanding, while others need only the necessary knowledge for their tasks.

    III. Critiques of Ideal States and Legislators

    • Socrates/Plato: The document critiques the ideal states proposed by Socrates (in “The Republic”) and later in Plato’s “Laws.” The document argues that they are impractical, especially concerning the number of “idle persons” (soldiers) the state must support. It points out inconsistencies and a return to similar governmental structures despite intentions for greater community. “All the discourses of Socrates are masterly, noble, new, and inquisitive; but that they are all true it may probably be too much to say.”
    • Phaleas: The briefing document takes issue with Phaleas’ plan for equality of property, arguing it’s insufficient for preventing social unrest. “Hence it is evident, that it is not proper for the legislator to establish an equality of circumstances, but to fix a proper medium.” The document argues for the need for proper education to instill similar sentiments rather than focus solely on economic equality.
    • Hippodamus: The briefing document questions Hippodamus’ division of citizens into artisans, husbandmen, and soldiers, finding it likely to create social divisions and render the artisans and husbandmen subservient to the military.
    • Lycurgus (Sparta): The source critiques the Spartan system, particularly regarding the lack of regulation of women’s behavior, leading to their undue influence and love of money, and unequal distribution of property which contributes to a shortage of citizens capable of serving.

    IV. Citizenship and the Nature of the State

    • Defining a Citizen: The briefing document explores the definition of a citizen, rejecting definitions based solely on lineage. It favors defining a citizen as one who participates in the judicial and executive functions of the government. “Such then is the description of a citizen who comes nearest to what all those who are called citizens are. Every one also should know, that of the component parts of those things which differ from each other in species, after the first or second remove, those which follow have either nothing at all or very little common to each.”
    • Virtue of a Citizen: The virtues of a good citizen may differ from those of a good man, as a citizen’s virtue is tied to the specific constitution of the state. A citizen’s actions are geared toward the safety of the community. “So also with respect to citizens, although they may in a few particulars be very different, yet there is one care common to them all, the safety of the community, for the community of the citizens composes the state; for which reason the virtue of a citizen has necessarily a reference to the state.”
    • Purpose of the State: The state is not merely a community of place or for mutual defense and trade. Instead, it is a society aimed at enabling citizens to “live agreeably” and achieve a happy and independent life. Therefore, the most virtuous citizens should hold greater power.
    • The Rule of Law vs. the Rule of Man: The source grapples with the question of whether the best man or the best law should govern. It acknowledges the limitations of law in addressing all situations but expresses concerns about the potential for passion and corruption in individual rulers. “But some one may say, that it is wrong to let man have the supreme power and not the law, as his soul is subject to so many passions. But if this law appoints an aristocracy, or a democracy, how will it help us in our present doubts?”

    V. Practical Considerations for the Ideal State

    • Population and Territory: There’s a discussion about the ideal size and nature of a city and its territory. The city must be large enough for self-sufficiency and defense, but not so large as to be unmanageable and lose its sense of community. The territory should provide the necessities of life and allow for temperate living.
    • Geographic Location: The proximity to the sea is debated, with concerns about the potential disruption from merchants and foreign influences balanced against the advantages for trade and defense. A moderate naval power is considered necessary, but not to the point of dominating the city’s character.
    • Character of the Citizens: The document stresses the importance of both courage and intelligence in citizens. The geographic location in which these qualities are naturally blended (ex. Greece) are ideally situated for good government. Citizens ought to have reverence towards the gods.
    • Social Structure: The excerpts discuss different social classes (husbandmen, artisans, soldiers, priests, etc.) and their roles. A key concern is ensuring that citizens involved in governance have the leisure and virtue necessary for their roles, excluding those engaged in manual labor or commerce.
    • Magistrates: The writing goes into detail about magistrates of different types, including how they are appointed, and what their responsibilities should be in a well-ordered society.

    VI. Essential Elements of a State

    • Food, Arts, Arms, Revenue, Religion, and Justice: These are listed as the essential components for the existence of a state. A state is “a number of people not accidentally met together, but with a purpose of ensuring to themselves sufficient independency and self-protection.”
    • Markets: The state needs proper regulators in the markets.

    VII. Importance of Good Laws

    • Well ordered society: A good law is, of course, a certain good order and therefore there needs to be a strong central authority to establish laws that can benefit all.

    In summary, these excerpts present a comprehensive examination of political society, governance, and the elements of an ideal state. They reveal a strong emphasis on natural hierarchy, the importance of virtue (though differentially defined), and the need for practical considerations in designing a stable and flourishing community. The author engages in critical analysis of existing and proposed systems, aiming to synthesize a model that balances theoretical ideals with real-world constraints.

    Frequently Asked Questions Based on the Provided Text

    Here are some frequently asked questions (FAQs) and answers regarding key concepts and themes presented in the text provided:

    1. What is the fundamental purpose of a city (political society)?

    According to the text, every city or political society is established for some perceived good. The highest and most excellent form of this society aims for the “best possible,” encompassing all other good purposes. Initially formed for basic survival (“that we might live”), it continues to exist so that people can “live happily.”

    2. How does the text differentiate between a household, a village, and a city, and what is the significance of these distinctions?

    The text outlines a progression:

    • The household (domestic) is the most basic unit, formed for daily support and propagation, naturally arising from the union of male and female and the relationship of master and slave.
    • A village consists of multiple families, initially united for mutual benefit and often composed of descendants of a single family.
    • A city emerges when multiple villages merge to form a single, self-sufficient society, representing the “end and perfection of government” aimed at both survival and the “good life.”

    The significance lies in understanding the natural evolution of social organization and the increasing complexity of governance as societies develop.

    3. According to the text, what is the natural relationship between the individual and the city (political society)?

    The text asserts that “man is naturally a political animal.” Those who are naturally (not accidentally) unfit for society are considered either inferior or superior to man. It emphasizes the gift of speech as evidence of man’s social nature, exceeding even that of bees. The implication is that humans are inherently designed to live in and contribute to political communities.

    4. How does the text define a citizen, and what rights and responsibilities are associated with citizenship?

    The text defines a citizen as one who has a share in the judicial and executive part of government in any city. This includes the right to participate in the general assembly and to serve as a juryman. A city is then defined as a collective body of such persons sufficient in themselves to all the purposes of life. This definition also touches on the problematic nature of illegally created citizens, who still participate but without just cause.

    5. According to the text, how should the relationship between husband and wife, and parent and child, be structured within a household?

    The text advocates for a hierarchical structure within the household. The husband should govern the wife politically, with the aim of both contributing to the common good. The man and the woman should have a distinction between them in forms, expressions and honors. The government of children should be kingly, founded on affection and seniority. The father’s authority over the child is justified by both affection and his older age/experience.

    6. What are the primary criticisms leveled against various proposed forms of government, such as those of Socrates, Phaleas, Hippodamus, and Sparta?

    The text critiques various aspects of these proposed governments: * Socrates: Criticized for focusing on only one part of the city being happy and only thoroughly settling a few parts of the community. * Phaleas: Criticized for focusing on equality of property without addressing the need for shared sentiments among citizens, neglecting foreign policy and military considerations. * Hippodamus: Criticized for dividing citizens into inflexible classes (artisans, farmers, soldiers) that would inevitably lead to inequality and resentment. * Sparta: Criticized for the excessive influence and lack of discipline among women, unequal distribution of property, and the corruptibility of the Ephors.

    7. What is the text’s perspective on the role of virtue in a citizen and in the state?

    The text emphasizes that for a city to truly deserve that name, the citizens must be virtuous. Whomever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, should attend to the virtues and the vices of each individual who composes it. It argues that a city is not merely an alliance for mutual defense or trade, but a society aimed at promoting a good and happy life for its inhabitants. Thus, cultivating virtue among citizens is paramount for a well-functioning state. In fact, some even believed that those who did not possess the virtues that an excellent citizen should have, should not be permitted to exercise any mechanic employment.

    8. What does the text argue are the necessary components of a state?

    The text outlines several essential elements: food, arts, arms, a certain revenue, a religious establishment, and a court to determine both criminal and civil causes. These elements are deemed necessary for a city to be self-sufficient and capable of ensuring independence and self-protection for its citizens.

    On Citizenship

    Citizenship involves participation in the judicial and executive functions of government. A complete citizen has a share in the judicial and executive aspects of the government.

    Definitions and requirements for citizenship may vary:

    • Common definition A citizen is someone whose parents were citizens. Some extend this to include grandparents and further ancestors. However, this definition does not address how the first citizens were determined.
    • Variations Citizenship criteria differ across governments. Some states grant citizenship to strangers, and some democracies grant it to children of free women. Laws regarding citizenship often change based on population size.
    • Potential Inconsistencies Illegally created citizens are still citizens, despite the impropriety of their creation.

    The virtues that constitute a good man and a valuable citizen may or may not be the same.

    • The safety of the community is a common concern for all citizens.
    • The qualities that make an excellent citizen in one type of community might not in another, so the virtue of a citizen is not always perfect.
    • A good citizen should know how to command and obey, which is a great recommendation.
    • Those who are to rule should have an education that is peculiar to themselves.

    There are different types of citizens:

    • Those allowed to share in the government.
    • Mechanics.
    • Boys are imperfect citizens until they reach maturity.

    A city is a collective body of citizens sufficient for all purposes of life. A city isn’t just a shared physical space or an alliance for mutual safety and traffic. It is a society where people join with their families to live agreeably and happily and requires family meetings, clubs, sacrifices, and public entertainment to promote friendship. The aim of the city is to enable inhabitants to live well and happily, not just to live together.

    Different forms of government will have different forms of citizenship. In a democracy, a citizen possesses every privilege that the station entails. However, in other forms of government, these privileges may not exist, as some states do not grant power to the people.

    Forms of Government: Types, Goals, and Considerations

    When deciding on a form of government, it is important to consider which is most suitable for particular people, as some may be incapable of enjoying the best form. A legislator should establish a government that the people will most readily submit to, as correcting mistakes in an established government can be as difficult as forming a new one. Laws should be framed to suit the government, not the other way around.

    Here are key aspects of different government forms, according to the sources:

    • Definition The form of government refers to the ordering and regulating of a city, including all its offices, particularly those holding supreme power.
    • Goal Governments should aim for the common good and justice, benefiting all citizens. Those that only benefit the rulers are based on wrong principles and resemble tyranny.

    Forms of government can be categorized by where the supreme power is lodged:

    • Monarchy Ruled by one person, called a kingdom when the power is used for the common good, and is considered the best when the ruler has supreme power over all things.
    • Aristocracy Ruled by a few individuals and is best when those individuals are the most worthy citizens.
    • Polity Ruled by the citizens at large for the public good.

    These forms of government can be corrupted:

    • Tyranny A corrupted monarchy that only considers the good of the ruler.
    • Oligarchy A corrupted aristocracy that only considers the rich.
    • Democracy A corrupted polity that only considers the poor.
    • The best government is formed of many parts.

    Here are key considerations in establishing different government types:

    • Democracy In a democracy, the supreme power is lodged in the whole people. A pure democracy is analogous to a dynastic oligarchy and a tyrannic monarchy. Frequent public assemblies are advantageous.
    • Oligarchy In an oligarchy, the supreme power is in the hands of a few.
    • Free State/Aristocracy An aristocracy should copy something from both oligarchy and democracy, such as choosing magistrates by vote (oligarchy) but not requiring a census (democracy).

    Additional points to consider:

    • Citizen Participation Citizens should share in governing and submitting to governance. The best state enables citizens to choose and maintain a virtuous life publicly and privately.
    • Role of Law The supreme power should be lodged in laws that are duly made, with magistrates authorized to address what the laws do not cover.
    • Balance A legislator should calculate laws for the better part of the citizens and the many, aiming for equality and benefiting the whole state.
    • Government Stability To maintain a state’s form, laws authorizing inequality in property should be upheld. Demagogues in democracies should not try to place the common people above the laws, and oligarchies should avoid supporting administrators against the people.

    Virtue, the State, and the Individual: A Summary

    Here’s a discussion of virtue, drawing on information from the sources:

    Virtue and the State:

    • The first concern of anyone founding a city should be to have virtuous citizens.
    • Establishing wholesome laws in a state requires attention to the virtues and vices of each individual.
    • Virtue is necessary for a state’s existence and happiness, with justice being essential for its existence and valor for its happiness.
    • The virtue of parts should correspond to the virtue of the whole. Therefore, wives and children should be instructed in accordance with the nature of the government.
    • A city is happiest when it is the best and acts best. Just, wise, and prudent actions in a man are likewise just, wise, and prudent in a city.
    • The aim of civil society is justice, which benefits all.
    • The object of laws should be what is useful for citizens in public and private capacities.
    • Legislators should prioritize laws that promote safety over those that seek dominance.
    • A legislator should instill laws that are most useful for people in their public and private capacities.
    • The aim of government should be the safety of those under it, not despotism.

    Virtue and the Individual:

    • Man is the only animal with a perception of good and evil, just and unjust.
    • Justice is a political virtue that regulates the state and defines what is right.
    • Moral virtue is common to those who govern and are governed but differs based on their roles.
    • For those in command, virtue should be perfect, as reason is the architect, while others need only enough for their station.
    • A good man’s virtue involves both commanding and obeying.
    • Qualities of a good person:
    • Fortitude.
    • Temperance.
    • Justice.
    • Prudence.
    • A virtuous person will act not from external influence but from their own nature.
    • A system of laws must be calculated for those who are equal in nature and power.
    • Virtuous activity and happiness are considered by some to be the same thing.
    • A good life involves virtuous energies.
    • Happiness consists in the energy and perfect practice of virtue, not relatively, but simply.

    The Role of Education:

    • Virtue and education are the means to make citizens happy.
    • The education of children ought to aim for labor and war, but rather for rest and peace; and also, doing what is necessary and useful, but rather what is fair and noble.
    • The education of youth is crucial, with the best manners producing the best government.
    • Education should be a common care, with children belonging to the state rather than individuals.
    • The mode of education should be adapted to the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed.
    • The soul of man may be divided into two parts; that which has reason in itself, and that which hath not, but is capable of obeying its dictates.
    • Some think the object of education should be to improve the reason or rectify the morals.
    • The virtues that lead to rest are necessary.
    • To be happy it is necessary to be virtuous.

    Different Types of Virtue:

    • The courage of a man is in commanding, while a woman’s courage lies in obeying.
    • Those with more excellent civil virtue should have greater power in the city.
    • Different virtues are required during times of peace and war, with temperance and justice being especially important during peace.

    On Political Power: Distribution, Maintenance, and Derailment

    Here’s a discussion of political power, drawing on information from the sources and our conversation history:

    Where Political Power Should Reside:

    • It may be a matter of debate whether supreme power ought to be lodged with the majority, the wealthy, a number of proper persons, one better than the rest, or a tyrant.
    • The supreme power should be lodged with the many rather than with the better sort, who are few.
    • The freemen who compose the bulk of the people should have absolute power in some things.
    • The supreme power should be lodged in laws duly made, and a magistrate or magistrates should be authorized to determine cases that the laws cannot specifically address.
    • If the majority of the state should happen to be good men, they should prefer many equally good governors over one uncorrupt governor.
    • It is unjust that where all are equal one person should continually enjoy power.

    How Political Power is Distributed:

    • All the members of the community will dispute with each other for the offices of the state and in some particulars justly, but not so in general.
    • Each part of a city may have a share in the government, or sometimes a few, sometimes more.
    • The power of the state may be distributed according to the size of the citizens or according to their beauty.
    • The power of election and censure are of the utmost consequence.
    • The supreme power should be vested in the people at large.
    • Those allowed to share in the government are citizens.
    • Having a share in the judicial and executive part of government characterizes a complete citizen.
    • In democracies, the poor ought to have more power than the rich, as being the greater number.
    • The power in the man who is member of the assembly, or council, but the assembly itself, and the council, and the people, of which each individual of the whole community are the parts.

    What Can Derail Political Power:

    • If the many seize into their own hands everything which belongs to the few, the city will be at an end.
    • If civil society was founded for the sake of preserving and increasing property, every one’s right in the city would be equal to his fortune.
    • It is wrong to let man have the supreme power and not the law, as his soul is subject to so many passions.
    • When there are many poor people who are incapable of acquiring the honors of their country, the state must necessarily have many enemies in it.
    • Democracies will be most subject to revolutions from the dishonesty of their demagogues.
    • A state is also liable to commotions when those parts of it which seem to be opposite to each other approach to an equality, as the rich and the common people.
    • Inequality is always the occasion of sedition.
    • Those who aim after an equality are the cause of seditions.
    • Those who aim at equality will be ever ready for sedition, if they see those whom they esteem their equals possess more than they do.

    What is Required to Maintain Political Power:

    • A king ought to have a proper power, and such a one is that which will be sufficient to make the king superior to any one person or even a large part of the community, but inferior to the whole.
    • Citizens should share in governing and submitting to governance.
    • To maintain a state’s form, laws authorizing inequality in property should be upheld.
    • By taking something from the power he increased the duration of the kingdom, so that in some measure he made it not less, but bigger.

    How Virtue Relates to Political Power:

    • Those who contribute most to enabling inhabitants to live as men ought deserve to have greater power in the city.
    • It seems absurd that the power of the state should be lodged with those who are but of indifferent morals, instead of those who are of excellent characters.
    • In general, the beginning and the causes of seditions in all states are such as I have now described, and revolutions therein are brought about in two ways, either by violence or fraud.

    On Law: Justice, Governance, and Common Good

    Here’s a discussion of law, drawing on information from the sources and our conversation history:

    Definition and Purpose of Law:

    • Law is a type of order.
    • Law is an agreement and a pledge among citizens to do justice to each other.
    • Law is a pledge that citizens intend to do justice to one another. However, law is not sufficient to make all citizens just and good.
    • The object of laws should be what is useful for citizens in public and private capacities.
    • The moral law is superior to the written law.
    • Law is reason without desire.

    The Role of Law in Government:

    • The supreme power in a state should be lodged in laws that are duly made.
    • The magistrate or magistrates should be authorized to determine cases that the laws cannot specifically address.
    • Laws should be framed to suit the government, not the other way around.
    • The laws of every state will necessarily be like every state, either trifling or excellent, just or unjust.
    • Laws must be framed correspondent to the constitution of the government.
    • A well-formed government will have good laws, and a bad one, bad laws.

    Qualities of Good Laws:

    • Good laws should aim for the common good and justice, benefiting all citizens.
    • The rectitude of anything consists in its equality.
    • That which is equally right will be advantageous to the whole state, and to every member of it in common.
    • Laws should be calculated for the better part of the citizens or the many, aiming for equality and benefiting the whole state.
    • Laws must be calculated for those who are equal to each other in nature and power.
    • Laws should promote the safety of the community.
    • To maintain a state’s form, laws authorizing inequality in property should be upheld.

    Potential Problems with Law:

    • Laws may be too simple and barbarous.
    • Written laws may not always be perfectly exact. When something is committed to writing, general terms must be used. However, in every action, there is something particular to itself that these may not comprehend.
    • Laws may be easily abolished, which is of bad consequence.

    The Need for Change and Caution in Changing Laws:

    • All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
    • Experience suggests that the science of government may be extended beyond its ancient bounds, as is the case with medicine, gymnastics, and other arts.
    • There is a question of whether it is useful or hurtful to alter the established law of any country, even for the better.
    • When the advantage proposed is trifling, and the accustoming the people easily to abolish their laws is of bad consequence, it is better to pass over some faults which either the legislator or the magistrates may have committed.
    • The alterations will not be of so much service as a habit of disobeying the magistrates will be of disservice.
    • A law derives all its strength from custom, and this requires long time to establish.
    • To make it an easy matter to pass from the established laws to other new ones, is to weaken the power of laws.
    • If the laws are to be altered, there is a question of whether they are all to be altered, and in every government or not, and whether at the pleasure of one person or many.

    Enforcement of Laws:

    • Law is a mean.
    • It is of no service to pass judgment in any cause without that judgment is carried into execution. Without this, human society could not subsist.
    • A proper power is needed to protect the power with which the law is guarded.
    • When experience proves that anything may be better established, it allows it to be altered.
    • Laws are safer to trust than any one man, though a worthy man is superior to the written laws.
    • When someone breaks the law, the young should be judged by the young. As to those cases which are already brought to a hearing, let one person pass sentence, and another see it executed.
    • It is necessary for the democracy we have been now treating of to have a power of censuring their magistrates when out of office and sitting in judgment upon all causes.
    • The moral law is far superior and conversant with far superior objects than the written law.
    Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle | Audiobook with Text

    The Original Text

    BOOK 1 CHAPTER 1  As we see that every city is a society, and every society Ed. is established for some good purpose; for an apparent good is the spring of all human actions; it is evident that this is the principle   upon which they are every one founded, and this is more especially true of that which has for   its object the best possible, and is itself the most excellent, and comprehends all the rest. Now   this is called a city, and the society thereof a political society; for those who think that   the principles of a political, a regal, a family, and a herile government are the same are mistaken,   while they suppose that each of these differ in the numbers to whom their power extends,   but not in their constitution: so that with them a herile government is one composed of a very few,   a domestic of more, a civil and a regal of still more, as if there was no difference between a   large family and a small city, or that a regal government and a political one are the same,   only that in the one a single person is continually at the head of public affairs;   in the other, that each member of the state has in his turn a share in the government,   and is at one time a magistrate, at another a private person, according to the rules of   political science. But now this is not true, as will be evident to any one who will consider   this question in the most approved method. As, in an inquiry into every other subject,   it is necessary to separate the different parts of which it is compounded, till we arrive at   their first elements, which are the most minute parts thereof; so by the same proceeding we shall   acquire a knowledge of the primary parts of a city and see wherein they differ from each other,   and whether the rules of art will give us any assistance in examining into each of these things   which are mentioned. CHAPTER 2  Now if in this particular science any one would attend to its original seeds, and their first   shoot, he would then as in others have the subject perfectly before him; and perceive,   in the first place, that it is requisite that those should be joined together whose species   cannot exist without each other, as the male and the female, for the business of propagation;   and this not through choice, but by that natural impulse which acts both upon plants and animals   also, for the purpose of their leaving behind them others like themselves. It is also from   natural causes that some beings command and others obey, that each may obtain their mutual safety;   for a being who is endowed with a mind capable of reflection and forethought is by nature the   superior and governor, whereas he whose excellence is merely corporeal is formect to be a slave;   whence it follows that the different state of master and slave is equally advantageous to   both. But there is a natural difference between a female and a slave: for nature is not like the   artists who make the Delphic swords for the use of the poor, but for every particular purpose she   has her separate instruments, and thus her ends are most complete, for whatsoever is employed   on one subject only, brings that one to much greater perfection than when employed on many;   and yet among the barbarians, a female and a slave are upon a level in the community,   the reason for which is, that amongst them there are none qualified by nature to govern,   therefore their society can be nothing but between slaves of different sexes. For which reason the   poets say, it is proper for the Greeks to govern the barbarians, as if a barbarian and a slave were   by nature one. Now of these two societies the domestic is the first, and Hesiod is right when   he says, “First a house, then a wife, then an ox for the plough,” for the poor man has always an ox   before a household slave. That society then which nature has established for daily support is the   domestic, and those who compose it are called by Charondas homosipuoi, and by Epimenides the Cretan   homokapnoi; but the society of many families, which was first instituted for their lasting,   mutual advantage, is called a village, and a village is most naturally composed of the   descendants of one family, whom some persons call homogalaktes, the children and the children’s   children thereof: for which reason cities were originally governed by kings, as the barbarian   states now are, which are composed of those who had before submitted to kingly government;   for every family is governed by the elder, as are the branches thereof, on account of their   relationship thereunto, which is what Homer says, “Each one ruled his wife and child;” and in this   scattered manner they formerly lived. And the opinion which universally prevails, that the   gods themselves are subject to kingly government, arises from hence, that all men formerly were,   and many are so now; and as they imagined themselves to be made in the likeness of the gods,   so they supposed their manner of life must needs be the same. And when many villages so entirely   join themselves together as in every respect to form but one society, that society is a city,   and contains in itself, if I may so speak, the end and perfection of government: first founded that   we might live, but continued that we may live happily. For which reason every city must be   allowed to be the work of nature, if we admit that the original society between male and female is;   for to this as their end all subordinate societies tend, and the end of everything is the nature of   it. For what every being is in its most perfect state, that certainly is the nature of that being,   whether it be a man, a horse, or a house: besides, whatsoever produces the final cause and the end   which we desire, must be best; but a government complete in itself is that final cause and what is   best. Hence it is evident that a city is a natural production, and that man is naturally a political   animal, and that whosoever is naturally and not accidentally unfit for society, must be either   inferior or superior to man: thus the man in Homer, who is reviled for being “without society,   without law, without family.” Such a one must naturally be of a quarrelsome disposition, and   as solitary as the birds. The gift of speech also evidently proves that man is a more social animal   than the bees, or any of the herding cattle: for nature, as we say, does nothing in vain,   and man is the only animal who enjoys it. Voice indeed, as being the token of pleasure and pain,   is imparted to others also, and thus much their nature is capable of, to perceive pleasure and   pain, and to impart these sensations to others; but it is by speech that we are enabled to express   what is useful for us, and what is hurtful, and of course what is just and what is unjust: for in   this particular man differs from other animals, that he alone has a perception of good and evil,   of just and unjust, and it is a participation of these common sentiments which forms a family and   a city. Besides, the notion of a city naturally precedes that of a family or an individual, for   the whole must necessarily be prior to the parts, for if you take away the whole man, you cannot say   a foot or a hand remains, unless by equivocation, as supposing a hand of stone to be made,   but that would only be a dead one; but everything is understood to be this or that by its energic   qualities and powers, so that when these no longer remain, neither can that be said to be the same,   but something of the same name. That a city then precedes an individual is plain, for if an   individual is not in himself sufficient to compose a perfect government, he is to a city as other   parts are to a whole; but he that is incapable of society, or so complete in himself as not to want   it, makes no part of a city, as a beast or a god. There is then in all persons a natural impetus to   associate with each other in this manner, and he who first founded civil society was the cause of   the greatest good; for as by the completion of it man is the most excellent of all living beings,   so without law and justice he would be the worst of all, for nothing is so difficult to subdue as   injustice in arms: but these arms man is born with, namely, prudence and valour, which he may   apply to the most opposite purposes, for he who abuses them will be the most wicked, the most   cruel, the most lustful, and most gluttonous being imaginable; for justice is a political virtue,   by the rules of it the state is regulated, and these rules are the criterion of what is right.  CHAPTER 3 SINCE it is now   evident of what parts a city is composed, it will be necessary to treat first of family government,   for every city is made up of families, and every family has again its separate parts of which it is   composed. When a family is complete, it consists of freemen and slaves; but as in every subject we   should begin with examining into the smallest parts of which it consists, and as the first   and smallest parts of a family are the master and slave, the husband and wife, the father and child,   let us first inquire into these three, what each of them may be, and what they ought to be;   that is to say, the herile, the nuptial, and the paternal. Let these then be considered as the   three distinct parts of a family: some think that the providing what is necessary for the family is   something different from the government of it, others that this is the greatest part of it;   it shall be considered separately; but we will first speak of a master and a slave,   that we may both understand the nature of those things which are absolutely necessary, and also   try if we can learn anything better on this subject than what is already known. Some persons   have thought that the power of the master over his slave originates from his superior knowledge,   and that this knowledge is the same in the master, the magistrate, and the king, as we   have already said; but others think that herile government is contrary to nature, and that it is   the law which makes one man a slave and another free, but that in nature there is no difference;   for which reason that power cannot be founded in justice, but in force.  CHAPTER 4 Since then a subsistence is   necessary in every family, the means of procuring it certainly makes up part of the management of a   family, for without necessaries it is impossible to live, and to live well. As in all arts which   are brought to perfection it is necessary that they should have their proper instruments if they   would complete their works, so is it in the art of managing a family: now of instruments some of them   are alive, others inanimate; thus with respect to the pilot of the ship, the tiller is without life,   the sailor is alive; for a servant is as an instrument in many arts. Thus property is as an   instrument to living; an estate is a multitude of instruments; so a slave is an animated instrument,   but every one that can minister of himself is more valuable than any other instrument;   for if every instrument, at command, or from a preconception of its master’s will, could   accomplish its work (as the story goes of the statues of Daedalus; or what the poet tells us of   the tripods of Vulcan, “that they moved of their own accord into the assembly of the gods “), the   shuttle would then weave, and the lyre play of itself; nor would the architect want servants, or   the master slaves. Now what are generally called instruments are the efficients of something else,   but possessions are what we simply use: thus with a shuttle we make something else for our use; but   we only use a coat, or a bed: since then making and using differ from each other in species,   and they both require their instruments, it is necessary that these should be different from each   other. Now life is itself what we use, and not what we employ as the efficient of something else;   for which reason the services of a slave are for use. A possession may be considered in the same   nature as a part of anything; now a part is not only a part of something, but also is nothing   else; so is a possession; therefore a master is only the master of the slave, but no part of him;   but the slave is not only the slave of the master, but nothing else but that. This fully explains   what is the nature of a slave, and what are his capacities; for that being who by nature is   nothing of himself, but totally another’s, and is a man, is a slave by nature; and that man who is   the property of another, is his mere chattel, though he continues a man; but a chattel is an   instrument for use, separate from the body. CHAPTER 5  But whether any person is such by nature, and whether it is advantageous and just for any   one to be a slave or no, or whether all slavery is contrary to nature, shall be considered hereafter;   not that it is difficult to determine it upon general principles, or to understand it from   matters of fact; for that some should govern, and others be governed, is not only necessary   but useful, and from the hour of their birth some are marked out for those purposes, and others for   the other, and there are many species of both sorts. And the better those are who are governed   the better also is the government, as for instance of man, rather than the brute creation: for the   more excellent the materials are with which the work is finished, the more excellent certainly is   the work; and wherever there is a governor and a governed, there certainly is some work produced;   for whatsoever is composed of many parts, which jointly become one, whether conjunct or separate,   evidently show the marks of governing and governed; and this is true of every living   thing in all nature; nay, even in some things which partake not of life, as in music; but   this probably would be a disquisition too foreign to our present purpose. Every living thing in the   first place is composed of soul and body, of these the one is by nature the governor, the other the   governed; now if we would know what is natural, we ought to search for it in those subjects in which   nature appears most perfect, and not in those which are corrupted; we should therefore examine   into a man who is most perfectly formed both in soul and body, in whom this is evident, for in   the depraved and vicious the body seems to rule rather than the soul, on account of their being   corrupt and contrary to nature. We may then, as we affirm, perceive in an animal the first principles   of herile and political government; for the soul governs the body as the master governs his slave;   the mind governs the appetite with a political or a kingly power, which shows that it is both   natural and advantageous that the body should be governed by the soul, and the pathetic part by the   mind, and that part which is possessed of reason; but to have no ruling power, or an improper one,   is hurtful to all; and this holds true not only of man, but of other animals also,   for tame animals are naturally better than wild ones, and it is advantageous that both   should be under subjection to man; for this is productive of their common safety: so is   it naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs,   the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind.   Those men therefore who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul, are to   be thus disposed of, as the proper use of them is their bodies, in which their excellence consists;   and if what I have said be true, they are slaves by nature, and it is advantageous to them to be   always under government. He then is by nature formed a slave who is qualified to become the   chattel of another person, and on that account is so, and who has just reason enough to know that   there is such a faculty, without being indued with the use of it; for other animals have no   perception of reason, but are entirely guided by appetite, and indeed they vary very little in   their use from each other; for the advantage which we receive, both from slaves and tame animals,   arises from their bodily strength administering to our necessities; for it is the intention of nature   to make the bodies of slaves and freemen different from each other, that the one should be robust   for their necessary purposes, the others erect, useless indeed for what slaves are employed in,   but fit for civil life, which is divided into the duties of war and peace; though these rules do not   always take place, for slaves have sometimes the bodies of freemen, sometimes the souls; if then   it is evident that if some bodies are as much more excellent than others as the statues of the gods   excel the human form, every one will allow that the inferior ought to be slaves to the superior;   and if this is true with respect to the body, it is still juster to determine in the same manner,   when we consider the soul; though it is not so easy to perceive the beauty of the soul as   it is of the body. Since then some men are slaves by nature, and others are freemen,   it is clear that where slavery is advantageous to any one, then it is just to make him a slave.  CHAPTER 6 But it is not difficult to perceive   that those who maintain the contrary opinion have some reason on their side; for a man may become a   slave two different ways; for he may be so by law also, and this law is a certain compact,   by which whatsoever is taken in battle is adjudged to be the property of the conquerors:   but many persons who are conversant in law call in question this pretended right, and say that it   would be hard that a man should be compelled by violence to be the slave and subject of another   who had the power to compel him, and was his superior in strength; and upon this subject,   even of those who are wise, some think one way and some another; but the cause of this doubt and   variety of opinions arises from hence, that great abilities, when accompanied with proper means,   are generally able to succeed by force: for victory is always owing to a superiority in   some advantageous circumstances; so that it seems that force never prevails but in consequence of   great abilities. But still the dispute concerning the justice of it remains; for some persons think,   that justice consists in benevolence, others think it just that the powerful should govern:   in the midst of these contrary opinions, there are no reasons sufficient to convince us,   that the right of being master and governor ought not to be placed with those who have the greatest   abilities. Some persons, entirely resting upon the right which the law gives (for that which is   legal is in some respects just), insist upon it that slavery occasioned by war is just,   not that they say it is wholly so, for it may happen that the principle upon which the wars   were commenced is unjust; moreover no one will say that a man who is unworthily in   slavery is therefore a slave; for if so, men of the noblest families might happen to be slaves,   and the descendants of slaves, if they should chance to be taken prisoners in war and sold: to   avoid this difficulty they say that such persons should not be called slaves, but barbarians only   should; but when they say this, they do nothing more than inquire who is a slave by nature,   which was what we at first said; for we must acknowledge that there are some persons who,   wherever they are, must necessarily be slaves, but others in no situation; thus also it is with   those of noble descent: it is not only in their own country that they are Esteemed as such,   but everywhere, but the barbarians are respected on this account at home only; as if nobility and   freedom were of two sorts, the one universal, the other not so. Thus says the Helen of Theodectes: “Who dares reproach me with the name of slave? When from the  immortal gods, on either side, I draw my lineage.” Those who express sentiments like these, shew only that they distinguish the slave and the freeman,   the noble and the ignoble from each other by their virtues and their vices;   for they think it reasonable, that as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, so from a good man,   a good man should be descended; and this is what nature desires to do,   but frequently cannot accomplish it. It is evident then that this doubt has some reason in it,   and that these persons are not slaves, and those freemen, by the appointment of nature;   and also that in some instances it is sufficiently clear, that it is advantageous to both parties for   this man to be a slave, and that to be a master, and that it is right and just, that some should be   governed, and others govern, in the manner that nature intended; of which sort of government is   that which a master exercises over a slave. But to govern ill is disadvantageous to both;   for the same thing is useful to the part and to the whole, to the body and to the soul;   but the slave is as it were a part of the master, as if he were an animated part of his body,   though separate. For which reason a mutual utility and friendship may subsist between   the master and the slave, I mean when they are placed by nature in that relation to each other,   for the contrary takes place amongst those who are reduced to slavery by the law, or by conquest.  CHAPTER 7 It is evident from what has been said,   that a herile and a political government are not the same, or that all governments are alike to   each other, as some affirm; for one is adapted to the nature of freemen, the other to that of   slaves. Domestic government is a monarchy, for that is what prevails in every house;   but a political state is the government of free men and equals. The master is not so called from   his knowing how to manage his slave, but because he is so; for the same reason a slave and a   freeman have their respective appellations. There is also one sort of knowledge proper for a master,   another for a slave; the slave’s is of the nature of that which was taught by a slave at Syracuse;   for he for a stipulated sum instructed the boys in all the business of a household slave,   of which there are various sorts to be learnt, as the art of cookery, and other such-like services,   of which some are allotted to some, and others to others; some employments being more honourable,   others more necessary; according to the proverb, “One slave excels another, one master excels   another:” in such-like things the knowledge of a slave consists. The knowledge of the master   is to be able properly to employ his slaves, for the mastership of slaves is the employment,   not the mere possession of them; not that this knowledge contains anything great or respectable;   for what a slave ought to know how to do, that a master ought to know how to order;   for which reason, those who have it in their power to be free from these low attentions,   employ a steward for this business, and apply themselves either to public affairs or philosophy:   the knowledge of procuring what is necessary for a family is different from that which belongs either   to the master or the slave: and to do this justly must be either by war or hunting. And thus much of   the difference between a master and a slave. CHAPTER 8  As a slave is a particular species of property, let us by all means inquire into the nature of   property in general, and the acquisition of money, according to the manner we have proposed. In the   first place then, some one may doubt whether the getting of money is the same thing as economy,   or whether it is a part of it, or something subservient to it; and if so,   whether it is as the art of making shuttles is to the art of weaving, or the art of making brass to   that of statue founding, for they are not of the same service; for the one supplies the tools,   the other the matter: by the matter I mean the subject out of which the work is finished,   as wool for the cloth and brass for the statue. It is evident then that the getting of money is   not the same thing as economy, for the business of the one is to furnish the means of the other   to use them; and what art is there employed in the management of a family but economy, but whether   this is a part of it, or something of a different species, is a doubt; for if it is the business of   him who is to get money to find out how riches and possessions may be procured, and both these arise   from various causes, we must first inquire whether the art of husbandry is part of money-getting or   something different, and in general, whether the same is not true of every acquisition and every   attention which relates to provision. But as there are many sorts of provision, so are the methods of   living both of man and the brute creation very various; and as it is impossible to live without   food, the difference in that particular makes the lives of animals so different from each other. Of   beasts, some live in herds, others separate, as is most convenient for procuring themselves food; as   some of them live upon flesh, others on fruit, and others on whatsoever they light on, nature having   so distinguished their course of life, that they can very easily procure themselves subsistence;   and as the same things are not agreeable to all, but one animal likes one thing and another   another, it follows that the lives of those beasts who live upon flesh must be different from the   lives of those who live on fruits; so is it with men, their lives differ greatly from each other;   and of all these the shepherd’s is the idlest, for they live upon the flesh of tame animals, without   any trouble, while they are obliged to change their habitations on account of their flocks,   which they are compelled to follow, cultivating, as it were, a living farm. Others live exercising   violence over living creatures, one pursuing this thing, another that, these preying upon men; those   who live near lakes and marshes and rivers, or the sea itself, on fishing, while others are fowlers,   or hunters of wild beasts; but the greater part of mankind live upon the produce of the earth and its   cultivated fruits; and the manner in which all those live who follow the direction of nature,   and labour for their own subsistence, is nearly the same, without ever thinking to procure any   provision by way of exchange or merchandise, such are shepherds, husband-men, robbers, fishermen,   and hunters: some join different employments together, and thus live very agreeably;   supplying those deficiencies which were wanting to make their subsistence depend   upon themselves only: thus, for instance, the same person shall be a shepherd and a robber,   or a husbandman and a hunter; and so with respect to the rest, they pursue that mode of life which   necessity points out. This provision then nature herself seems to have furnished all animals with,   as well immediately upon their first origin as also when they are arrived at a state of maturity;   for at the first of these periods some of them are provided in the womb with proper nourishment,   which continues till that which is born can get food for itself,   as is the case with worms and birds; and as to those which bring forth their young alive,   they have the means for their subsistence for a certain time within themselves, namely milk. It   is evident then that we may conclude of those things that are, that plants are created for   the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of men; the tame for our use and provision; the wild,   at least the greater part, for our provision also, or for some other advantageous purpose,   as furnishing us with clothes, and the like. As nature therefore makes nothing either imperfect   or in vain, it necessarily follows that she has made all these things for men: for which reason   what we gain in war is in a certain degree a natural acquisition; for hunting is a part of it,   which it is necessary for us to employ against wild beasts; and those men who being intended by   nature for slavery are unwilling to submit to it, on which occasion such a. war is by nature just:   that species of acquisition then only which is according to nature is part of economy;   and this ought to be at hand, or if not, immediately procured, namely, what is   necessary to be kept in store to live upon, and which are useful as well for the state as the   family. And true riches seem to consist in these; and the acquisition of those possessions which are   necessary for a happy life is not infinite; though Solon says otherwise in this verse: “No bounds to riches can be fixed for man;” for they may be fixed as in other arts; for the instruments of no art whatsoever are infinite,   either in their number or their magnitude; but riches are a number of instruments in domestic   and civil economy; it is therefore evident that the acquisition of certain things according to   nature is a part both of domestic and civil economy, and for what reason.  CHAPTER 9 There is also another   species of acquisition which they particularly call pecuniary, and with great propriety; and by   this indeed it seems that there are no bounds to riches and wealth. Now many persons suppose, from   their near relation to each other, that this is one and the same with that we have just mentioned,   but it is not the same as that, though not very different; one of these is natural,   the other is not, but rather owing to some art and skill; we will enter into a particular examination   of this subject. The uses of every possession are two, both dependent upon the thing itself,   but not in the same manner, the one supposing an inseparable connection with it, the other not; as   a shoe, for instance, which may be either worn, or exchanged for something else, both these are the   uses of the shoe; for he who exchanges a shoe with some man who wants one, for money or provisions,   uses the shoe as a shoe, but not according to the original intention, for shoes were not at first   made to be exchanged. The same thing holds true of all other possessions; for barter, in general,   had its original beginning in nature, some men having a surplus, others too little of what was   necessary for them: hence it is evident, that the selling provisions for money is not according to   the natural use of things; for they were obliged to use barter for those things which they wanted;   but it is plain that barter could have no place in the first, that is to say, in family society;   but must have begun when the number of those who composed the community was enlarged: for   the first of these had all things in common; but when they came to be separated they were obliged   to exchange with each other many different things which both parties wanted. Which custom of barter   is still preserved amongst many barbarous nations, who procure one necessary with another, but never   sell anything; as giving and receiving wine for corn and the like. This sort of barter is not   contradictory to nature, nor is it any species of money-getting; but is necessary in procuring that   subsistence which is so consonant thereunto. But this barter introduced the use of money, as might   be expected; for a convenient place from whence to import what you wanted, or to export what you had   a surplus of, being often at a great distance, money necessarily made its way into commerce;   for it is not everything which is naturally most useful that is easiest of carriage; for which   reason they invented something to exchange with each other which they should mutually   give and take, that being really valuable itself, should have the additional advantage of being of   easy conveyance, for the purposes of life, as iron and silver, or anything else of the same nature:   and this at first passed in value simply according to its weight or size; but in process of time it   had a certain stamp, to save the trouble of weighing, which stamp expressed its value. Money then being established as the necessary medium of exchange, another species of   money-getting soon took place, namely, by buying and selling, at probably first in a simple manner,   afterwards with more skill and experience, where and how the greatest profits might be   made. For which reason the art of money-getting seems to be chiefly conversant about trade,   and the business of it to be able to tell where the greatest profits can be made, being the means   of procuring abundance of wealth and possessions: and thus wealth is very often supposed to consist   in the quantity of money which any one possesses, as this is the medium by which all trade is   conducted and a fortune made, others again regard it as of no value, as being of none by nature,   but arbitrarily made so by compact; so that if those who use it should alter their sentiments,   it would be worth nothing, as being of no service for any necessary purpose. Besides,   he who abounds in money often wants necessary food; and it is impossible to say that any   person is in good circumstances when with all his possessions he may perish with hunger. Like Midas in the fable, who from his insatiable wish had everything he touched turned into gold.   For which reason others endeavour to procure other riches and other property, and rightly,   for there are other riches and property in nature; and these are the proper objects of economy:   while trade only procures money, not by all means, but by the exchange of it, and for that purpose   it is this which it is chiefly employed about, for money is the first principle and the end of trade;   nor are there any bounds to be set to what is thereby acquired. Thus also there are no   limits to the art of medicine, with respect to the health which it attempts to procure; the same also   is true of all other arts; no line can be drawn to terminate their bounds, the several professors   of them being desirous to extend them as far as possible. (But still the means to be employed for   that purpose are limited; and these are the limits beyond which the art cannot proceed.) Thus in   the art of acquiring riches there are no limits, for the object of that is money and possessions;   but economy has a boundary, though this has not: for acquiring riches is not the business of that,   for which reason it should seem that some boundary should be set to riches, though we see   the contrary to this is what is practised; for all those who get riches add to their money without   end; the cause of which is the near connection of these two arts with each other, which sometimes   occasions the one to change employments with the other, as getting of money is their common object:   for economy requires the possession of wealth, but not on its own account but with another view,   to purchase things necessary therewith; but the other procures it merely to increase it:   so that some persons are confirmed in their belief, that this is the proper object of economy,   and think that for this purpose money should be saved and hoarded up without end; the reason for   which disposition is, that they are intent upon living, but not upon living well; and this desire   being boundless in its extent, the means which they aim at for that purpose are boundless also;   and those who propose to live well, often confine that to the enjoyment of the pleasures of sense;   so that as this also seems to depend upon what a man has, all their care is to get money,   and hence arises the other cause for this art; for as this enjoyment is excessive in its degree,   they endeavour to procure means proportionate to supply it; and if they cannot do this merely by   the art of dealing in money, they will endeavour to do it by other ways, and apply all their powers   to a purpose they were not by nature intended for. Thus, for instance, courage was intended to   inspire fortitude, not to get money by; neither is this the end of the soldier’s or the physician’s   art, but victory and health. But such persons make everything subservient to money-getting,   as if this was the only end; and to the end everything ought to refer.  We have now considered that art of money-getting which is not necessary, and have seen in what   manner we became in want of it; and also that which is necessary, which is different from it;   for that economy which is natural, and whose object is to provide food, is not like this   unlimited in its extent, but has its bounds. CHAPTER 10  We have now determined what was before doubtful, whether or no the art of getting money is his   business who is at the head of a family or a state, and though not strictly so, it is however   very necessary; for as a politician does not make men, but receiving them from the hand of nature   employs them to proper purposes; thus the earth, or the sea, or something else ought to supply   them with provisions, and this it is the business of the master of the family to manage properly;   for it is not the weaver’s business to make yarn, but to use it, and to distinguish what is good and   useful from what is bad and of no service; and indeed some one may inquire why getting money   should be a part of economy when the art of healing is not, as it is as requisite that the   family should be in health as that they should eat, or have anything else which is necessary;   and as it is indeed in some particulars the business both of the master of the family, and he   to whom the government of the state is entrusted, to see after the health of those under their care,   but in others not, but the physician’s; so also as to money; in some respects it is the business of   the master of the family, in others not, but of the servant; but as we have already said,   it is chiefly nature’s, for it is her part to supply her offspring with food; for everything   finds nourishment left for it in what produced it; for which reason the natural riches of all men   arise from fruits and animals. Now money-making, as we say, being twofold, it may be applied to two   purposes, the service of the house or retail trade; of which the first is necessary and   commendable, the other justly censurable; for it has not its origin in nature, but by it men   gain from each other; for usury is most reasonably detested, as it is increasing our fortune by money   itself, and not employing it for the purpose it was originally intended, namely exchange. And this is the explanation of the name (TOKOS), which means the breeding of money.   For as offspring resemble their parents, so usury is money bred of money. Whence of all forms of   money-making it is most against nature. CHAPTER 11  Having already sufficiently considered the general principles of this subject, let us now go into the   practical part thereof; the one is a liberal employment for the mind, the other necessary.   These things are useful in the management of one’s affairs; to be skilful in the nature of cattle,   which are most profitable, and where, and how; as for instance, what advantage will arise from   keeping horses, or oxen, or sheep, or any other live stock; it is also necessary to be acquainted   with the comparative value of these things, and which of them in particular places are worth most;   for some do better in one place, some in another. Agriculture also should be understood, and the   management of arable grounds and orchards; and also the care of bees, and fish, and birds, from   whence any profit may arise; these are the first and most proper parts of domestic management.  With respect to gaining money by exchange, the principal method of doing this is by merchandise,   which is carried on in three different ways, either by sending the commodity for sale by sea or   by land, or else selling it on the place where it grows; and these differ from each other in this,   that the one is more profitable, the other safer. The second method is by usury. The   third by receiving wages for work done, and this either by being employed in some mean art, or   else in mere bodily labour. There is also a third species of improving a fortune, that is something   between this and the first; for it partly depends upon nature, partly upon exchange; the subject   of which is, things that are immediately from the earth, or their produce, which,   though they bear no fruit, are yet useful, such as selling of timber and the whole art of metallurgy,   which includes many different species, for there are various sorts of things dug out of the earth. These we have now mentioned in general, but to enter into particulars concerning each of them,   though it might be useful to the artist, would be tiresome to dwell on. Now of all the works of art,   those are the most excellent wherein chance has the least to do, and those are the meanest   which deprave the body, those the most servile in which bodily strength alone is chiefly wanted,   those most illiberal which require least skill; but as there are books written on these subjects   by some persons, as by Chares the Panian, and Apollodorus the Lemnian, upon husbandry and   planting; and by others on other matters, let those who have occasion consult them thereon;   besides, every person should collect together whatsoever he hears occasionally mentioned, by   means of which many of those who aimed at making a fortune have succeeded in their intentions;   for all these are useful to those who make a point of getting money, as in the contrivance of Thales   the Milesian (which was certainly a gainful one, but as it was his it was attributed to his wisdom,   though the method he used was a general one, and would universally succeed), when they   reviled him for his poverty, as if the study of philosophy was useless: for they say that he,   perceiving by his skill in astrology that there would be great plenty of olives that year,   while it was yet winter, having got a little money, he gave earnest for all the oil works that   were in Miletus and Chios, which he hired at a low price, there being no one to bid against him;   but when the season came for making oil, many persons wanting them, he all at once   let them upon what terms he pleased; and raising a large sum of money by that means,   convinced them that it was easy for philosophers to be rich if they chose it, but that that was not   what they aimed at; in this manner is Thales said to have shown his wisdom. It indeed is,   as we have said, generally gainful for a person to contrive to make a monopoly of anything;   for which reason some cities also take this method when they want money, and monopolise   their commodities. There was a certain person in Sicily who laid out a sum of money which was   deposited in his hand in buying up all the iron from the iron merchants; so that when the dealers   came from the markets to purchase, there was no one had any to sell but himself; and though he put   no great advance upon it, yet by laying out fifty talents he made an hundred. When Dionysius heard   this he permitted him to take his money with him, but forbid him to continue any longer in Sicily,   as being one who contrived means for getting money inconsistent with his affairs. This man’s view   and Thales’s was exactly the same; both of them contrived to procure a monopoly for themselves:   it is useful also for politicians to understand these things, for many states want to raise money   and by such means, as well as private families, nay more so; for which reason some persons who are   employed in the management of public affairs confine themselves to this province only.  CHAPTER 12 There are then three parts of   domestic government, the masters, of which we have already treated, the fathers, and the husbands;   now the government of the wife and children should both be that of free persons, but not the same;   for the wife should be treated as a citizen of a free state, the children should be under kingly   power; for the male is by nature superior to the female, except when something happens contrary to   the usual course of nature, as is the elder and perfect to the younger and imperfect. Now in the   generality of free states, the governors and the governed alternately change place; for an equality   without any preference is what nature chooses; however, when one governs and another is governed,   she endeavours that there should be a distinction between them in forms, expressions, and honours;   according to what Amasis said of his laver. This then should be the established rule between the   man and the woman. The government of children should be kingly; for the power of the father over   the child is founded in affection and seniority, which is a species of kingly government;   for which reason Homer very properly calls Jupiter “the father of gods and men,” who was king of both   these; for nature requires that a king should be of the same species with those whom he governs,   though superior in some particulars, as is the case between the elder and the younger,   the father and the son. CHAPTER 13  It is evident then that in the due government of a family, greater attention should be paid to the   several members of it and their virtues than to the possessions or riches of it;   and greater to the freemen than the slaves: but here some one may doubt whether there is any other   virtue in a slave than his organic services, and of higher estimation than these, as temperance,   fortitude, justice, and such-like habits, or whether they possess only bodily qualities:   each side of the question has its difficulties; for if they possess these virtues, wherein do   they differ from freemen? and that they do not, since they are men, and partakers of reason,   is absurd. Nearly the same inquiry may be made concerning a woman and a child, whether   these also have their proper virtues; whether a woman ought to be temperate, brave, and just,   and whether a child is temperate or no; and indeed this inquiry ought to be general, whether the   virtues of those who, by nature, either govern or are governed, are the same or different; for if it   is necessary that both of them should partake of the fair and good, why is it also necessary that,   without exception, the one should govern, the other always be governed? for this cannot arise   from their possessing these qualities in different degrees; for to govern, and to be governed,   are things different in species, but more or less are not. And yet it is wonderful that one party   ought to have them, and the other not; for if he who is to govern should not be temperate and just,   how can he govern well? or if he is to be governed, how can he be governed well? for he   who is intemperate and a coward will never do what he ought: it is evident then that both parties   ought to be virtuous; but there is a difference between them, as there is between those who by   nature command and who by nature obey, and this originates in the soul; for in this nature has   planted the governing and submitting principle, the virtues of which we say are different, as   are those of a rational and an irrational being. It is plain then that the same principle may be   extended farther, and that there are in nature a variety of things which govern and are governed;   for a freeman is governed in a different manner from a slave, a male from a female, and a man from   a child: and all these have parts of mind within them, but in a different manner. Thus a slave can   have no power of determination, a woman but a weak one, a child an imperfect one. Thus also   must it necessarily be with respect to moral virtues; all must be supposed to possess them,   but not in the same manner, but as is best suited to every one’s employment; on which account he who   is to govern ought to be perfect in moral virtue, for his business is entirely that of an architect,   and reason is the architect; while others want only that portion of it which may be sufficient   for their station; from whence it is evident, that although moral virtue is common to all those we   have spoken of, yet the temperance of a man and a woman are not the same, nor their courage, nor   their justice, though Socrates thought otherwise; for the courage of the man consists in commanding,   the woman’s in obeying; and the same is true in other particulars: and this will be evident   to those who will examine different virtues separately; for those who use general terms   deceive themselves when they say, that virtue consists in a good disposition of mind, or doing   what is right, or something of this sort. They do much better who enumerate the different virtues   as Georgias did, than those who thus define them; and as Sophocles speaks of a woman, we   think of all persons, that their ‘virtues should be applicable to their characters, for says he, “Silence is a woman’s ornament,” but it is not a man’s; and as a child is incomplete, it is evident that his   virtue is not to be referred to himself in his present situation, but to that in which he will   be complete, and his preceptor. In like manner the virtue of a slave is to be referred to his master;   for we laid it down as a maxim, that the use of a slave was to employ him in what you wanted;   so that it is clear enough that few virtues are wanted in his station, only that he may not   neglect his work through idleness or fear: some person may question if what I have said is true,   whether virtue is not necessary for artificers in their calling, for they often through idleness   neglect their work, but the difference between them is very great; for a slave is connected with   you for life, but the artificer not so nearly: as near therefore as the artificer approaches to the   situation of a slave, just so much ought he to have of the virtues of one; for a mean artificer   is to a certain point a slave; but then a slave is one of those things which are by nature what   they are, but this is not true of a shoemaker, or any other artist. It is evident then that a slave   ought to be trained to those virtues which are proper for his situation by his master; and not   by him who has the power of a master, to teach him any particular art. Those therefore are in the   wrong who would deprive slaves of reason, and say that they have only to follow their orders; for   slaves want more instruction than children, and thus we determine this matter. It is necessary,   I am sensible, for every one who treats upon government, to enter particularly into the   relations of husband and wife, and of parent and child, and to show what are the virtues of each   and their respective connections with each other; what is right and what is wrong; and how the one   ought to be followed, and the other avoided. Since then every family is part of a city, and each of   those individuals is part of a family, and the virtue of the parts ought to correspond to the   virtue of the whole; it is necessary, that both the wives and children of the community should be   instructed correspondent to the nature thereof, if it is of consequence to the virtue of the state,   that the wives and children therein should be virtuous, and of consequence it certainly is,   for the wives are one half of the free persons; and of the children the succeeding citizens are   to be formed. As then we have determined these points, we will leave the rest to be spoken to   in another place, as if the subject was now finished; and beginning again anew,   first consider the sentiments of those who have treated of the most perfect forms of government. BOOK 2 CHAPTER 1  Since then we propose to inquire what civil society is of all others best for those who   have it in their power to live entirely as they wish, it is necessary to examine into the polity   of those states which are allowed to be well governed; and if there should be any others which   some persons have described, and which appear properly regulated, to note what is right and   useful in them; and when we point out wherein they have failed, let not this be imputed to   an affectation of wisdom, for it is because there are great defects in all those which are already   established, that I have been induced to undertake this work. We will begin with that part of the   subject which naturally presents itself first to our consideration. The members of every state must   of necessity have all things in common, or some things common, and not others, or nothing at all   common. To have nothing in common is evidently impossible, for society itself is one species of   community; and the first thing necessary thereunto is a common place of habitation, namely the city,   which must be one, and this every citizen must have a share in. But in a government which is   to be well founded, will it be best to admit of a community in everything which is capable thereof,   or only in some particulars, but in others not? for it is possible that the citizens may   have their wives, and children, and goods in common, as in Plato’s Commonwealth;   for in that Socrates affirms that all these particulars ought to be so. Which then shall we   prefer? the custom which is already established, or the laws which are proposed in that treatise?  CHAPTER 2 Now as a community of wives is attended with   many other difficulties, so neither does the cause for which he would frame his government in this   manner seem agreeable to reason, nor is it capable of producing that end which he has proposed, and   for which he says it ought to take place; nor has he given any particular directions for putting it   in practice. Now I also am willing to agree with Socrates in the principle which he proceeds upon,   and admit that the city ought to be one as much as possible; and yet it is evident that if it   is contracted too much, it will be no longer a city, for that necessarily supposes a multitude;   so that if we proceed in this manner, we shall reduce a city to a family, and a family to a   single person: for we admit that a family is one in a greater degree than a city, and a single   person than a family; so that if this end could be obtained, it should never be put in practice,   as it would annihilate the city; for a city does not only consist of a large number of inhabitants,   but there must also be different sorts; for were they all alike, there could be no city;   for a confederacy and a city are two different things; for a confederacy is valuable from its   numbers, although all those who compose it are men of the same calling; for this is entered   into for the sake of mutual defence, as we add an additional weight to make the scale go down.   The same distinction prevails between a city and a nation when the people are not collected into   separate villages, but live as the Arcadians. Now those things in which a city should be one   are of different sorts, and in preserving an alternate reciprocation of power between these,   the safety thereof consists (as I have already mentioned in my treatise on Morals),   for amongst freemen and equals this is absolutely necessary; for all cannot govern at the same time,   but either by the year, or according to some other regulation or time, by which means every one in   his turn will be in office; as if the shoemakers and carpenters should exchange occupations,   and not always be employed in the same calling. But as it is evidently better, that these should   continue to exercise their respective trades; so also in civil society, where it is possible,   it would be better that the government should continue in the same hands; but where it is not   (as nature has made all men equal, and therefore it is just, be the administration good or bad,   that all should partake of it), there it is best to observe a rotation, and let those who are their   equals by turns submit to those who are at that time magistrates, as they will, in their turns,   alternately be governors and governed, as if they were different men: by the same method different   persons will execute different offices. From hence it is evident, that a city cannot be one   in the manner that some persons propose; and that what has been said to be the greatest good which   it could enjoy, is absolutely its destruction, which cannot be: for the good of anything is that   which preserves it. For another reason also it is clear, that it is not for the best to endeavour   to make a city too much one, because a family is more sufficient in itself than a single person,   a city than a family; and indeed Plato supposes that a city owes its existence to that sufficiency   in themselves which the members of it enjoy. If then this sufficiency is so desirable,   the less the city is one the better. CHAPTER 3  But admitting that it is most advantageous for a city to be one as much as possible, it does   not seem to follow that this will take place by permitting all at once to say this is mine,   and this is not mine (though this is what Socrates regards as a proof that a city is entirely one),   for the word All is used in two senses; if it means each individual, what Socrates proposes   will nearly take place; for each person will say, this is his own son, and his own wife,   and his own property, and of everything else that may happen to belong to him, that it is his own.   But those who have their wives and children in common will not say so, but all will say so,   though not as individuals; therefore, to use the word all is evidently a fallacious mode of speech;   for this word is sometimes used distributively, and sometimes collectively, on account of its   double meaning, and is the cause of inconclusive syllogisms in reasoning. Therefore for all persons   to say the same thing was their own, using the word all in its distributive sense, would be well,   but is impossible: in its collective sense it would by no means contribute to the concord   of the state. Besides, there would be another inconvenience attending this proposal,   for what is common to many is taken least care of; for all men regard more what is their own   than what others share with them in, to which they pay less attention than is incumbent on every one:   let me add also, that every one is more negligent of what another is to see to, as well as himself,   than of his own private business; as in a family one is often worse served by   many servants than by a few. Let each citizen then in the state have a thousand children,   but let none of them be considered as the children of that individual, but let the relation of father   and child be common to them all, and they will all be neglected. Besides, in consequence of this,   whenever any citizen behaved well or ill, every person, be the number what it would,   might say, this is my son, or this man’s or that; and in this manner would they speak,   and thus would they doubt of the whole thousand, or of whatever number the city consisted; and it   would be uncertain to whom each child belonged, and when it was born, who was to take care of it:   and which do you think is better, for every one to say this is mine, while they may apply it equally   to two thousand or ten thousand; or as we say, this is mine in our present forms of government,   where one man calls another his son, another calls that same person his brother, another nephew,   or some other relation, either by blood or marriage, and first extends his care to him   and his, while another regards him as one of the same parish and the same tribe; and it is   better for any one to be a nephew in his private capacity than a son after that manner. Besides,   it will be impossible to prevent some persons from suspecting that they are brothers and sisters,   fathers and mothers to each other; for, from the mutual likeness there is between the sire and the   offspring, they will necessarily conclude in what relation they stand to each other,   which circumstance, we are informed by those writers who describe different parts of the world,   does sometimes happen; for in Upper Africa there are wives in common who yet deliver their children   to their respective fathers, being guided by their likeness to them. There are also some mares and   cows which naturally bring forth their young so like the male, that we can easily distinguish by   which of them they were impregnated: such was the mare called Just, in Pharsalia.  CHAPTER 4 Besides, those who contrive this plan of   community cannot easily avoid the following evils; namely, blows, murders involuntary or voluntary,   quarrels, and reproaches, all which it would be impious indeed to be guilty of towards our   fathers and mothers, or those who are nearly related to us; though not to those who are not   connected to us by any tie of affinity: and certainly these mischiefs must necessarily   happen oftener amongst those who do not know how they are connected to each other than those who   do; and when they do happen, if it is among the first of these, they admit of a legal expiation,   but amongst the latter that cannot be done. It is also absurd for those who promote a community   of children to forbid those who love each other from indulging themselves in the last excesses   of that passion, while they do not restrain them from the passion itself, or those intercourses   which are of all things most improper, between a Father and a son, a brother and a brother,   and indeed the thing itself is most absurd. It is also ridiculous to prevent this intercourse   between the nearest relations, for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, while they   think that the relation of father and daughter, the brother and sister, is of no consequence at   all. It seems also more advantageous for the state, that the husbandmen should have their   wives and children in common than the military, for there will be less affection among them in   that case than when otherwise; for such persons ought to be under subjection, that they may obey   the laws, and not seek after innovations. Upon the whole, the consequences of such a law as this   would be directly contrary to those things which good laws ought to establish, and which Socrates   endeavoured to establish by his regulations concerning women and children: for we think   that friendship is the greatest good which can happen to any city, as nothing so much prevents   seditions: and amity in a city is what Socrates commends above all things, which appears to be,   as indeed he says, the effect of friendship; as we learn from Aristophanes in the Erotics, who says,   that those who love one another from the excess of that passion, desire to breathe the same soul,   and from being two to be blended into one: from whence it would necessarily follow,   that both or one of them must be destroyed. But now in a city which admits of this community,   the tie of friendship must, from that very cause, be extremely weak, when no father can say,   this is my son; or son, this is my father; for as a very little of what is sweet, being mixed   with a great deal of water is imperceptible after the mixture, so must all family connections, and   the names they go by, be necessarily disregarded in such a community, it being then by no means   necessary that the father should have any regard for him he called a

    son, or the brothers for those   they call brothers. There are two things which principally inspire mankind with care and love   of their offspring, knowing it is their own, and what ought to be the object of their affection,   neither of which can take place in this sort of community. As for exchanging the children of the   artificers and husbandmen with those of the military, and theirs reciprocally with these,   it will occasion great confusion in whatever manner it shall be done; for of necessity,   those who carry the children must know from whom they took and to whom they gave them; and by this   means those evils which I have already mentioned will necessarily be the more likely to happen,   as blows, incestuous love, murders, and the like; for those who are given from their own   parents to other citizens, the military, for instance, will not call them brothers, sons,   fathers, or mothers. The same thing would happen to those of the military who were placed among   the other citizens; so that by this means every one would be in fear how to act in consequence   of consanguinity. And thus let us determine concerning a community of wives and children.  CHAPTER 5 We proceed next to consider in what manner   property should be regulated in a state which is formed after the most perfect mode of government,   whether it should be common or not; for this may be considered as a separate question from what had   been determined concerning wives and children; I mean, whether it is better that these should be   held separate, as they now everywhere are, or that not only possessions but also the usufruct of them   should be in common; or that the soil should have a particular owner, but that the produce should   be brought together and used as one common stock, as some nations at present do; or on the contrary,   should the soil be common, and should it also be cultivated in common, while the produce is divided   amongst the individuals for their particular use, which is said to be practised by some barbarians;   or shall both the soil and the fruit be common? When the business of the husbandman devolves not   on the citizen, the matter is much easier settled; but when those labour together who have a common   right of possession, this may occasion several difficulties; for there may not be an equal   proportion between their labour and what they consume; and those who labour hard and have but   a small proportion of the produce, will certainly complain of those who take a large share of it   and do but little for that. Upon the whole, as a community between man and man so entire   as to include everything possible, and thus to have all things that man can possess in common,   is very difficult, so is it particularly so with respect to property; and this is evident from that   community which takes place between those who go out to settle a colony; for they frequently have   disputes with each other upon the most common occasions, and come to blows upon trifles: we   find, too, that we oftenest correct those slaves who are generally employed in the common offices   of the family: a community of property then has these and other inconveniences attending it. But the manner of life which is now established, more particularly when embellished with good   morals and a system of equal laws, is far superior to it, for it will have the advantage of both;   by both I mean properties being common, and divided also; for in some respects it ought to   be in a manner common, but upon the whole private: for every man’s attention being employed on his   own particular concerns, will prevent mutual complaints against each other; nay, by this   means industry will be increased, as each person will labour to improve his own private property;   and it will then be, that from a principle of virtue they will mutually perform good offices   to each other, according to the proverb, “All things are common amongst friends;” and in some   cities there are traces of this custom to be seen, so that it is not impracticable,   and particularly in those which are best governed; some things are by this means in a manner common,   and others might be so; for there, every person enjoying his own private property,   some things he assists his friend with, others are considered as in common; as in Lacedaemon,   where they use each other’s slaves, as if they were, so to speak, their own,   as they do their horses and dogs, or even any provision they may want in a journey. It is evident then that it is best to have property private, but to make the use of it   common; but how the citizens are to be brought to it is the particular business of the legislator.   And also with respect to pleasure, it is unspeakable how advantageous it is,   that a man should think he has something which he may call his own; for it is by no means to   no purpose, that each person should have an affection for himself, for that is natural,   and yet to be a self-lover is justly censured; for we mean by that, not one that simply loves   himself, but one that loves himself more than he ought; in like manner we blame a money-lover,   and yet both money and self is what all men love. Besides, it is very pleasing to us to   oblige and assist our friends and companions, as well as those whom we are connected with by the   rights of hospitality; and this cannot be done without the establishment of private property,   which cannot take place with those who make a city too much one; besides, they prevent every   opportunity of exercising two principal virtues, modesty and liberality. Modesty with respect to   the female sex, for this virtue requires you to abstain from her who is another’s; liberality,   which depends upon private property, for without that no one can appear liberal,   or do any generous action; for liberality consists in imparting to others what is our own. This system of polity does indeed recommend itself by its good appearance and specious pretences to   humanity; and when first proposed to any one, must give him great pleasure, as he will conclude it to   be a wonderful bond of friendship, connecting all to all; particularly when any one censures   the evils which are now to be found in society, as arising from properties not being common,   I mean the disputes which happen between man and man, upon their different contracts with   each other; those judgments which are passed in court in consequence of fraud, and perjury,   and flattering the rich, none of which arise from properties being private, but from the   vices of mankind. Besides, those who live in one general community, and have all things in common,   oftener dispute with each other than those who have their property separate;   from the very small number indeed of those who have their property in common, compared with   those where it is appropriated, the instances of their quarrels are but few. It is also but right   to mention, not only the inconveniences they are preserved from who live in a communion of goods,   but also the advantages they are deprived of; for when the whole comes to be considered,   this manner of life will be found impracticable. We must suppose, then, that Socrates’s mistake   arose from the principle he set out with being false; we admit, indeed,   that both a family and a city ought to be one in some particulars, but not entirely; for there is a   point beyond which if a city proceeds in reducing itself to one, it will be no longer a city. There is also another point at which it will still continue to be a city, but it will approach so   near to not being one, that it will be worse than none; as if any one should reduce the voices of   those who sing in concert to one, or a verse to a foot. But the people ought to be made one, and   a community, as I have already said, by education; as property at Lacedaemon, and their public tables   at Crete, were made common by their legislators. But yet, whosoever shall introduce any education,   and think thereby to make his city excellent and respectable, will be absurd, while he expects to   form it by such regulations, and not by manners, philosophy, and laws. And whoever would establish   a government upon a community of goods, ought to know that he should consult the experience   of many years, which would plainly enough inform him whether such a scheme is useful;   for almost all things have already been found out, but some have been neglected,   and others which have been known have not been put in practice. But this would be most evident,   if any one could see such a government really established: for it would be impossible to frame   such a city without dividing and separating it into its distinct parts, as public tables,   wards, and tribes; so that here the laws will do nothing more than forbid the military   to engage in agriculture, which is what the Lacedaemonians are at present endeavouring to do. Nor has Socrates told us (nor is it easy to say) what plan of government should be pursued with   respect to the individuals in the state where there is a community of goods established;   for though the majority of his citizens will in general consist of a multitude of persons of   different occupations, of those he has determined nothing; whether the property of the husbandman   ought to be in common, or whether each person should have his share to himself; and also,   whether their wives and children ought to be in common: for if all things are to be alike common   to all, where will be the difference between them and the military, or what would they get   by submitting to their government? and upon what principles would they do it, unless they should   establish the wise practice of the Cretans? for they, allowing everything else to their slaves,   forbid them only gymnastic exercises and the use of arms. And if they are not, but these   should be in the same situation with respect to their property which they are in other cities,   what sort of a community will there be? in one city there must of necessity be two,   and those contrary to each other; for he makes the military the guardians of the state,   and the husbandman, artisans, and others, citizens; and all those quarrels, accusations,   and things of the like sort, which he says are the bane of other cities, will be found in his also:   notwithstanding Socrates says they will not want many laws in consequence of their education,   but such only as may be necessary for regulating the streets, the markets, and the like, while at   the same time it is the education of the military only that he has taken any care of. Besides,   he makes the husbandmen masters of property upon paying a tribute; but this would be   likely to make them far more troublesome and high-spirited than the Helots, the Penestise,   or the slaves which others employ; nor has he ever determined whether it is necessary to give   any attention to them in these particulars, nor thought of what is connected therewith,   their polity, their education, their laws; besides, it is of no little consequence, nor is   it easy to determine, how these should be framed so as to preserve the community of the military. Besides, if he makes the wives common, while the property continues separate, who shall manage   the domestic concerns with the same care which the man bestows upon his fields? nor will the   inconvenience be remedied by making property as well as wives common; and it is absurd to draw a   comparison from the brute creation, and say, that the same principle should regulate the connection   of a man and a woman which regulates theirs amongst whom there is no family association. It is also very hazardous to settle the magistracy as Socrates has done; for he would have persons of   the same rank always in office, which becomes the cause of sedition even amongst those who are of   no account, but more particularly amongst those who are of a courageous and warlike disposition;   it is indeed evidently necessary that he should frame his community in this manner;   for that golden particle which God has mixed up in the soul of man flies not from one to the other,   but always continues with the same; for he says, that some of our species have gold,   and others silver, blended in their composition from the moment of their birth:   but those who are to be husbandmen and artists, brass and iron; besides, though he deprives   the military of happiness, he says, that the legislator ought to make all the citizens happy;   but it is impossible that the whole city can be happy, without all, or the greater,   or some part of it be happy. For happiness is not like that numerical equality which arises from   certain numbers when added together, although neither of them may separately contain it;   for happiness cannot be thus added together, but must exist in every individual, as some   properties belong to every integral; and if the military are not happy, who else are so? for the   artisans are not, nor the multitude of those who are employed in inferior offices. The state which   Socrates has described has all these defects, and others which are not of less consequence.  CHAPTER 6 It is also nearly   the same in the treatise upon Laws which was writ afterwards, for which reason it will be proper in   this place to consider briefly what he has there said upon government, for Socrates has thoroughly   settled but very few parts of it; as for instance, in what manner the community of wives and children   ought to be regulated, how property should be established, and government conducted. Now he divides the inhabitants into two parts, husbandmen and soldiers,   and from these he select a third part who are to be senators and govern the city; but he has not   said whether or no the husbandman and artificer shall have any or what share in the government,   or whether they shall have arms, and join with the others in war, or not. He thinks   also that the women ought to go to war, and have the same education as the soldiers;   as to other particulars, he has filled his treatise with matter foreign to the purpose;   and with respect to education, he has only said what that of the guards ought to be. As to his book of Laws, laws are the principal thing which that contains,   for he has there said but little concerning government; and this government, which he was   so desirous of framing in such a manner as to impart to its members a more entire community   of goods than is to be found in other cities, he almost brings round again to be the same as that   other government which he had first proposed; for except the community of wives and goods,   he has framed both his governments alike, for the education of the citizens is to be the same   in both; they are in both to live without any servile employ, and their common tables are   to be the same, excepting that in that he says the women should have common tables,   and that there should be a thousand men-at-arms, in this, that there should be five thousand. All the discourses of Socrates are masterly, noble, new, and inquisitive; but that they are all   true it may probably be too much to say. For now with respect to the number just spoken of, it must   be acknowledged that he would want the country of Babylonia for them, or some one like it, of an   immeasurable extent, to support five thousand idle persons, besides a much greater number of women   and servants. Every one, it is true, may frame an hypothesis as he pleases, but yet it ought to be   possible. It has been said, that a legislator should have two things in view when he frames   his laws, the country and the people. He will also do well, if he has some regard to the neighbouring   states, if he intends that his community should maintain any political intercourse with them,   for it is not only necessary that they should understand that practice of war which is adapted   to their own country, but to others also; for admitting that any one chooses not this life   either in public or private, yet there is not the less occasion for their being formidable to   their enemies, not only when they invade their country, but also when they retire out of it. It may also be considered whether the quantity of each person’s property may not be settled   in a different manner from what he has done it in, by making it more determinate;   for he says, that every one ought to have enough whereon to live moderately,   as if any one had said to live well, which is the most comprehensive expression. Besides,   a man may live moderately and miserably at the same time; he had therefore better have proposed,   that they should live both moderately and liberally; for unless these two conspire,   luxury will come in on the one hand, or wretchedness on the other,   since these two modes of living are the only ones applicable to the employment of our substance;   for we cannot say with respect to a man’s fortune, that he is mild or courageous,   but we may say that he is prudent and liberal, which are the only qualities connected therewith. It is also absurd to render property equal, and not to provide for the increasing number of the   citizens; but to leave that circumstance uncertain, as if it would regulate itself   according to the number of women who should happen to be childless, let that be what it would because   this seems to take place in other cities; but the case would not be the same in such a state   which he proposes and those which now actually unite; for in these no one actually wants,   as the property is divided amongst the whole community, be their numbers what they will;   but as it could not then be divided, the supernumeraries, whether they were many   or few, would have nothing at all. But it is more necessary than even to regulate property, to take   care that the increase of the people should not exceed a certain number; and in determining that,   to take into consideration those children who will die, and also those women who will be barren;   and to neglect this, as is done in several cities, is to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and   poverty is the cause of sedition and evil. Now Phidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest   legislators, thought the families and the number of the citizens should continue the same; although   it should happen that all should have allotments at the first, disproportionate to their numbers. In Plato’s Laws it is however different; we shall mention hereafter what we think would be best in   these particulars. He has also neglected in that treatise to point out how the governors are to be   distinguished from the governed; for he says, that as of one sort of wool the warp ought to be made,   and of another the woof, so ought some to govern, and others to be governed. But since he admits,   that all their property may be increased fivefold, why should he not allow the same increase to the   country? he ought also to consider whether his allotment of the houses will be useful   to the community, for he appoints two houses to each person, separate from each other;   but it is inconvenient for a person to inhabit two houses. Now he is desirous to have his whole   plan of government neither a democracy nor an oligarchy, but something between both,   which he calls a polity, for it is to be composed of men-at-arms. If Plato intended to frame a state   in which more than in any other everything should be common, he has certainly given it a right name;   but if he intended it to be the next in perfection to that which he had already framed, it is not so;   for perhaps some persons will give the preference to the Lacedaemonian form of government,   or some other which may more completely have attained to the aristocratic form. Some persons say, that the most perfect government should be composed of all others blended together,   for which reason they commend that of Lacedaemon; for they say, that this is composed   of an oligarchy, a monarchy, and a democracy, their kings representing the monarchical part,   the senate the oligarchical; and, that in the ephori may be found the democratical,   as these are taken from the people. But some say, that in the ephori is absolute power,   and that it is their common meal and daily course of life, in which the democratical form   is represented. It is also said in this treatise of Laws, that the best form of government must,   be one composed of a democracy and a tyranny; though such a mixture no one else would ever   allow to be any government at all, or if it is, the worst possible; those propose what is much   better who blend many governments together; for the most perfect is that which is formed of many   parts. But now in this government of Plato’s there are no traces of a monarchy, only of an oligarchy   and democracy; though he seems to choose that it should rather incline to an oligarchy, as is   evident from the appointment of the magistrates; for to choose them by lot is common to both;   but that a man of fortune must necessarily be a member of the assembly, or to elect the   magistrates, or take part in the management of public affairs, while others are passed over,   makes the state incline to an oligarchy; as does the endeavouring that the greater part of the   rich may be in office, and that the rank of their appointments may correspond with their fortunes. The same principle prevails also in the choice of their senate; the manner of electing   which is favourable also to an oligarchy; for all are obliged to vote for those who are   senators of the first class, afterwards they vote for the same number out of the second,   and then out of the third; but this compulsion to vote at the election of senators does not   extend to the third and fourth classes and the first and second class only are obliged to vote   for the fourth. By this means he says he shall necessarily have an equal number of each rank,   but he is mistaken—for the majority will always consist of those of the first rank,   and the most considerable people; and for this reason, that many of the commonalty   not being obliged to it, will not attend the elections. From hence it is evident,   that such a state will not consist of a democracy and a monarchy, and this will be   further proved by what we shall say when we come particularly to consider this form of government. There will also great danger arise from the manner of electing the senate, when those who are elected   themselves are afterwards to elect others; for by this means, if a certain number choose to   combine together, though not very considerable, the election will always fall according to their   pleasure. Such are the things which Plato proposes concerning government in his book of Laws.  CHAPTER 7 There are also some other   forms of government, which have been proposed either by private persons, or philosophers,   or politicians, all of which come much nearer to those which have been really established,   or now exist, than these two of Plato’s; for neither have they introduced the innovation   of a community of wives and children, and public tables for the women, but have been   contented to set out with establishing such rules as are absolutely necessary. There are some persons who think, that the first object of government should be   to regulate well everything relating to private property; for they say, that a neglect herein is   the source of all seditions whatsoever. For this reason, Phaleas the Chalcedonian first proposed,   that the fortunes of the citizens should be equal, which he thought was not difficult to   accomplish when a community was first settled, but that it was a work of greater difficulty in   one that had been long established; but yet that it might be effected, and an equality   of circumstances introduced by these means, that the rich should give marriage portions,   but never receive any, while the poor should always receive, but never give. But Plato, in his treatise of Laws, thinks that a difference in circumstances should   be permitted to a certain degree; but that no citizen should be allowed to possess more   than five times as much as the lowest census, as we have already mentioned. But legislators   who would establish this principle are apt to overlook what they ought to consider; that   while they regulate the quantity of provisions which each individual shall possess, they ought   also to regulate the number of his children; for if these exceed the allotted quantity of   provision, the law must necessarily be repealed; and yet, in spite of the repeal, it will have   the bad effect of reducing many from wealth to poverty, so difficult is it for innovators not   to fall into such mistakes. That an equality of goods was in some degree serviceable to strengthen   the bands of society, seems to have been known to some of the ancients; for Solon made a law,   as did some others also, to restrain persons from possessing as much land as they pleased. And upon   the same principle there are laws which forbid men to sell their property, as among the Locrians,   unless they can prove that some notorious misfortune has befallen them. They were   also to preserve their ancient patrimony, which custom being broken through by the Leucadians,   made their government too democratic; for by that means it was no longer necessary to be   possessed of a certain fortune to be qualified to be a magistrate. But if an equality of goods   is established, this may be either too much, when it enables the people to live luxuriously,   or too little, when it obliges them to live hard. Hence it is evident, that it is not proper for   the legislator to establish an equality of circumstances, but to fix a proper medium.   Besides, if any one should regulate the division of property in such a manner that there should   be a moderate sufficiency for all, it would be of no use; for it is of more consequence that   the citizen should entertain a similarity of sentiments than an equality of circumstances;   but this can never be attained unless they are properly educated under the direction of the law.   But probably Phaleas may say, that this in what he himself mentions; for he both proposes a equality   of property and one plan of education in his city. But he should have said particularly what   education he intended, nor is it of any service to have this to much one; for this education may   be one, and yet such as will make the citizens over-greedy, to grasp after honours, or riches,   or both. Besides, not only an inequality of possessions, but also of honours, will occasion   seditions, but this upon contrary grounds; for the vulgar will be seditious if there be   an inequality of goods, by those of more elevated sentiments, if there is an equality of honours. “When good and bad do equal honours share.” For men are not guilty of crimes for necessaries only (for which he thinks an equality of goods   would be a sufficient remedy, as they would then have no occasion to steal cold or hunger),   but that they may enjoy what they desire, and not wish for it in vain; for if their desire   extend beyond the common necessaries of life, they were be wicked to gratify them; and not only so,   but if their wishes point that way, they will do the same to enjoy those pleasures which are free   from the alloy of pain. What remedy then shall we find for these three disorders. And first,   to prevent stealing from necessity, let every one be supplied with a moderate subsistence,   which may make the addition of his own industry necessary; second to prevent stealing to procure   the luxuries of life, temperance be enjoined; and thirdly, let those who wish for pleasure in   itself seek for it only in philosophy, all others want the assistance of men. Since then men are guilty of the greatest crimes from ambition, and not from necessity, no one,   for instance aims at being a tyrant to keep him from the cold, hence great honour is due to him   who kills not a thief, but tyrant; so that polity which Phaleas establishes would only be salutary   to prevent little crimes. He has also been very desirous to establish such rules as will conduce   to perfect the internal policy of his state, and he ought also to have done the same with respect   to its neighbours and all foreign nations; for the considerations of the military establishment   should take place in planning every government, that it may not be unprovided in case of a war,   of which he has said nothing; so also with respect to property, it ought not only to   be adapted to the exigencies of the state, but also to such dangers as may arise from without. Thus it should not be so much as to tempt those who are near, and more powerful to invade it,   while those who possess it are not able to drive out the invaders, nor so little as that the state   should not be able to go to war with those who are quite equal to itself, and of this   he has determined nothing; it must indeed be allowed that it is advantageous to a community   to be rather rich than poor; probably the proper boundary is this, not to possess enough to make   it worth while for a more powerful neighbour to attack you, any more than he would those who had   not so much as yourself; thus when Autophradatus proposed to besiege Atarneus, Eubulus advised him   to consider what time it would require to take the city, and then would have him determine whether it   would answer, for that he should choose, if it would even take less than he proposed, to   quit the place; his saying this made Autophradatus reflect upon the business and give over the siege.   There is, indeed, some advantage in an equality of goods amongst the citizens to prevent seditions;   and yet, to say truth, no very great one; for men of great abilities will stomach their being put   upon a level with the rest of the community. For which reason they will very often appear   ready for every commotion and sedition; for the wickedness of mankind is insatiable. For though   at first two oboli might be sufficient, yet when once it is become customary, they continually want   something more, until they set no limits to their expectations; for it is the nature of our desires   to be boundless, and many live only to gratify them. But for this purpose the first object is,   not so much to establish an equality of fortune, as to prevent those who are of a good disposition   from desiring more than their own, and those who are of a bad one from being able to acquire it;   and this may be done if they are kept in an inferior station, and not exposed to injustice.   Nor has he treated well the equality of goods, for he has extended his regulation only to land;   whereas a man’s substance consists not only in this, but also in slaves, cattle, money,   and all that variety of things which fall under the name of chattels; now there must be either   an equality established in all these, or some certain rule, or they must be left entirely   at large. It appears too by his laws, that he intends to establish only a small state,   as all the artificers are to belong to the public, and add nothing to the complement of citizens;   but if all those who are to be employed in public works are to be the slaves of the public,   it should be done in the same manner as it is at Epidamnum, and as Diophantus formerly regulated   it at Athens. From these particulars any one may nearly judge whether Phaleas’s community is well   or ill established. CHAPTER 8  Hippodamus, the son of Euruphon a Milesian, contrived the art of laying out towns,   and separated the Pireus. This man was in other respects too eager after notice, and seemed to   many to live in a very affected manner, with his flowing locks and his expensive ornaments,   and a coarse warm vest which he wore, not only in the winter, but also in the hot weather. As   he was very desirous of the character of a universal scholar, he was the first who,   not being actually engaged in the management of public affairs, sat himself to inquire what sort   of government was best; and he planned a state, consisting of ten thousand persons, divided into   three parts, one consisting of artisans, another of husbandmen, and the third of soldiers; he also   divided the lands into three parts, and allotted one to sacred purposes, another to the public, and   the third to individuals. The first of these was to supply what was necessary for the established   worship of the gods; the second was to be allotted to the support of the soldiery; and the third was   to be the property of the husbandman. He thought also that there need only be three sorts of laws,   corresponding to the three sorts of actions which can be brought, namely, for assault, trespasses,   or death. He ordered also that there should be a particular court of appeal, into which all causes   might be removed which were supposed to have been unjustly determined elsewhere; which court should   be composed of old men chosen for that purpose. He thought also that they should not pass sentence by   votes; but that every one should bring with him a tablet, on which he should write, that he found   the party guilty, if it was so, but if not, he should bring a plain tablet; but if he acquitted   him of one part of the indictment but not of the other, he should express that also on the tablet;   for he disapproved of that general custom already established, as it obliges the judges to be guilty   of perjury if they determined positively either on the one side or the other. He also made a law,   that those should be rewarded who found out anything for the good of the city, and that   the children of those who fell in battle should be educated at the public expense; which law had   never been proposed by any other legislator, though it is at present in use at Athens as   well as in other cities, he would have the magistrates chosen out of the people in general,   by whom he meant the three parts before spoken of; and that those who were so elected should   be the particular guardians of what belonged to the public, to strangers, and to orphans. These are the principal parts and most worthy of notice in Hippodamus’s plan. But some persons   might doubt the propriety of his division of the citizens into three parts; for the artisans,   the husbandmen, and the soldiers are to compose one community, where the husbandmen are to have   no arms, and the artisans neither arms nor land, which would in a manner render them   slaves to the soldiery. It is also impossible that the whole community should partake   of all the honourable employments in it—for the generals and the guardians of the state must   necessarily be appointed out of the soldiery, and indeed the most honourable magistrates;   but as the two other parts will not have their share in the government, how can they be expected   to have any affection for it? But it is necessary that the soldiery should be superior to the other   two parts, and this superiority will not be easily gained without they are very numerous;   and if they are so, why should the community consist of any other members? why should any   others have a right to elect the magistrates? Besides, of what use are the husbandmen to this   community? Artisans, ’tis true, are necessary, for these every city wants, and they can live   upon their business. If the husbandmen indeed furnished the soldiers with provisions,   they would be properly part of the community; but these are supposed to have their private property,   and to cultivate it for their own use. Moreover, if the soldiers themselves are to cultivate that   common land which is appropriated for their support, there will be no distinction between   the soldier and the husbandman, which the legislator intended there should be;   and if there should be any others who are to cultivate the private property of the husbandman   and the common lands of the military, there will be a fourth order in the state which will   have no share in it, and always entertain hostile sentiments towards it. If any one should propose   that the same persons should cultivate their own lands and the public ones also, then there   would be a deficiency of provisions to supply two families, as the lands would not immediately yield   enough for themselves and the soldiers also; and all these things would occasion great confusion.  Nor do I approve of his method of determining causes, when he would have the judge split the   case which comes simply before him; and thus, instead of being a judge, become an arbitrator.   Now when any matter is brought to arbitration, it is customary for many persons to confer together   upon the business that is before them; but when a cause is brought before judges it is not so;   and many legislators take care that the judges shall not have it in their power to communicate   their sentiments to each other. Besides, what can prevent confusion on the bench when one   judge thinks a fine should be different from what another has set it at; one proposing twenty minae,   another ten, or be it more or less, another four, and another five; and it is evident, that in this   manner they will differ from each other, while some will give the whole damages sued for, and   others nothing; in this situation, how shall their determinations be settled? Besides, a judge cannot   be obliged to perjure himself who simply acquits or condemns, if the action is fairly and justly   brought; for he who acquits the party does not say that he ought not to pay any fine at all, but   that he ought not to pay a fine of twenty minae. But he that condemns him is guilty of perjury if   he sentences him to pay twenty minae while he believes the damages ought not to be so much. Now with respect to these honours which he proposes to bestow on those who can give   any information useful to the community, this, though very pleasing in speculation,   is what the legislator should not settle, for it would encourage informers, and probably occasion   commotions in the state. And this proposal of his gives rise also to further conjectures and   inquiries; for some persons have doubted whether it is useful or hurtful to alter the established   law of any country, if even for the better; for which reason one cannot immediately determine upon   what he here says, whether it is advantageous to alter the law or not. We know, indeed,   that it is possible to propose to new model both the laws and government as a common good;   and since we have mentioned this subject, it may be very proper to enter into a few   particulars concerning it, for it contains some difficulties, as I have already said,   and it may appear better to alter them, since it has been found useful in other sciences. Thus the science of physic is extended beyond its ancient bounds; so is the gymnastic,   and indeed all other arts and powers; so that one may lay it down for certain that the same   thing will necessarily hold good in the art of government. And it may also be affirmed,   that experience itself gives a proof of this; for the ancient laws are too simple and barbarous;   which allowed the Greeks to wear swords in the city, and to buy their wives of each other.   And indeed all the remains of old laws which we have are very simple; for instance, a law in Cuma   relative to murder. If any person who prosecutes another for murder can produce a certain number of   witnesses to it of his own relations, the accused person shall be held guilty. Upon the whole,   all persons ought to endeavour to follow what is right, and not what is established; and   it is probable that the first men, whether they sprung out of the earth, or were saved from some   general calamity, had very little understanding or knowledge, as is affirmed of these aborigines;   so that it would be absurd to continue in the practice of their rules. Nor is it, moreover,   right to permit written laws always to remain without alteration; for as in all other sciences,   so in politics, it is impossible to express everything in writing with perfect exactness;   for when we commit anything to writing we must use general terms, but in every action there   is something particular to itself, which these may not comprehend; from whence it is evident,   that certain laws will at certain times admit of alterations. But if we consider this matter in   another point of view, it will appear to require great caution; for when the advantage proposed is   trifling, as the accustoming the people easily to abolish their laws is of bad consequence,   it is evidently better to pass over some faults which either the legislator or the magistrates   may have committed; for the alterations will not be of so much service as a habit of disobeying   the magistrates will be of disservice. Besides, the instance brought from the arts is fallacious;   for it is not the same thing to alter the one as the other. For a law derives all its strength from   custom, and this requires long time to establish; so that, to make it an easy matter to pass from   the established laws to other new ones, is to weaken the power of laws. Besides, here is another   question; if the laws are to be altered, are they all to be altered, and in every government or not,   and whether at the pleasure of one person or many? all which particulars will make a great   difference; for which reason we will at present drop the inquiry, to pursue it at some other time.  CHAPTER 9 There are two considerations which   offer themselves with respect to the government established at Lacedaemon and Crete, and indeed   in almost all other states whatsoever; one is whether their laws do or do not promote the best   establishment possible? the other is whether there is anything, if we consider either the principles   upon which it is founded or the executive part of it, which prevents the form of government that   they had proposed to follow from being observed; now it is allowed that in every well-regulated   state the members of it should be free from servile labour; but in what manner this shall   be effected is not so easy to determine; for the Penestse have very often attacked the Thessalians,   and the Helots the Lacedaemonians, for they in a manner continually watch an opportunity for   some misfortune befalling them. But no such thing has ever happened to the Cretans; the reason for   which probably is, that although they are engaged in frequent wars with the neighbouring cities,   yet none of these would enter into an alliance with the revolters, as it would be disadvantageous   for them, who themselves also have their villains. But now there is perpetual enmity between the   Lacedaemonians and all their neighbours, the Argives, the Messenians, and the Arcadians.   Their slaves also first revolted from the Thessalians while they were engaged in wars with   their neighbours the Acheans, the Perrabeans, and the Magnesians. It seems to me indeed, if nothing   else, yet something very troublesome to keep upon proper terms with them; for if you are remiss in   your discipline they grow insolent, and think themselves upon an equality with their masters;   and if they are hardly used they are continually plotting against you and hate you. It is evident,   then, that those who employ slaves have not as yet hit upon the right way of managing them. As to the indulging of women in any particular liberties, it is hurtful to the end of government   and the prosperity of the city; for as a man and his wife are the two parts of a family,   if we suppose a city to be divided into two parts, we must allow that   the number of men and women will be equal. In whatever city then the women are not   under good regulations, we must look upon one half of it as not under the restraint of law,   as it there happened; for the legislator, desiring to make his whole city a collection   of warriors with respect to the men, he most evidently accomplished his design; but in the   meantime the women were quite neglected, for they live without restraint in every improper   indulgence and luxury. So that in such a state riches will necessarily be in general esteem,   particularly if the men are governed by their wives, which has been the case with   many a brave and warlike people except the Celts, and those other nations, if there are any such,   who openly practise pederasty. And the first mythologists seem not improperly   to have joined Mars and Venus together; for all nations of this character are greatly addicted   either to the love of women or of boys, for which reason it was thus at Lacedaemon; and many things   in their state were done by the authority of the women. For what is the difference,   if the power is in the hands of the women, or in the hands of those whom they themselves govern?   it must turn to the same account. As this boldness of the women can be of no use in any common   occurrences, if it was ever so, it must be in war; but even here we find that the Lacedaemonian women   were of the greatest disservice, as was proved at the time of the Theban invasion, when they were   of no use at all, as they are in other cities, but made more disturbance than even the enemy. The origin of this indulgence which the Lacedaemonian women enjoy is easily accounted for,   from the long time the men were absent from home upon foreign expeditions against the Argives, and   afterwards the Arcadians and Messenians, so that, when these wars were at an end, their military   life, in which there is no little virtue, prepared them to obey the precepts of their law-giver; but   we are told, that when Lycurgus endeavoured also to reduce the women to an obedience to his laws,   upon their refusal he declined it. It may indeed be said that the women were the causes of these   things, and of course all the fault was theirs. But we are not now considering where the fault   lies, or where it does not lie, but what is right and what is wrong; and when the manners   of the women are not well regulated, as I have already said, it must not only occasion faults   which are disgraceful to the state, but also increase the love of money. In the next place,   fault may be found with his unequal division of property, for some will have far too much,   others too little; by which means the land will come into few hands, which business is badly   regulated by his laws. For he made it infamous for any one either to buy or sell their possessions,   in which he did right; but he permitted any one that chose it to give them away, or bequeath them,   although nearly the same consequences will arise from one practice as from the other. It   is supposed that near two parts in five of the whole country is the property of women, owing   to their being so often sole heirs, and having such large fortunes in marriage; though it would   be better to allow them none, or a little, or a certain regulated proportion. Now every one is   permitted to make a woman his heir if he pleases; and if he dies intestate, he who succeeds as heir   at law gives it to whom he pleases. From whence it happens that although the country is able to   support fifteen hundred horse and thirty thousand foot, the number does not amount to one thousand. And from these facts it is evident, that this particular is badly regulated;   for the city could not support one shock, but was ruined for want of men. They say,   that during the reigns of their ancient kings they used to present foreigners with the   freedom of their city, to prevent there being a want of men while they carried on long wars;   it is also affirmed that the number of Spartans was formerly ten thousand; but be that as it will,   an equality of property conduces much to increase the number of the people. The law,   too, which he made to encourage population was by no means calculated to correct this inequality;   for being willing that the Spartans should be as numerous as possible, to make them desirous of   having large families he ordered that he who had three children should be excused the night-watch,   and that he who had four should pay no taxes: though it is very evident, that while the land   was divided in this manner, that if the people increased there must many of them be very poor. Nor was he less blamable for the manner in which he constituted the ephori;   for these magistrates take cognisance of things of the last importance, and yet they are chosen out   of the people in general; so that it often happens that a very poor person is elected to that office,   who, from that circumstance, is easily bought. There have been many instances of this formerly,   as well as in the late affair at Andros. And these men, being corrupted with money, went as   far as they could to ruin the city: and, because their power was too great and nearly tyrannical,   their kings were obliged to natter them, which contributed greatly to hurt the state;   so that it altered from an aristocracy to a democracy. This magistracy is indeed the   great support of the state; for the people are easy, knowing that they are eligible   to the first office in it; so that, whether it took place by the intention of the legislator,   or whether it happened by chance, this is of great service to their affairs; for it is necessary that   every member of the state should endeavour that each part of the government should be preserved,   and continue the same. And upon this principle their kings have always acted, out of regard to   their honour; the wise and good from their attachment to the senate, a seat wherein   they consider as the reward of virtue; and the common people, that they may support the ephori,   of whom they consist. And it is proper that these magistrates should be chosen out of the whole   community, not as the custom is at present, which is very ridiculous. The ephori are the supreme   judges in causes of the last consequence; but as it is quite accidental what sort of persons they   may be, it is not right that they should determine according to their own opinion, but by a written   law or established custom. Their way of life also is not consistent with the manners of the city,   for it is too indulgent; whereas that of others is too severe; so that they cannot support it, but   are obliged privately to act contrary to law, that they may enjoy some of the pleasures of sense.   There are also great defects in the institution of their senators. If indeed they were fitly trained   to the practice of every human virtue, every one would readily admit that they would be useful   to the government; but still it might be debated whether they should be continued judges for life,   to determine points of the greatest moment, since the mind has its old age as well as the body;   but as they are so brought up, that even the legislator could not depend upon them as good men,   their power must be inconsistent with the safety of the state: for it is known that the members of   that body have been guilty both of bribery and partiality in many public affairs; for which   reason it had been much better if they had been made answerable for their conduct, which they   are not. But it may be said the ephori seem to have a check upon all the magistrates. They have   indeed in this particular very great power; but I affirm that they should not be entrusted with this   control in the manner they are. Moreover, the mode of choice which they make use of at the election   of their senators is very childish. Nor is it right for any one to solicit for a place he is   desirous of; for every person, whether he chooses it or not, ought to execute any office he is fit   for. But his intention was evidently the same in this as in the other parts of his government. For   making his citizens ambitious after honours, with men of that disposition he has filled his senate,   since no others will solicit for that office; and yet the principal part of   those crimes which men are deliberately guilty of arise from ambition and avarice. We will inquire at another time whether the office of a king is useful to the state:   thus much is certain, that they should be chosen from a consideration of their conduct and not as   they are now. But that the legislator himself did not expect to make all his citizens honourable   and completely virtuous is evident from this, that he distrusts them as not being good men;   for he sent those upon the same embassy that were at variance with each other; and thought,   that in the dispute of the kings the safety of the state consisted. Neither were their common   meals at first well established: for these should rather have been provided at the public expense,   as at Crete, where, as at Lacedaemon, every one was obliged to buy his portion,   although he might be very poor, and could by no means bear the expense, by which means the   contrary happened to what the legislator desired: for he intended that those public meals should   strengthen the democratic part of his government: but this regulation had quite the contrary effect,   for those who were very poor could not take part in them; and it was an observation of their   forefathers, that the not allowing those who could not contribute their proportion to the common   tables to partake of them, would be the ruin of the state. Other persons have censured his laws   concerning naval affairs, and not without reason, as it gave rise to disputes. For the commander of   the fleet is in a manner set up in opposition to the kings, who are generals of the army for life. There is also another defect in his laws worthy of censure, which Plato has given in his book   of Laws; that the whole constitution was calculated only for the business of war:   it is indeed excellent to make them conquerors; for which reason the preservation of the state   depended thereon. The destruction of it commenced with their victories: for they knew not how to   be idle, or engage in any other employment than war. In this particular also they were mistaken,   that though they rightly thought, that those things which are the objects of contention   amongst mankind are better procured by virtue than vice, yet they wrongfully   preferred the things themselves to virtue. Nor was the public revenue well managed at Sparta,   for the state was worth nothing while they were obliged to carry on the most extensive wars,   and the subsidies were very badly raised; for as the Spartans possessed a large extent of country,   they were not exact upon each other as to what they paid in. And thus an event contrary to the   legislator’s intention took place; for the state was poor, the individuals avaricious.   Enough of the Lacedaemonian government; for these seem the chief defects in it.  CHAPTER 10 The government of   Crete bears a near resemblance to this, in some few particulars it is not worse, but in general   it is far inferior in its contrivance. For it appears and is allowed in many particulars   the constitution of Lacedaemon was formed in imitation of that of Crete;   and in general most new things are an improvement upon the old. For they say,   that when Lycurgus ceased to be guardian to King Charilles he went abroad and spent a long time   with his relations in Crete, for the Lycians are a colony of the Lacedaemonians; and those who first   settled there adopted that body of laws which they found already established by the inhabitants;   in like manner also those who now live near them have the very laws which Minos first drew up. This island seems formed by nature to be the mistress of Greece, for it is entirely surrounded   by a navigable ocean which washes almost all the maritime parts of that country, and is not   far distant on the one side from Peloponnesus, on the other, which looks towards Asia, from Triopium   and Rhodes. By means of this situation Minos acquired the empire of the sea and the islands;   some of which he subdued, in others planted colonies: at last he died at Camicus while he was   attacking Sicily. There is this analogy between the customs of the Lacedaemonians and the Cretans,   the Helots cultivate the grounds for the one, the domestic slaves for the other. Both states   have their common meals, and the Lacedaemonians called these formerly not psiditia but andpia,   as the Cretans do; which proves from whence the custom arose. In this particular   their governments are also alike: the ephori have the same power with those of Crete,   who are called kosmoi; with this difference only, that the number of the one is five,   of the other ten. The senators are the same as those whom the Cretans call the council.   There was formerly also a kingly power in Crete; but it was afterwards dissolved, and the command   of their armies was given to the kosmoi. Every one also has a vote in their public assembly;   but this has only the power of confirming what has already passed the council and the kosmoi. The Cretans conducted their public meals better than the Lacedaemonians, for at Lacedaemon each   individual was obliged to furnish what was assessed upon him; which if he could not do,   there was a law which deprived him of the rights of a citizen, as has been already mentioned: but   in Crete they were furnished by the community; for all the corn and cattle, taxes and contributions,   which the domestic slaves were obliged to furnish, were divided into parts and allotted to the gods,   the exigencies of the state, and these public meals; so that all the men, women,   and children were maintained from a common stock. The legislator gave great attention   to encourage a habit of eating sparingly, as very useful to the citizens. He also endeavoured, that   his community might not be too populous, to lessen the connection with women, by introducing the love   of boys: whether in this he did well or ill we shall have some other opportunity of considering.   But that the public meals were better ordered at Crete than at Lacedaemon is very evident. The institution of the kosmoi, was still worse than that of the ephori:   for it contained all the faults incident to that magistracy and some peculiar to itself;   for in both cases it is uncertain who will be elected: but the Lacedaemonians have this   advantage which the others have not, that as all are eligible, the whole community have a share   in the highest honours, and therefore all desire to preserve the state: whereas among the Cretans   the kosmoi are not chosen out of the people in general, but out of some certain families,   and the senate out of the kosmoi. And the same observations which may be made on the senate at   Lacedaemon may be applied to these; for their being under no control, and their continuing   for life, is an honour greater than they merit; and to have their proceedings not regulated by a   written law, but left to their own discretion, is dangerous. (As to there being no insurrections,   although the people share not in the management of public affairs, this is no proof of a   well-constituted government, as the kosmoi have no opportunity of being bribed like the ephori,   as they live in an island far from those who would corrupt them.) But the method they take to correct   that fault is absurd, impolitic, and tyrannical: for very often either their fellow-magistrates   or some private persons conspire together and turn out the kosmoi. They are also permitted to   resign their office before their time is elapsed, and if all this was done by law it would be well,   and not at the pleasure of the individuals, which is a bad rule to follow. But what is worst of all   is, that general confusion which those who are in power introduce to impede the ordinary course   of justice; which sufficiently shows what is the nature of the government, or rather lawless force:   for it is usual with the principal persons amongst them to collect together some of the common people   and their friends, and then revolt and set up for themselves, and come to blows with each   other. And what is the difference, if a state is dissolved at once by such violent means,   or if it gradually so alters in process of time as to be no longer the same constitution? A state   like this would ever be exposed to the invasions of those who were powerful and inclined to attack   it; but, as has been already mentioned, its situation preserves it, as it is free from   the inroads of foreigners; and for this reason the family slaves still remain quiet at Crete,   while the Helots are perpetually revolting: for the Cretans take no part in foreign affairs,   and it is but lately that any foreign troops have made an attack upon the island; and their   ravages soon proved the ineffectualness of their laws. And thus much for the government of Crete.  CHAPTER 11 The government of Carthage   seems well established, and in many respects superior to others; in some particulars it   bears a near resemblance to the Lacedaemonians; and indeed these three states, the Cretans,   the Lacedaemonians and the Carthaginians are in some things very like each other, in others   they differ greatly. Amongst many excellent constitutions this may show how well their   government is framed, that although the people are admitted to a share in the administration,   the form of it remains unaltered, without any popular insurrections, worth notice,   on the one hand, or degenerating into a tyranny on the other. Now the Carthaginians have these things   in common with the Lacedaemonians: public tables for those who are connected together by the tie   of mutual friendship, after the manner of their Phiditia; they have also a magistracy, consisting   of an hundred and four persons, similar to the ephori, or rather selected with more judgment;   for amongst the Lacedaemonians, all the citizens are eligible, but amongst the Carthaginians,   they are chosen out of those of the better sort: there is also some analogy between the king and   the senate in both these governments, though the Carthaginian method of appointing their kings is   best, for they do not confine themselves to one family; nor do they permit the election to be at   large, nor have they any regard to seniority; for if amongst the candidates there are any of   greater merit than the rest, these they prefer to those who may be older; for as their power   is very extensive, if they are persons of no account, they may be very hurtful to the state,   as they have always been to the Lacedaemonians; also the greater part of those things which   become reprehensible by their excess are common to all those governments which we have described. Now of those principles on which the Carthaginians have established their mixed form of government,   composed of an

    aristocracy and democracy, some incline to produce a democracy, others   an oligarchy: for instance, if the kings and the senate are unanimous upon any point in debate,   they can choose whether they will bring it before the people or no; but if they disagree,   it is to these they must appeal, who are not only to hear what has been approved of by the senate,   but are finally to determine upon it; and whosoever chooses it, has a right to speak against   any matter whatsoever that may be proposed, which is not permitted in other cases. The five, who   elect each other, have very great and extensive powers; and these choose the hundred, who are   magistrates of the highest rank: their power also continues longer than any other magistrates,   for it commences before they come into office, and is prolonged after they are out of it; and in this   particular the state inclines to an oligarchy: but as they are not elected by lot, but by suffrage,   and are not permitted to take money, they are the greatest supporters imaginable of an aristocracy. The determining all causes by the same magistrates, and not orae in one court   and another in another, as at Lacedaemon, has the same influence. The constitution of   Carthage is now shifting from an aristocracy to an oligarchy, in consequence of an opinion   which is favourably entertained by many, who think that the magistrates in the community   ought not to be persons of family only, but of fortune also; as it is impossible for those who   are in bad circumstances to support the dignity of their office, or to be at leisure to apply to   public business. As choosing men of fortune to be magistrates make a state incline to an oligarchy,   and men of abilities to an aristocracy, so is there a third method of proceeding which took   place in the polity of Carthage; for they have an eye to these two particulars when they elect their   officers, particularly those of the highest rank, their kings and their generals. It must   be admitted, that it was a great fault in their legislator not to guard against the constitution’s   degenerating from an aristocracy; for this is a most necessary thing to provide for at first,   that those citizens who have the best abilities should never be obliged to do anything unworthy   their character, but be always at leisure to serve the public, not only when in office,   but also when private persons; for if once you are obliged to look among the wealthy,   that you may have men at leisure to serve you, your greatest offices, of king and general, will   soon become venal; in consequence of which, riches will be more honourable than virtue and a love of   money be the ruling principle in the city-for what those who have the chief power regard as   honourable will necessarily be the object which the citizens in general will aim at; and where the   first honours are not paid to virtue, there the aristocratic form of government cannot flourish:   for it is reasonable to conclude, that those who bought their places should generally make   an advantage of what they laid out their money for; as it is absurd to suppose, that if a man of   probity who is poor should be desirous of gaining something, a bad man should not endeavour to do   the same, especially to reimburse himself; for which reason the magistracy should be formed of   those who are most able to support an aristocracy. It would have been better for the legislature   to have passed over the poverty of men of merit, and only to have taken care to have   ensured them sufficient leisure, when in office, to attend to public affairs. It seems also improper, that one person should execute several offices, which was   approved of at Carthage; for one business is best done by one person; and it is the duty of   the legislator to look to this, and not make the same person a musician and a shoemaker:   so that where the state is not small it is more politic and more popular to admit many   persons to have a share in the government; for, as I just now said, it is not only more usual,   but everything is better and sooner done, when one thing only is allotted to one person:   and this is evident both in the army and navy, where almost every one, in his turn,   both commands and is under command. But as their government inclines to an oligarchy, they avoid   the ill effects of it by always appointing some of the popular party to the government of cities   to make their fortunes. Thus they consult this fault in their constitution and render it stable;   but this is depending on chance; whereas the legislator ought to frame his government,   that there the no room for insurrections. But now, if there should be any general calamity,   and the people should revolt from their rulers, there is no remedy for reducing them to obedience   by the laws. And these are the particulars of the Lacedaemonian, the Cretan, and the Carthaginian   governments which seem worthy of commendation. CHAPTER 12  Some of those persons who have written upon government had never any share in public affairs,   but always led a private life. Everything worthy of notice in their works we have already spoke to.   Others were legislators, some in their own cities, others were employed in regulating the governments   of foreign states. Some of them only composed a body of laws; others formed the constitution also,   as Lycurgus; and Solon, who did both. The Lacedaemonians have been already mentioned.   Some persons think that Solon was an excellent legislator, who could dissolve a pure oligarchy,   and save the people from that slavery which hung over them, and establish the ancient democratic   form of government in his country; wherein every part of it was so framed as to be well adapted   to the whole. In the senate of Areopagus an oligarchy was preserved; by the manner of   electing their magistrates, an aristocracy; and in their courts of justice, a democracy. Solon seems not to have altered the established form of government,   either with respect to the senate or the mode of electing their magistrates; but to have raised   the people to great consideration in the state by allotting the supreme judicial department to them;   and for this some persons blame him, as having done what would soon overturn that   balance of power he intended to establish; for by trying all causes whatsoever before the people,   who were chosen by lot to determine them, it was necessary to flatter a tyrannical populace who   had got this power; which contributed to bring the government to that pure democracy it now is. Both Ephialtes and Pericles abridged the power of the Areopagites, the latter of whom introduced   the method of paying those who attended the courts of justice: and thus every one   who aimed at being popular proceeded increasing the power of the people to what we now see it.   But it is evident that this was not Solon’s intention, but that it arose from accident;   for the people being the cause of the naval victory over the Medes, assumed greatly upon it,   and enlisted themselves under factious demagogues, although opposed by the better   part of the citizens. He thought it indeed most necessary to entrust the people with the choice   of their magistrates and the power of calling them to account; for without that they must have been   slaves and enemies to the other citizens: but he ordered them to elect those only who were   persons of good account and property, either out of those who were worth five hundred medimnoi,   or those who were called zeugitai, or those of the third census, who were called horsemen. As for those of the fourth, which consisted of mechanics, they were incapable of any office.   Zaleucus was the legislator of the Western Locrians, as was Charondas, the Catanean, of   his own cities, and those also in Italy and Sicily which belonged to the Calcidians. Some persons   endeavour to prove that Onomacritus, the Locrian, was the first person of note who drew up laws; and   that he employed himself in that business while he was at Crete, where he continued some time to   learn the prophetic art: and they say, that Thales was his companion; and that Lycurgus and Zaleucus   were the scholars of Thales, and Charondas of Zaleucus; but those who advance this, advance   what is repugnant to chronology. Philolaus also, of the family of the Bacchiades, was a Theban   legislator. This man was very fond of Diocles, a victor in the Olympic games, and when he left   his country from a disgust at an improper passion which his mother Alithoe had entertained for him,   and settled at Thebes, Philolaus followed him, where they both died, and where they still show   their tombs placed in view of each other, but so disposed, that one of them looks towards Corinth,   the other does not; the reason they give for this is, that Diodes, from his detestation   of his mother’s passion, would have his tomb so placed that no one could see Corinth from it; but   Philolaus chose that it might be seen from his: and this was the cause of their living at Thebes. As Philolaus gave them laws concerning many other things, so did he upon adoption, which they call   adoptive laws; and this he in particular did to preserve the number of families. Charondas did   nothing new, except in actions for perjury, which he was the first person who took into particular   consideration. He also drew up his laws with greater elegance and accuracy than even any   of our present legislators. Philolaus introduced the law for the equal distribution of goods; Plato   that for the community of women, children, and goods, and also for public tables for the women;   and one concerning drunkenness, that they might observe sobriety in their symposiums.   He also made a law concerning their warlike exercises; that they should acquire a habit   of using both hands alike, as it was necessary that one hand should be as useful as the other. As for Draco’s laws, they were published when the government was already established,   and they have nothing particular in them worth mentioning, except their severity on account   of the enormity of their punishments. Pittacus was the author of some laws, but never drew up   any form of government; one of which was this, that if a drunken man beat any person he should   be punished more than if he did it when sober; for as people are more apt to be abusive when   drunk than sober, he paid no consideration to the excuse which drunkenness might claim, but regarded   only the common benefit. Andromadas Regmus was also a lawgiver to the Thracian talcidians.   There are some laws of his concerning murders and heiresses extant, but these contain nothing   that any one can say is new and his own. And thus much for different sorts of governments,   as well those which really exist as those which different persons have proposed. BOOK 3 CHAPTER 1  Every one who inquires into the nature of government, and what are its different forms,   should make this almost his first question, What is a city? For upon this there is a dispute:   for some persons say the city did this or that, while others say, not the city, but the oligarchy,   or the tyranny. We see that the city is the only object which both the politician and legislator   have in view in all they do: but government is a certain ordering of those who inhabit a   city. As a city is a collective body, and, like other wholes, composed of many parts,   it is evident our first inquiry must be, what a citizen is: for a city is a certain number of   citizens. So that we must consider whom we ought to call citizen, and who is one; for this is   often doubtful: for every one will not allow that this character is applicable to the same person;   for that man who would be a citizen in a republic would very often not be one in an oligarchy. We   do not include in this inquiry many of those who acquire this appellation out of the ordinary way,   as honorary persons, for instance, but those only who have a natural right to it. Now it is not residence which constitutes a man a citizen; for in this sojourners   and slaves are upon an equality with him; nor will it be sufficient for this purpose,   that you have the privilege of the laws, and may plead or be impleaded, for this all those   of different nations, between whom there is a mutual agreement for that purpose, are allowed;   although it very often happens, that sojourners have not a perfect right therein without the   protection of a patron, to whom they are obliged to apply, which shows that their share in the   community is incomplete. In like manner, with respect to boys who are not yet enrolled,   or old men who are past war, we admit that they are in some respects citizens, but not   completely so, but with some exceptions, for these are not yet arrived to years of maturity,   and those are past service; nor is there any difference between them. But what we mean is   sufficiently intelligible and clear, we want a complete citizen, one in whom there is no   deficiency to be corrected to make him so. As to those who are banished, or infamous, there may   be the same objections made and the same answer given. There is nothing that more characterises   a complete citizen than having a share in the judicial and executive part of the government.  With respect to offices, some are fixed to a particular time, so that no person is,   on any account, permitted to fill them twice; or else not till some certain period has intervened;   others are not fixed, as a juryman’s, and a member of the general assembly: but probably some one may   say these are not offices, nor have the citizens in these capacities any share in the government;   though surely it is ridiculous to say that those who have the principal power in the state bear no   office in it. But this objection is of no weight, for it is only a dispute about words; as there is   no general term which can be applied both to the office of a juryman and a member of the assembly.   For the sake of distinction, suppose we call it an indeterminate office: but I lay it down as a   maxim, that those are citizens who could exercise it. Such then is the description of a citizen who   comes nearest to what all those who are called citizens are. Every one also should know,   that of the component parts of those things which differ from each other in species, after the first   or second remove, those which follow have either nothing at all or very little common to each. Now we see that governments differ from each other in their form,   and that some of them are defective, others as excellent as possible: for it is evident,   that those which have many deficiencies and degeneracies in them must be far inferior to   those which are without such faults. What I mean by degeneracies will be hereafter explained.   Hence it is clear that the office of a citizen must differ as governments do from each other:   for which reason he who is called a citizen has, in a democracy, every privilege which that   station supposes. In other forms of government he may enjoy them; but not necessarily: for in   some states the people have no power; nor have they any general assembly, but a few select men. The trial also of different causes is allotted to different persons; as at Lacedaemon all disputes   concerning contracts are brought before some of the ephori: the senate are the judges in cases   of murder, and so on; some being to be heard by one magistrate, others by another: and thus at   Carthage certain magistrates determine all causes. But our former description of a citizen will admit   of correction; for in some governments the office of a juryman and a member of the general assembly   is not an indeterminate one; but there are particular persons appointed for these purposes,   some or all of the citizens being appointed jurymen or members of the general assembly,   and this either for all causes and all public business whatsoever, or else for some particular   one: and this may be sufficient to show what a citizen is; for he who has a right to a share   in the judicial and executive part of government in any city, him we call a citizen of that place;   and a city, in one word, is a collective body of such persons sufficient in themselves to   all the purposes of life. CHAPTER 2  In common use they define a citizen to be one who is sprung from citizens on both sides,   not on the father’s or the mother’s only. Others carry the matter still further, and inquire how   many of his ancestors have been citizens, as his grandfather, great-grandfather, etc.,   but some persons have questioned how the first of the family could prove themselves citizens,   according to this popular and careless definition. Gorgias of Leontium, partly   entertaining the same doubt, and partly in jest, says, that as a mortar is made by a mortar-maker,   so a citizen is made by a citizen-maker, and a Larisssean by a Larisssean-maker. This is   indeed a very simple account of the matter; for if citizens are so, according to this definition,   it will be impossible to apply it to the first founders or first inhabitants of states,   who cannot possibly claim in right either of their father or mother. It is probably a matter of still   more difficulty to determine their rights as citizens who are admitted to their freedom after   any revolution in the state. As, for instance, at Athens, after the expulsion of the tyrants,   when Clisthenes enrolled many foreigners and city-slaves amongst the tribes; and the doubt   with respect to them was, not whether they were citizens or no, but whether they were legally so   or not. Though indeed some persons may have this further doubt, whether a citizen can be a citizen   when he is illegally made; as if an illegal citizen, and one who is no citizen at all,   were in the same predicament: but since we see some persons govern unjustly, whom yet we admit   to govern, though not justly, and the definition of a citizen is one who exercises certain offices,   for such a one we have defined a citizen to be, it is evident, that a citizen illegally created yet   continues to be a citizen, but whether justly or unjustly so belongs to the former inquiry.  CHAPTER 3 It has also been doubted what was and what   was not the act of the city; as, for instance, when a democracy arises out of an aristocracy or   a tyranny; for some persons then refuse to fulfil their contracts; as if the right to receive the   money was in the tyrant and not in the state, and many other things of the same nature; as if   any covenant was founded for violence and not for the common good. So in like manner, if anything is   done by those who have the management of public affairs where a democracy is established, their   actions are to be considered as the actions of the state, as well as in the oligarchy or tyranny. And here it seems very proper to consider this question,   When shall we say that a city is the same, and when shall we say that it is different? It is but a superficial mode of examining into this question to begin with the place and the   people; for it may happen that these may be divided from that, or that some one of them may   live in one place, and some in another (but this question may be regarded as no very knotty one;   for, as a city may acquire that appellation on many accounts, it may be solved many ways);   and in like manner, when men inhabit one common place, when shall we say that they inhabit the   same city, or that the city is the same? for it does not depend upon the walls; for I can suppose   Peloponnesus itself surrounded with a wall, as Babylon was, and every other place, which rather   encircles many nations than one city, and that they say was taken three days when some of the   inhabitants knew nothing of it: but we shall find a proper time to determine this question;   for the extent of a city, how large it should be, and whether it should consist of more than one   people, these are particulars that the politician should by no means be unacquainted with. This,   too, is a matter of inquiry, whether we shall say that a city is the same while it is inhabited   by the same race of men, though some of them are perpetually dying, others coming into the world,   as we say that a river or a fountain is the same, though the waters are continually changing;   or when a revolution takes place shall we say the men are the same, but the city is different:   for if a city is a community, it is a community of citizens; but if the mode of government should   alter, and become of another sort, it would seem a necessary consequence that the city is   not the same; as we regard the tragic chorus as different from the comic, though it may probably   consist of the same performers: thus every other community or composition is said to be different   if the species of composition is different; as in music the same hands produce different harmony,   as the Doric and Phrygian. If this is true, it is evident, that when we speak of a city   as being the same we refer to the government there established; and this, whether it is called by the   same name or any other, or inhabited by the same men or different. But whether or no it   is right to dissolve the community when the constitution is altered is another question.  CHAPTER 4 What has been said, it follows that we should   consider whether the same virtues which constitute a good man make a valuable citizen, or different;   and if a particular inquiry is necessary for this matter we must first give a general description   of the virtues of a good citizen; for as a sailor is one of those who make up a community, so is a   citizen, although the province of one sailor may be different from another’s (for one is a rower,   another a steersman, a third a boatswain, and so on, each having their several appointments),   it is evident that the most accurate description of any one good sailor must refer to his peculiar   abilities, yet there are some things in which the same description may be applied to the whole crew,   as the safety of the ship is the common business of all of them, for this is the general centre   of all their cares: so also with respect to citizens, although they may in a few particulars   be very different, yet there is one care common to them all, the safety of the community, for the   community of the citizens composes the state; for which reason the virtue of a citizen has   necessarily a reference to the state. But if there are different sorts of governments, it is evident   that those actions which constitute the virtue of an excellent citizen in one community will not   constitute it in another; wherefore the virtue of such a one cannot be perfect: but we say, a man is   good when his virtues are perfect; from whence it follows, that an excellent citizen does not   possess that virtue which constitutes a good man. Those who are any ways doubtful concerning this   question may be convinced of the truth of it by examining into the best formed states: for, if it   is impossible that a city should consist entirely of excellent citizens (while it is necessary that   every one should do well in his calling, in which consists his excellence, as it is impossible   that all the citizens should have the same qualifications) it is impossible that the virtue   of a citizen and a good man should be the same; for all should possess the virtue of an excellent   citizen: for from hence necessarily arise the perfection of the city: but that every one should   possess the virtue of a good man is impossible without all the citizens in a well-regulated   state were necessarily virtuous. Besides, as a city is composed of dissimilar parts, as an   animal is of life and body; the soul of reason and appetite; a family of a man and his wife—property   of a master and a slave; in the same manner, as a city is composed of all these and many other very   different parts, it necessarily follows that the virtue of all the citizens cannot be the same;   as the business of him who leads the band is different from the other dancers. From all which   proofs it is evident that the virtues of a citizen cannot be one and the same. But do we never find   those virtues united which constitute a good man and excellent citizen? for we say, such a one is   an excellent magistrate and a prudent and good man; but prudence is a necessary qualification for   all those who engage in public affairs. Nay, some persons affirm that the education of those who are   intended to command should, from the beginning, be different from other citizens, as the children of   kings are generally instructed in riding and warlike exercises; and thus Euripides says: “… No showy arts Be mine, but teach me what the state requires.” As if those who are to rule were to have an education peculiar to themselves.   But if we allow, that the virtues of a good man and a good magistrate may be the same,   and a citizen is one who obeys the magistrate, it follows that the virtue of the one cannot in   general be the same as the virtue of the other, although it may be true of some particular   citizen; for the virtue of the magistrate must be different from the virtue of the citizen. For   which reason Jason declared that was he deprived of his kingdom he should pine away with regret,   as not knowing how to live a private man. But it is a great recommendation to know how to command   as well as to obey; and to do both these things well is the virtue of an accomplished citizen.   If then the virtue of a good man consists only in being able to command, but the virtue of a   good citizen renders him equally fit for the one as well as the other, the commendation of both of   them is not the same. It appears, then, that both he who commands and he who obeys should each of   them learn their separate business: but that the citizen should be master of and take part in both   these, as any one may easily perceive; in a family government there is no occasion for the master   to know how to perform the necessary offices, but rather to enjoy the labour of others; for   to do the other is a servile part. I mean by the other, the common family business of the slave. There are many sorts of slaves; for their employments are various:   of these the handicraftsmen are one, who, as their name imports, get their living by the labour of   their hands, and amongst these all mechanics are included; for which reasons such workmen,   in some states, were not formerly admitted into any share in the government; till at length   democracies were established: it is not therefore proper for any man of honour, or any citizen,   or any one who engages in public affairs, to learn these servile employments without they   have occasion for them for their own use; for without this was observed the distinction between   a master and a slave would be lost. But there is a government of another sort, in which men govern   those who are their equals in rank, and freemen, which we call a political government, in which men   learn to command by first submitting to obey, as a good general of horse, or a commander-in-chief,   must acquire a knowledge of their duty by having been long under the command of another,   and the like in every appointment in the army: for well is it said, no one knows how to command who   has not himself been under command of another. The virtues of those are indeed different, but a good   citizen must necessarily be endowed with them; he ought also to know in what manner freemen ought to   govern, as well as be governed: and this, too, is the duty of a good man. And if the temperance and   justice of him who commands is different from his who, though a freeman, is under command,   it is evident that the virtues of a good citizen cannot be the same as justice,   for instance but must be of a different species in these two different situations, as the   temperance and courage of a man and a woman are different from each other; for a man would appear   a coward who had only that courage which would be graceful in a woman, and a woman would be thought   a talker who should take as large a part in the conversation as would become a man of consequence. The domestic employments of each of them are also different; it is the man’s business to   acquire subsistence, the woman’s to take care of it. But direction and knowledge of public   affairs is a virtue peculiar to those who govern, while all others seem to be equally requisite for   both parties; but with this the governed have no concern, it is theirs to entertain just notions:   they indeed are like flute-makers, while those who govern are the musicians who play on them.   And thus much to show whether the virtue of a good man and an excellent citizen is the same,   or if it is different, and also how far it is the same, and how far different.  CHAPTER 5 But with respect to citizens there is a doubt   remaining, whether those only are truly so who are allowed to share in the government, or whether the   mechanics also are to be considered as such? for if those who are not permitted to rule are to be   reckoned among them, it is impossible that the virtue of all the citizens should be the same,   for these also are citizens; and if none of them are admitted to be citizens, where shall they   be ranked? for they are neither sojourners nor foreigners? or shall we say that there   will no inconvenience arise from their not being citizens, as they are neither slaves nor freedmen:   for this is certainly true, that all those are not citizens who are necessary to the existence   of a city, as boys are not citizens in the same manner that men are, for those are perfectly so,   the others under some conditions; for they are citizens, though imperfect ones: for in   former times among some people the mechanics were either slaves or foreigners, for which reason many   of them are so now: and indeed the best regulated states will not permit a mechanic to be a citizen;   but if it be allowed them, we cannot then attribute the virtue we have described to   every citizen or freeman, but to those only who are disengaged from servile offices. Now   those who are employed by one person in them are slaves; those who do them for money are   mechanics and hired servants: hence it is evident on the least reflection what is their situation,   for what I have said is fully explained by appearances. Since the number of communities   is very great, it follows necessarily that there will be many different sorts of citizens,   particularly of those who are governed by others, so that in one state it may be necessary to admit   mechanics and hired servants to be citizens, but in others it may be impossible; as particularly   in an aristocracy, where honours are bestowed on virtue and dignity: for it is impossible   for one who lives the life of a mechanic or hired servant to acquire the practice of virtue. In an   oligarchy also hired servants are not admitted to be citizens; because there a man’s right to   bear any office is regulated by his fortune; but mechanics are, for many citizens are very rich. There was a law at Thebes that no one could have a share in the government till he had been ten years   out of trade. In many states the law invites strangers to accept the freedom of the city;   and in some democracies the son of a free-woman is himself free. The same is also observed in many   others with respect to natural children; but it is through want of citizens regularly born that   they admit such: for these laws are always made in consequence of a scarcity of inhabitants;   so, as their numbers increase, they first deprive the children of a male   or female slave of this privilege, next the child of a free-woman,   and last of all they will admit none but those whose fathers and mothers were both free. That there are many sorts of citizens, and that he may be said to be as completely who shares   the honours of the state, is evident from what has been already said. Thus Achilles, in Homer,   complains of Agamemnon’s treating him like an unhonoured stranger; for a stranger or sojourner   is one who does not partake of the honours of the state: and whenever the right to the freedom of   the city is kept obscure, it is for the sake of the inhabitants. From what has been said it   is plain whether the virtue of a good man and an excellent citizen is the same or different:   and we find that in some states it is the same, in others not; and also that this is not true of each   citizen, but of those only who take the lead, or are capable of taking the lead, in public affairs,   either alone or in conjunction with others. CHAPTER 6  Having established these points, we proceed next to consider whether one form of government only   should be established, or more than one; and if more, how many, and of what sort, and what are the   differences between them. The form of government is the ordering and regulating of the city,   and all the offices in it, particularly those wherein the supreme power is lodged; and this   power is always possessed by the administration; but the administration itself is that particular   form of government which is established in any state: thus in a democracy the supreme power is   lodged in the whole people; on the contrary, in an oligarchy it is in the hands of a few. We say   then, that the form of government in these states is different, and we shall find the   same thing hold good in others. Let us first determine for whose sake a city is established;   and point out the different species of rule which man may submit to in social life. I have already mentioned in my treatise on the management of a family, and the power of the   master, that man is an animal naturally formed for society, and that therefore, when he does   not want any foreign assistance, he will of his own accord desire to live with others; not but   that mutual advantage induces them to it, as far as it enables each person to live more agreeably;   and this is indeed the great object not only to all in general, but also to each individual:   but it is not merely matter of choice, but they join in society also, even that they may be able   to live, which probably is not without some share of merit, and they also support civil society,   even for the sake of preserving life, without they are grievously overwhelmed with the miseries   of it: for it is very evident that men will endure many calamities for the sake of living,   as being something naturally sweet and desirable. It is easy to point out the different modes of   government, and we have already settled them in our exoteric discourses. The power of the master,   though by nature equally serviceable, both to the master and to the slave, yet nevertheless has for   its object the benefit of the master, while the benefit of the slave arises accidentally;   for if the slave is destroyed, the power of the master is at an end: but the authority which a man   has over his wife, and children, and his family, which we call domestic government, is either for   the benefit of those who are under subjection, or else for the common benefit of the whole: but its   particular object is the benefit of the governed, as we see in other arts; in physic, for instance,   and the gymnastic exercises, wherein, if any benefit arise to the master, it is accidental;   for nothing forbids the master of the exercises from sometimes being himself one of those who   exercises, as the steersman is always one of the sailors; but both the master of the exercises and   the steersman consider the good of those who are under their government. Whatever good may happen   to the steersman when he is a sailor, or to the master of the exercises when he himself makes one   at the games, is not intentional, or the object of their power; thus in all political governments   which are established to preserve and defend the equality of the citizens it is held right to rule   by turns. Formerly, as was natural, every one expected that each of his fellow-citizens should   in his turn serve the public, and thus administer to his private good, as he himself when in office   had done for others; but now every one is desirous of being continually in power,   that he may enjoy the advantage which he makes of public business and being in office; as if places   were a never-failing remedy for every complaint, and were on that account so eagerly sought after. It is evident, then, that all those governments which have a common good in view are rightly   established and strictly just, but those who have in view only the good of the rulers are   all founded on wrong principles, and are widely different from what a government ought to be,   for they are tyranny over slaves, whereas a city is a community of   freemen. CHAPTER 7  Having established these particulars, we come to consider next the different number   of governments which there are, and what they are; and first, what are their excellencies:   for when we have determined this, their defects will be evident enough. It is evident that every form of government or administration,   for the words are of the same import, must contain a supreme power over the whole state,   and this supreme power must necessarily be in the hands of one person, or a few, or many;   and when either of these apply their power for the common good, such states are well governed;   but when the interest of the one, the few, or the many who enjoy this power is alone consulted, then   ill; for you must either affirm that those who make up the community are not citizens, or else   let these share in the advantages of government. We usually call a state which is governed by one   person for the common good, a kingdom; one that is governed by more than one, but by a few only,   an aristocracy; either because the government is in the hands of the most worthy citizens,   or because it is the best form for the city and its inhabitants. When the citizens at large govern   for the public good, it is called a state; which is also a common name for all other governments,   and these distinctions are consonant to reason; for it will not be difficult to find one person,   or a very few, of very distinguished abilities, but almost impossible to meet with the majority of   a people eminent for every virtue; but if there is one common to a whole nation it is valour;   for this is created and supported by numbers: for which reason in such a   state the profession of arms will always have the greatest share in the government. Now the corruptions attending each of these governments are these; a kingdom may degenerate   into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and a state into a democracy. Now a tyranny is a   monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers   only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view.  CHAPTER 8 It will be necessary to enlarge   a little more upon the nature of each of these states, which is not without some difficulty,   for he who would enter into a philosophical inquiry into the principles of them, and not   content himself with a superficial view of their outward conduct, must pass over and omit nothing,   but explain the true spirit of each of them. A tyranny then is, as has been said, a monarchy,   where one person has an absolute and despotic power over the whole community and every member   therein: an oligarchy, where the supreme power of the state is lodged with the rich: a democracy, on   the contrary, is where those have it who are worth little or nothing. But the first difficulty that   arises from the distinctions which we have laid down is this, should it happen that the majority   of the inhabitants who possess the power of the state (for this is a democracy) should be rich,   the question is, how does this agree with what we have said? The same difficulty occurs, should   it ever happen that the poor compose a smaller part of the people than the rich, but from their   superior abilities acquire the supreme power; for this is what they call an oligarchy; it should   seem then that our definition of the different states was not correct: nay, moreover, could any   one suppose that the majority of the people were poor, and the minority rich, and then describe   the state in this manner, that an oligarchy was a government in which the rich, being few in number,   possessed the supreme power, and that a democracy was a state in which the poor, being many in   number, possessed it, still there will be another difficulty; for what name shall we give to those   states we have been describing? I mean, that in which the greater number are rich, and that in   which the lesser number are poor (where each of these possess the supreme power), if there are   no other states than those we have described. It seems therefore evident to reason, that whether   the supreme power is vested in the hands of many or few may be a matter of accident; but that it is   clear enough, that when it is in the hands of the few, it will be a government of the rich; when in   the hands of the many, it will be a government of the poor; since in all countries there are   many poor and few rich: it is not therefore the cause that has been already assigned (namely,   the number of people in power) that makes the difference between the two governments; but an   oligarchy and democracy differ in this from each other, in the poverty of those who govern in the   one, and the riches I28oa of those who govern in the other; for when the government is in the hands   of the rich, be they few or be they more, it is an oligarchy; when it is in the hands of the poor, it   is a democracy: but, as we have already said, the one will be always few, the other numerous, but   both will enjoy liberty; and from the claims of wealth and liberty will arise continual disputes   with each other for the lead in public affairs. CHAPTER 9  Let us first determine what are the proper limits of an oligarchy and a democracy, and what is just   in each of these states; for all men have some natural inclination to justice; but they proceed   therein only to a certain degree; nor can they universally point out what is absolutely just;   as, for instance, what is equal appears just, and is so; but not to all; only among those who   are equals: and what is unequal appears just, and is so; but not to all, only amongst those who are   unequals; which circumstance some people neglect, and therefore judge ill; the reason for which is,   they judge for themselves, and every one almost is the worst judge in his own cause. Since   then justice has reference to persons, the same distinctions must be made with respect to persons   which are made with respect to things, in the manner that I have already described in my Ethics. As to the equality of the things, these they agree in; but their dispute is concerning the equality   of the persons, and chiefly for the reason above assigned; because they judge ill in their own   cause; and also because each party thinks, that if they admit what is right in some particulars,   they have done justice on the whole: thus, for instance, if some persons are unequal in riches,   they suppose them unequal in the whole; or, on the contrary, if they are equal in liberty,   they suppose them equal in the whole: but what is absolutely just they omit;   for if civil society was founded for the sake of preserving and increasing property,   every one’s right in the city would be equal to his fortune;   and then the reasoning of those who insist upon an oligarchy would be valid; for it would not be   right that he who contributed one mina should have an equal share in the hundred along with   him who brought in all the rest, either of the original money or what was afterwards acquired. Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live   well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation: but this is not   so; for these have no share in the happiness of it; nor do they live after their own choice; nor   is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse:   for then the Tyrrhenians and Carthaginians, and all other nations between whom treaties   of commerce subsist, would be citizens of one city; for they have articles to regulate their   exports and imports, and engagements for mutual protection, and alliances for mutual defence;   but yet they have not all the same magistrates established among them, but they are different   among the different people; nor does the one take any care, that the morals of the other should be   as they ought, or that none of those who have entered into the common agreements should be   unjust, or in any degree vicious, only that they do not injure any member of the confederacy. But   whosoever endeavours to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and the vices   of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would   found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens   virtuous; for otherwise it is merely an alliance for self-defence; differing from those of the same   cast which are made between different people only in place: for law is an agreement and a pledge, as   the sophist Lycophron says, between the citizens of their intending to do justice to each other,   though not sufficient to make all the citizens just and good: and that this is faact is evident,   for could any one bring different places together, as, for instance, enclose Megara and Corinth in   a wall, yet they would not be one city, not even if the inhabitants intermarried with each other,   though this inter-community contributes much to make a place one city. Besides,   could we suppose a set of people to live separate from each other,   but within such a distance as would admit of an intercourse, and that there were laws   subsisting between each party, to prevent their injuring one another in their mutual dealings,   supposing one a carpenter, another a husbandman, shoemaker, and the like, and that their numbers   were ten thousand, still all that they would have together in common would be a tariff for trade,   or an alliance for mutual defence, but not the same city. And why? not because their mutual   intercourse is not near enough, for even if persons so situated should come to one place,   and every one should live in his own house as in his native city, and there should be alliances   subsisting between each party to mutually assist and prevent any injury being done to the other,   still they would not be admitted to be a city by those who think correctly,   if they preserved the same customs when they were together as when they were separate. It is evident, then, that a city is not a community of place; nor established for the sake   of mutual safety or traffic with each other; but that these things are the necessary consequences   of a city, although they may all exist where there is no city: but a city is a society of   people joining together with their families and their children to live agreeably for the sake   of having their lives as happy and as independent as possible: and for this purpose it is necessary   that they should live in one place and intermarry with each other: hence in all cities there are   family-meetings, clubs, sacrifices, and public entertainments to promote friendship; for a   love of sociability is friendship itself; so that the end then for which a city is established is,   that the inhabitants of it may live happy, and these things are conducive to that end: for it   is a community of families and villages for the sake of a perfect independent life; that is, as   we have already said, for the sake of living well and happily. It is not therefore founded for the   purpose of men’s merely living together, but for their living as men ought; for which reason those   who contribute most to this end deserve to have greater power in the city than those who are their   equals in family and freedom, but their inferiors in civil virtue, or those who excel them in wealth   but are below them in worth. It is evident from what has been said, that in all disputes upon   government each party says something that is just. CHAPTER 10  It may also be a doubt where the supreme power ought to be lodged. Shall it be with the majority,   or the wealthy, with a number of proper persons, or one better than the rest, or with a tyrant? But   whichever of these we prefer some difficulty will arise. For what? shall the poor have it because   they are the majority? they may then divide among themselves, what belongs to the rich: nor is this   unjust; because truly it has been so judged by the supreme power. But what avails it to point   out what is the height of injustice if this is not? Again, if the many seize into their own hands   everything which belongs to the few, it is evident that the city will be at an end. But virtue will   never destroy what is virtuous; nor can what is right be the ruin of the state: therefore such   a law can never be right, nor can the acts of a tyrant ever be wrong, for of necessity they must   all be just; for he, from his unlimited power, compels every one to obey his command, as the   multitude oppress the rich. Is it right then that the rich, the few, should have the supreme power?   and what if they be guilty of the same rapine and plunder the possessions of the majority, that will   be as right as the other: but that all things of this sort are wrong and unjust is evident. Well   then, these of the better sort shall have it: but must not then all the other citizens live   unhonoured, without sharing the offices of the city; for the offices of a city are its honours,   and if one set of men are always in power, it is evident that the rest must be without honour. Well   then, let it be with one person of all others the fittest for it: but by this means the power will   be still more contracted, and a greater number than before continue unhonoured. But some one may   say, that it is wrong to let man have the supreme power and not the law, as his soul is subject to   so many passions. But if this law appoints an aristocracy, or a democracy, how will it help   us in our present doubts? for those things will happen which we have already mentioned.  CHAPTER 11 Other particulars we will consider separately;   but it seems proper to prove, that the supreme power ought to be lodged with the many, rather   than with those of the better sort, who are few; and also to explain what doubts (and probably just   ones) may arise: now, though not one individual of the many may himself be fit for the supreme power,   yet when these many are joined together, it does not follow but they may be better qualified for   it than those; and this not separately, but as a collective body; as the public suppers exceed   those which are given at one person’s private expense: for, as they are many, each person   brings in his share of virtue and wisdom; and thus, coming together, they are like one man made   up of a multitude, with many feet, many hands, and many intelligences: thus is it with respect to the   manners and understandings of the multitude taken together; for which reason the public are the best   judges of music and poetry; for some understand one part, some another, and all collectively the   whole; and in this particular men of consequence differ from each of the many; as they say those   who are beautiful do from those who are not so, and as fine pictures excel any natural objects,   by collecting the several beautiful parts which were dispersed among different originals into one,   although the separate parts, as the eye or any other, might be handsomer than in the picture. But if this distinction is to be made between every people and every general assembly, and   some few men of consequence, it may be doubtful whether it is true; nay, it is clear enough that,   with respect to a few, it is not; since the same conclusion might be applied even to brutes:   and indeed wherein do some men differ from brutes? Not but that nothing prevents what I have said   being true of the people in some states. The doubt then which we have lately proposed, with all its   consequences, may be settled in this manner; it is necessary that the freemen who compose the bulk   of the people should have absolute power in some things; but as they are neither men of property,   nor act uniformly upon principles of virtue, it is not safe to trust them with the first offices   in the state, both on account of their iniquity and their ignorance; from the one of which they   will do what is wrong, from the other they will mistake: and yet it is dangerous to allow them   no power or share in the government; for when there are many poor people who are incapable   of acquiring the honours of their country, the state must necessarily have many enemies in it;   let them then be permitted to vote in the public assemblies and to determine causes;   for which reason Socrates, and some other legislators, gave them the power of electing   the officers of the state, and also of inquiring into their conduct when they came out of office,   and only prevented their being magistrates by themselves; for the multitude when they are   collected together have all of them sufficient understanding for these purposes, and, mixing   among those of higher rank, are serviceable to the city, as some things, which alone are   improper for food, when mixed with others make the whole more wholesome than a few of them would be. But there is a difficulty attending this form of government, for it seems, that the person   who himself was capable of curing any one who was then sick, must be the best judge whom to employ   as a physician; but such a one must be himself a physician; and the same holds true in every other   practice and art: and as a physician ought to give an account of his practice to a physician, so   ought it to be in other arts: those whose business is physic may be divided into three sorts,   the first of these is he who makes up the medicines; the second prescribes, and is   to the other as the architect is to the mason; the third is he who understands the science, but never   practises it: now these three distinctions may be found in those who understand all other arts;   nor have we less opinion of their judgment who are only instructed in the principles of the art   than of those who practise it: and with respect to elections the same method of proceeding seems   right; for to elect a proper person in any science is the business of those who   are skilful therein; as in geometry, of geometricians; in steering, of steersmen:   but if some individuals should know something of particular arts and works,   they do not know more than the professors of them: so that even upon this principle neither   the election of magistrates, nor the censure of their conduct, should be entrusted to the many. But probably all that has been here said may not be right; for, to resume the argument I   lately used, if the people are not very brutal indeed, although we allow that each individual   knows less of these affairs than those who have given particular attention to them, yet when   they come together they will know them better, or at least not worse; besides, in some particular   arts it is not the workman only who is the best judge; namely, in those the works of which are   understood by those who do not profess them: thus he who builds a house is not the only judge of it,   for the master of the family who inhabits it is a better; thus also a steersman is a better   judge of a tiller than he who made it; and he who gives an entertainment than the cook. What   has been said seems a sufficient solution of this difficulty; but there is another that follows:   for it seems absurd that the power of the state should be lodged with those   who are but of indifferent morals, instead of those who are of excellent characters.   Now the power of election and censure are of the utmost consequence, and this, as has been said,   in some states they entrust to the people; for the general assembly is the supreme court of all,   and they have a voice in this, and deliberate in all public affairs, and try all causes,   without any objection to the meanness of their circumstances, and at any age: but their   treasurers, generals, and other great officers of state are taken from men of great fortune and   worth. This difficulty also may be solved upon the same principle; and here too they may be right,   for the power is not in the man who is member of the assembly, or council, but the assembly itself,   and the council, and the people, of which each individual of the whole community are the parts,   I mean as senator, adviser, or judge; for which reason it is very right, that the many should   have the greatest powers in their own hands; for the people, the council, and the judges   are composed of them, and the property of all these collectively is more than the property   of any person or a few who fill the great offices of the state: and thus I determine these points. The first question that we stated shows plainly, that the supreme power should   be lodged in laws duly made and that the magistrate or magistrates, either one or more,   should be authorised to determine those cases which the laws cannot particularly speak to, as   it is impossible for them, in general language, to explain themselves upon everything that may arise:   but what these laws are which are established upon the best foundations has not been yet explained,   but still remains a matter of some question: but the laws of every state will necessarily   be like every state, either trifling or excellent, just or unjust; for it is evident,   that the laws must be framed correspondent to the constitution of the government; and, if so,   it is plain, that a well-formed government will have good laws, a bad one, bad ones.  CHAPTER 12 Since in every art and science the   end aimed at is always good, so particularly in this, which is the most excellent of all,   the founding of civil society, the good wherein aimed at is justice; for it is this which is for   the benefit of all. Now, it is the common opinion, that justice is a certain equality; and in this   point all the philosophers are agreed when they treat of morals: for they say what is just, and to   whom; and that equals ought to receive equal: but we should know how we are to determine what things   are equal and what unequal; and in this there is some difficulty, which calls for the philosophy   of the politician. Some persons will probably say, that the employments of the state ought to   be given according to every particular excellence of each citizen, if there is no other difference   between them and the rest of the community, but they are in every respect else alike:   for justice attributes different things to persons differing from each other in their character,   according to their respective merits. But if this is admitted to be true, complexion, or height,   or any such advantage will be a claim for a greater share of the public rights. But that this   is evidently absurd is clear from other arts and sciences; for with respect to musicians who play   on the flute together, the best flute is not given to him who is of the best family, for he will play   never the better for that, but the best instrument ought to be given to him who is the best artist. If what is now said does not make this clear, we will explain it still further: if there   should be any one, a very excellent player on the flute, but very deficient in family and beauty,   though each of them are more valuable endowments than a skill in music, and excel this art in a   higher degree than that player excels others, yet the best flutes ought to be given to him;   for the superiority in beauty and fortune should have a reference to the business in hand;   but these have none. Moreover, according to this reasoning, every possible excellence might come   in comparison with every other; for if bodily strength might dispute the point with riches   or liberty, even any bodily strength might do it; so that if one person excelled in size more   than another did in virtue, and his size was to qualify him to take place of the other’s virtue,   everything must then admit of a comparison with each other; for if such a size is greater than   virtue by so much, it is evident another must be equal to it: but, since this is impossible,   it is plain that it would be contrary to common sense to dispute a right to any office in the   state from every superiority whatsoever: for if one person is slow and the other swift,   neither is the one better qualified nor the other worse on that account, though in the gymnastic   races a difference in these particulars would gain the prize; but a pretension to the offices   of the state should be founded on a superiority in those qualifications which are useful to it:   for which reason those of family, independency, and fortune, with great propriety, contend with   each other for them; for these are the fit persons to fill them: for a city can no more consist of   all poor men than it can of all slaves But if such persons are requisite, it is evident that   those also who are just and valiant are equally so; for without justice and valour no state can   be supported, the former being necessary for its existence, the latter for its happiness.  CHAPTER 13 It seems, then, requisite for the establishment   of a state, that all, or at least many of these particulars should be well canvassed and inquired   into; and that virtue and education may most justly claim the right of being considered as   the necessary means of making the citizens happy, as we have already said. As those who are equal   in one particular are not therefore equal in all, and those who are unequal in one particular are   not therefore unequal in all, it follows that all those governments which are established upon a   principle which supposes they are, are erroneous. We have already said, that all the members of the   community will dispute with each other for the offices of the state; and in some particulars   justly, but not so in general; the rich, for instance, because they have the greatest landed   property, and the ultimate right to the soil is vested in the community; and also because their   fidelity is in general most to be depended on. The freemen and men of family will dispute the   point with each other, as nearly on an equality; for these latter have a right to a higher regard   as citizens than obscure persons, for honourable descent is everywhere of great esteem: nor is it   an improper conclusion, that the descendants of men of worth will be men of worth themselves;   for noble birth is the fountain of virtue to men of family: for the same reason also we justly say,   that virtue has a right to put in her pretensions. Justice, for instance,   is a virtue, and so necessary to

    society, that all others must yield her the precedence. Let us now see what the many have to urge on their side against the few; and they may say, that if,   when collectively taken, they are compared with them, they are stronger, richer, and better than   they are. But should it ever happen that all these should inhabit the same city, I mean the good,   the rich, the noble, as well as the many, such as usually make up the community, I ask, will there   then be any reason to dispute concerning who shall govern, or will there not? for in every   community which we have mentioned there is no dispute where the supreme power should be placed;   for as these differ from each other, so do those in whom that is placed; for in one state the rich   enjoy it, in others the meritorious, and thus each according to their separate manners. Let   us however consider what is to be done when all these happen at the same time to inhabit   the same city. If the virtuous should be very few in number, how then shall we act? shall we prefer   the virtuous on account of their abilities, if they are capable of governing the city?   or should they be so many as almost entirely to compose the state? There is also a doubt concerning the pretensions of all those who claim the honours of government:   for those who found them either on fortune or family have nothing which they can justly   say in their defence; since it is evident upon their principle, that if any one person can be   found richer than all the rest, the right of governing all these will be justly vested in   this one person. In the same manner, one man who is of the best family will claim it from   those who dispute the point upon family merit: and probably in an aristocracy the same dispute might   arise on the score of virtue, if there is one man better than all the other men of worth who are   in the same community; it seems just, by the same reasoning, that he should enjoy the supreme power.   And upon this principle also, while the many suppose they ought to have the supreme command,   as being more powerful than the few, if one or more than one, though a small number   should be found stronger than themselves, these ought rather to have it than they. All these things seem to make it plain, that none of these principles are justly founded on   which these persons would establish their right to the supreme power;   and that all men whatsoever ought to obey them: for with respect to those who claim   it as due to their virtue or their fortune, they might have justly some objection to make;   for nothing hinders but that it may sometimes happen, that the many may be better or richer   than the few, not as individuals, but in their collective capacity. As to the doubt which some persons have proposed and objected, we may answer it in this manner;   it is this, whether a legislator, who would establish the most perfect system of laws, should   calculate them for the use of the better part of the citizens, or the many, in the circumstances   we have already mentioned? The rectitude of anything consists in its equality; that therefore   which is equally right will be advantageous to the whole state, and to every member of it in common.  Now, in general, a citizen is one who both shares in the government and also in his turn submits   to be governed; their condition, it is true, is different in different states: the best is that in   which a man is enabled to choose and to persevere in a course of virtue during his whole life,   both in his public and private state. But should there be one person, or a very few, eminent for   an uncommon degree of virtue, though not enough to make up a civil state, so that the virtue of   the many, or their political abilities, should be too inferior to come in comparison with theirs, if   more than one; or if but one, with his only; such are not to be considered as part of the city; for   it would be doing them injustice to rate them on a level with those who are so far their inferiors in   virtue and political abilities, that they appear to them like a god amongst men. From whence it is   evident, that a system of laws must be calculated for those who are equal to each other in nature   and power. Such men, therefore, are not the object of law; for they are themselves a law:   and it would be ridiculous in any one to endeavour to include them in the penalties of a law:   for probably they might say what Antisthenes tells us the lions did to the hares when they demanded   to be admitted to an equal share with them in the government. And it is on this account that   democratic states have established the ostracism; for an equality seems the principal object of   their government. For which reason they compel all those who are very eminent for their power,   their fortune, their friendships, or any other cause which may give them too great weight in   the government, to submit to the ostracism, and leave the city for a stated time; as the fabulous   histories relate the Argonauts served Hercules, for they refused to take him with them in the   ship Argo on account of his superior valour. For which reason those who hate a tyranny and find   fault with the advice which Periander gave to Thrasybulus, must not think there was nothing   to be said in its defence; for the story goes, that Periander said nothing to the messenger in   answer to the business he was consulted about, but striking off those ears of corn which were higher   than the rest, reduced the whole crop to a level; so that the messenger, without knowing the cause   of what was done, related the fact to Thrasybulus, who understood by it that he must take off all the   principal men in the city. Nor is this serviceable to tyrants only; nor is it tyrants only who do it;   for the same thing is practised both in oligarchies and democracies: for the ostracism   has in a manner nearly the same power, by restraining and banishing those who are too great;   and what is done in one city is done also by those who have the supreme power in separate states;   as the Athenians with respect to the Samians, the Chians, and the Lesbians; for when they   suddenly acquired the superiority over all Greece, they brought the other states into subjection,   contrary to the treaties which subsisted between them. The King of Persia also very often reduces   the Medes and Babylonians when they assume upon their former power: and this is a principle which   all governments whatsoever keep in their eye; even those which are best administered, as well as   those which are not, do it; these for the sake of private utility, the others for the public good. The same thing is to be perceived in the other arts and sciences; for a painter would not   represent an animal with a foot disproportionally large, though he had drawn it remarkably   beautiful; nor would the shipwright make the prow or any other part of the vessel larger   than it ought to be; nor will the master of the band permit any who sings louder and better than   the rest to sing in concert with them. There is therefore no reason that a monarch should not act   in agreement with free states, to support his own power, if they do the same thing for the benefit   of their respective communities; upon which account when there is any acknowledged difference   in the power of the citizens, the reason upon which the ostracism is founded will be politically   just; but it is better for the legislator so to establish his state at the beginning as not to   want this remedy: but if in course of time such an inconvenience should arise, to endeavour to amend   it by some such correction. Not that this was the use it was put to: for many did not regard the   benefit of their respective communities, but made the ostracism a weapon in the hand of sedition. It is evident, then, that in corrupt governments it is partly just and useful to the individual,   though probably it is as clear that it is not entirely just: for in a well-governed state   there may be great doubts about the use of it, not on account of the pre-eminence which one may have   in strength, riches, or connection: but when the pre-eminence is virtue, what then is to be done?   for it seems not right to turn out and banish such a one; neither does it seem right to govern him,   for that would be like desiring to share the power with Jupiter and to govern him:   nothing then remains but what indeed seems natural, and that is for all persons quietly   to submit to the government of those who are thus eminently virtuous, and let them be perpetually   kings in the separate states. CHAPTER 14  What has been now said, it seems proper to change our subject and to inquire into the   nature of monarchies; for we have already admitted them to be one of those species of   government which are properly founded. And here let us consider whether a kingly government is   proper for a city or a country whose principal object is the happiness of the inhabitants,   or rather some other. But let us first determine whether this is of one kind only, or more; and it   is easy to know that it consists of many different species, and that the forms of government are not   the same in all: for at Sparta the kingly power seems chiefly regulated by the laws;   for it is not supreme in all circumstances; but when the king quits the territories of   the state he is their general in war; and all religious affairs are entrusted to him:   indeed the kingly power with them is chiefly that of a general who cannot be called to an   account for his conduct, and whose command is for life: for he has not the power of life and death,   except as a general; as they frequently had in their expeditions by martial law,   which we learn from Homer; for when Agamemnon is affronted in council, he restrains his resentment,   but when he is in the field and armed with this power, he tells the Greeks: “Whoe’er I know shall shun th’ impending fight,  To dogs and vultures soon shall be a prey; For death is mine….” This, then, is one species of monarchical government in which the kingly power is in a   general for life; and is sometimes hereditary, sometimes elective: besides, there is also   another, which is to be met with among some of the barbarians, in which the kings are invested   with powers nearly equal to a tyranny, yet are, in some respects, bound by the laws and the customs   of their country; for as the barbarians are by nature more prone to slavery than the Greeks,   and those in Asia more than those in Europe, they endure without murmuring a despotic government;   for this reason their governments are tyrannies; but yet not liable to be overthrown, as being   customary and according to law. Their guards also are such as are used in a kingly government,   not a despotic one; for the guards of their kings are his citizens, but a tyrant’s are foreigners.   The one commands, in the manner the law directs, those who willingly obey; the other, arbitrarily,   those who consent not. The one, therefore, is guarded by the citizens, the other against them. These, then, are the two different sorts of these monarchies, and another is that   which in ancient Greece they called aesumnetes; which is nothing more than an elective tyranny;   and its difference from that which is to be found amongst the barbarians consists not in its not   being according to law, but only in its not being according to the ancient customs of the country.   Some persons possessed this power for life, others only for a particular time or particular purpose,   as the people of Mitylene elected Pittacus to oppose the exiles, who were headed by Antimenides   and Alcaeus the poet, as we learn from a poem of his; for he upbraids the Mitylenians for having   chosen Pittacus for their tyrant, and with one voice extolling him to the skies who was   the ruin of a rash and devoted people. These sorts of government then are, and ever were, despotic,   on account of their being tyrannies; but inasmuch as they are elective,   and over a free people, they are also kingly. A fourth species of kingly government is that   which was in use in the heroic times, when a free people submitted to a kingly government,   according to the laws and customs of their country. For those who were at first of   benefit to mankind, either in arts or arms, or by collecting them into civil society,   or procuring them an establishment, became the kings of a willing people,   and established an hereditary monarchy. They were particularly their generals in war,   and presided over their sacrifices, excepting such only as belonged to the priests: they   were also the supreme judges over the people; and in this case some of them took an oath,   others did not; they did, the form of swearing was by their sceptre held out. In ancient times the power of the kings extended to everything whatsoever, both civil, domestic,   and foreign; but in after-times they relinquished some of their privileges,   and others the people assumed, so that, in some states, they left their kings only the   right of presiding over the sacrifices; and even those whom it were worth while to call   by that name had only the right of being commander-in-chief in their foreign wars. These, then, are the four sorts of kingdoms: the first is that of the heroic times;   which was a government over a free people, with its rights in some particulars marked out;   for the king was their general, their judge, and their high priest. The second,   that of the barbarians; which is an hereditary despotic government regulated by laws: the third   is that which they call aesumnetic, which is an elective tyranny. The fourth is the Lacedaemonian;   and this, in few words, is nothing more than an hereditary generalship: and in these   particulars they differ from each other. There is a fifth species of kingly government,   which is when one person has a supreme power over all things whatsoever, in the manner that   every state and every city has over those things which belong to the public: for as the master of   a family is king in his own house, so such a king is master of a family in his own city or state.  CHAPTER 15 But the different sorts of kingly   governments may, if I may so say, be reduced to two; which we will consider more particularly.   The last spoken of, and the Lacedaemonian, for the chief of the others are placed between these,   which are as it were at the extremities, they having less power than an absolute government,   and yet more than the Lacedaemonians; so that the whole matter in question may be reduced to these   two points; the one is, whether it is advantageous to the citizens to have the office of general   continue in one person for life, and whether it should be confined to any particular families or   whether every one should be eligible: the other, whether it is advantageous for one person to have   the supreme power over everything or not. But to enter into the particulars concerning the office   of a Lacedaemonian general would be rather to frame laws for a state than to consider   the nature and utility of its constitution, since we know that the appointing of a general is what   is done in every state. Passing over this question then, we will proceed to consider   the other part of their government, which is the polity of the state; and this it will be   necessary to examine particularly into, and to go through such questions as may arise. Now the first thing which presents itself to our consideration is this, whether it is best   to be governed by a good man, or by good laws? Those who prefer a kingly government think that   laws can only speak a general language, but cannot adapt themselves to particular circumstances; for   which reason it is absurd in any science to follow written rule; and even in Egypt the physician was   allowed to alter the mode of cure which the law prescribed to him, after the fourth day; but if   he did it sooner it was at his own peril: from whence it is evident, on the very same account,   that a government of written laws is not the best; and yet general reasoning is necessary to   all those who are to govern, and it will be much more perfect in those who are entirely free from   passions than in those to whom they are natural. But now this is a quality which laws possess;   while the other is natural to the human soul. But some one will say in answer to this, that   man will be a better judge of particulars. It will be necessary, then, for a king to be a lawgiver,   and that his laws should be published, but that those should have no authority which are absurd,   as those which are not, should. But whether is it better for the community that those things which   cannot possibly come under the cognisance of the law either at all or properly should be under the   government of every worthy citizen, as the present method is, when the public community, in their   general assemblies, act as judges and counsellors, where all their determinations are upon particular   cases, for one individual, be he who he will, will be found, upon comparison, inferior to a whole   people taken collectively: but this is what a city is, as a public entertainment is better than one   man’s portion: for this reason the multitude judge of many things better than any one single person.   They are also less liable to corruption from their numbers, as water is from its quantity: besides,   the judgment of an individual must necessarily be perverted if he is overcome by anger or any other   passion; but it would be hard indeed if the whole community should be misled by anger. Moreover,   let the people be free, and they will do nothing but in conformity to the law, except only in those   cases which the law cannot speak to. But though what I am going to propose may not easily be met   with, yet if the majority of the state should happen to be good men, should they prefer one   uncorrupt governor or many equally good, is it not evident that they should choose the many? But   there may be divisions among these which cannot happen when there is but one. In answer to this   it may be replied that all their souls will be as much animated with virtue as this one man’s. If then a government of many, and all of them good men, compose an aristocracy, and the government of   one a kingly power, it is evident that the people should rather choose the first than the last;   and this whether the state is powerful or not, if many such persons so alike can be met with:   and for this reason probable it was, that the first governments were generally monarchies;   because it was difficult to find a number of persons eminently virtuous, more particularly as   the world was then divided into small communities; besides, kings were appointed in return for the   benefits they had conferred on mankind; but such actions are peculiar to good men: but when many   persons equal in virtue appeared at the time, they brooked not a superiority, but sought after an   equality and established a free state; but after this, when they degenerated, they made a property   of the public; which probably gave rise to oligarchies; for they made wealth meritorious, and   the honours of government were reserved for the rich: and these afterwards turned to tyrannies and   these in their turn gave rise to democracies; for the power of the tyrants continually decreasing,   on account of their rapacious avarice, the people grew powerful enough to frame and establish   democracies: and as cities after that happened to increase, probably it was not easy for them   to be under any other government than a democracy. But if any person prefers a kingly government   in a state, what is to be done with the king’s children? Is the family also to reign? But should   they have such children as some persons usually have, it will be very detrimental. It may be said,   that then the king who has it in his power will never permit such children to succeed to his   kingdom. But it is not easy to trust to that; for it is very hard and requires greater virtue   than is to be met with in human nature. There is also a doubt concerning the power with which   a king should be entrusted: whether he should be allowed force sufficient to compel those who   do not choose to be obedient to the laws, and how he is to support his government? for if he   is to govern according to law and do nothing of his own will which is contrary thereunto,   at the same time it will be necessary to protect that power with which he guards the law,   This matter however may not be very difficult to determine; for he ought to have a proper power,   and such a one is that which will be sufficient to make the king superior to any one person or even a   large part of the community, but inferior to the whole, as the ancients always appointed guards   for that person whom they created aesumnetes or tyrant; and some one advised the Syracusians, when   Dionysius asked for guards, to allow him such. CHAPTER 16  We will next consider the absolute monarch that we have just mentioned, who does everything according   to his own will: for a king governing under the direction of laws which he is obliged to   follow does not of himself create any particular species of government, as we have already said:   for in every state whatsoever, either aristocracy or democracy, it is easy to appoint a general   for life; and there are many who entrust the administration of affairs to one person only;   such is the government at Dyrrachium, and nearly the same at Opus. As for an absolute monarchy   as it is called, that is to say, when the whole state is wholly subject to the will of one person,   namely the king, it seems to many that it is unnatural that one man should have the entire rule   over his fellow-citizens when the state consists of equals: for nature requires that the same   right and the same rank should necessarily take place amongst all those who are equal by nature:   for as it would be hurtful to the body for those who are of different constitutions to   observe the same regimen, either of diet or clothing, so is it with respect to the   honours of the state as hurtful, that those who are equal in merit should be unequal in rank;   for which reason it is as much a man’s duty to submit to command as to assume it,   and this also by rotation; for this is law, for order is law; and it is more proper that law   should govern than any one of the citizens: upon the same principle, if it is advantageous to place   the supreme power in some particular persons, they should be appointed to be only guardians,   and the servants of the laws, for the supreme power must be placed somewhere; but they say,   that it is unjust that where all are equal one person should continually enjoy it. But it seems   unlikely that man should be able to adjust that which the law cannot determine; it may be replied,   that the law having laid down the best rules possible, leaves the adjustment and   application of particulars to the discretion of the magistrate; besides, it allows anything to be   altered which experience proves may be better established. Moreover, he who would place the   supreme power in mind, would place it in God and the laws; but he who entrusts man with it,   gives it to a wild beast, for such his appetites sometimes make him; for passion influences those   who are in power, even the very best of men: for which reason law is reason without desire. The instance taken from the arts seems fallacious: wherein it is said to be wrong for a sick person   to apply for a remedy to books, but that it would be far more eligible to employ those   who are skilful in physic; for these do nothing contrary to reason from motives of friendship   but earn their money by curing the sick, whereas those who have the management of public affairs   do many things through hatred or favour. And, as a proof of what we have advanced,   it may be observed, that whenever a sick person suspects that his physician has been persuaded   by his enemies to be guilty of any foul practice to him in his profession, he then rather chooses   to apply to books for his cure: and not only this but even physicians themselves when they are ill   call in other physicians: and those who teach others the gymnastic exercises, exercise with   those of the same profession, as being incapable from self-partiality to form a proper judgment   of what concerns themselves. From whence it is evident, that those who seek for what is just,   seek for a mean; now law is a mean. Moreover; the moral law is far superior and conversant   with far superior objects than the written law; for the supreme magistrate is safer to be trusted   to than the one, though he is inferior to the other. But as it is impossible that one person   should have an eye to everything himself, it will be necessary that the supreme magistrate should   employ several subordinate ones under him; why then should not this be done at first, instead of   appointing one person in this manner? Besides, if, according to what has been already said,   the man of worth is on that account fit to govern, two men of worth are certainly better than one:   as, for instance, in Homer, “Let two together go:” and also Agamemnon’s wish; “Were ten such faithful   counsel mine!” Not but that there are even now some particular magistrates invested with supreme   power to decide, as judges, those things which the law cannot, as being one of those cases which   comes not properly under its jurisdiction; for of those which can there is no doubt:   since then laws comprehend some things, but not all, it is necessary to enquire and consider   which of the two is preferable, that the best man or the best law should govern;   for to reduce every subject which can come under the deliberation of man into a law is impossible. No one then denies, that it is necessary that there should be some person to decide those   cases which cannot come under the cognisance of a written law: but we say, that it is better to have   many than one; for though every one who decides according to the principles of the law decides   justly; yet surely it seems absurd to suppose, that one person can see better with two eyes,   and hear better with two ears, or do better with two hands and two feet, than many can do   with many: for we see that absolute monarchs now furnish themselves with many eyes and ears and   hands and feet; for they entrust those who are friends to them and their government with part   of their power; for if they are not friends to the monarch, they will not do what he chooses;   but if they are friends to him, they are friends also to his government: but a friend is an   equal and like his friend: if then he thinks that such should govern, he thinks that his equal also   should govern. These are nearly the objections which are usually made to a kingly power.  CHAPTER 17 Probably what we   have said may be true of some persons, but not of others; for some men are by nature formed to   be under the government of a master; others, of a king; others, to be the citizens of a free state,   just and useful; but a tyranny is not according to nature, nor the other perverted forms of   government; for they are contrary to it. But it is evident from what has been said,   that among equals it is neither advantageous nor right that one person should be lord over   all where there are no established laws, but his will is the law; or where there are; nor is it   right that one who is good should have it over those who are good; or one who is not good over   those who are not good; nor one who is superior to the rest in worth, except in a particular manner,   which shall be described, though indeed it has been already mentioned. But let us next   determine what people are best qualified for a kingly government, what for an aristocratic,   and what for a democratic. And, first, for a kingly; and it should be those who are accustomed   by nature to submit the civil government of themselves to a family eminent for virtue:   for an aristocracy, those who are naturally framed to bear the rule of free men, whose superior   virtue makes them worthy of the management of others: for a free state, a war-like people,   formed by nature both to govern and be governed by laws which admit the poorest citizen to share   the honours of the commonwealth according to his worth. But whenever a whole family or any one of   another shall happen so far to excel in virtue as to exceed all other persons in the community,   then it is right that the kingly power should be in them, or if it is an individual who does so,   that he should be king and lord of all; for this, as we have just mentioned, is not only   correspondent to that principle of right which all founders of all states, whether aristocracies,   oligarchies, or democracies, have a regard to (for in placing the supreme power they all think   it right to fix it to excellence, though not the same); but it is also agreeable to what has been   already said; as it would not be right to kill, or banish, or ostracise such a one for his superior   merit. Nor would it be proper to let him have the supreme power only in turn; for it is contrary   to nature that what is highest should ever be lowest: but this would be the case should such a   one ever be governed by others. So that there can nothing else be done but to submit, and permit him   continually to enjoy the supreme power. And thus much with respect to kingly power in different   states, and whether it is or is not advantageous to them, and to what, and in what manner.  CHAPTER 18 Since then we have said that   there are three sorts of regular governments, and of these the best must necessarily be that which   is administered by the best men (and this must be that which happens to have one man, or one family,   or a number of persons excelling all the rest in virtue, who are able to govern and be governed in   such a manner as will make life most agreeable, and we have already shown that the virtue of   a good man and of a citizen in the most perfect government will be the same), it is evident, that   in the same manner, and for those very qualities which would procure a man the character of good,   any one would say, that the government of a state was a well-established aristocracy or kingdom;   so that it will be found to be education and morals that are almost the whole which go to   make a good man, and the same qualities will make a good citizen or good king. These particulars being treated of, we will now proceed to consider what sort of   government is best, how it naturally arises, and how it is established;   for it is necessary to make a proper inquiry concerning this. BOOK 4 CHAPTER 1  In every art and science which is not conversant in parts but in some one genus in which it is   complete, it is the business of that art alone to determine what is fitted to its particular genus;   as what particular exercise is fitted to a certain particular body, and suits it best:   for that body which is formed by nature the most perfect and superior to others necessarily   requires the best exercise-and also of what one kind that must be which will suit the generality;   and this is the business of the gymnastic arts: and although any one should not desire to acquire   an exact knowledge and skill in these exercises, yet it is not, on that account, the less necessary   that he who professes to be a master and instruct the youth in them should be perfect therein:   and we see that this is what equally befalls the healing, shipbuilding, cloth-making, and indeed   all other arts; so that it evidently belongs to the same art to find out what kind of government   is best, and would of all others be most correspondent to our wish, while it received no   molestation from without: and what particular species of it is adapted to particular persons;   for there are many who probably are incapable of enjoying the best form: so that the legislator,   and he who is truly a politician, ought to be acquainted not only with that which is most   perfect imaginable, but also that which is the best suited to any given circumstances. There is,   moreover, a third sort, an imaginary one, and he ought, if such a one should be presented to his   consideration, to be able to discern what sort of one it would be at the beginning; and, when once   established, what would be the proper means to preserve it a long time. I mean, for instance, if   a state should happen not to have the best form of government, or be deficient in what was necessary,   or not receive every advantage possible, but something less. And, besides all this,   it is necessary to know what sort of government is best fitting for all cities: for most of those   writers who have treated this subject, however speciously they may handle other parts of it,   have failed in describing the practical parts: for it is not enough to be able to perceive what is   best without it is what can be put in practice. It should also be simple, and easy for all to attain   to. But some seek only the most subtile forms of government. Others again, choosing rather to treat   of what is common, censure those under which they live, and extol the excellence of a particular   state, as the Lacedaemonian, or some other: but every legislator ought to establish such a   form of government as from the present state and disposition of the people who are to receive it   they will most readily submit to and persuade the community to partake of: for it is not a business   of less trouble to correct the mistakes of an established government than to form a new one; as   it is as difficult to recover what we have forgot as to learn anything afresh. He, therefore, who   aspires to the character of a legislator, ought, besides all we have already said, to be able   to correct the mistakes of a government already established, as we have before mentioned. But this   is impossible to be done by him who does not know how many different forms of government there are:   some persons think that there is only one species both of democracy and oligarchy; but this is not   true: so that every one should be acquainted with the difference of these governments, how great   they are, and whence they arise; and should have equal knowledge to perceive what laws are best,   and what are most suitable to each particular government: for all laws are, and ought to be,   framed agreeable to the state that is to be governed by them, and not the state to the laws:   for government is a certain ordering in a state which particularly respects the magistrates in   what manner they shall be regulated, and where the supreme power shall be placed; and what shall be   the final object which each community shall have in view; but the laws are something different   from what regulates and expresses the form of the constitution-it is their office to direct   the conduct of the magistrate in the execution of his office and the punishment of offenders. From   whence it is evident, that the founders of laws should attend both to the number and the different   sorts of government; for it is impossible that the same laws should be calculated for all sorts   of oligarchies and all sorts of democracies, for of both these governments there are many species,   not one only. CHAPTER 2  Since, then, according to our first method in treating of the different forms of government,   we have divided those which are regular into three sorts, the kingly, the aristocratical,   the free states, and shown the three excesses which these are liable to: the kingly,   of becoming tyrannical; the aristocratical, oligarchical; and the free state, democratical:   and as we have already treated of the aristocratical and kingly; for to enter   into an inquiry what sort of government is best is the same thing as to treat of these two expressly;   for each of them desires to be established upon the principles of virtue: and as, moreover,   we have already determined wherein a kingly power and an aristocracy differ from each other,   and when a state may be said to be governed by a king, it now remains that we examine into a free   state, and also these other governments, an oligarchy, a democracy, and a tyranny;   and it is evident of these three excesses which must be the worst of all, and which next to it;   for, of course, the excesses of the best and most holy must be the worst; for it   must necessarily happen either that the name of king only will remain, or else that the king will   assume more power than belongs to him, from whence tyranny will arise, the worst excess imaginable,   a government the most contrary possible to a free state. The excess next hurtful is an oligarchy;   for an aristocracy differs much from this sort of government: that which is least so is a democracy.   This subject has been already treated of by one of those writers who have gone before me, though   his sentiments are not the same as mine: for he thought, that of all excellent constitutions,   as a good oligarchy or the like, a democracy was the worst, but of all bad ones, the best. Now I affirm, that all these states have, without exception, fallen into excess; and also that   he should not have said that one oligarchy was better than another, but that it was not quite so   bad. But this question we shall not enter into at present. We shall first inquire how many different   sorts of free states there are; since there are many species of democracies and oligarchies;   and which of them is the most comprehensive, and most desirable after the best form of government;   or if there is any other like an aristocracy, well established; and also which of these is   best adapted to most cities, and which of them is preferable for particular persons: for, probably,   some may suit better with an oligarchy than a democracy, and others better with a democracy   than an oligarchy; and afterwards in what manner any one ought to proceed who desires to establish   either of these states, I mean every species of democracy, and also of oligarchy. And to conclude,   when we shall have briefly gone through everything that is necessary, we will endeavour to point out   the sources of corruption, and stability, in government, as well those which are   common to all as those which are peculiar to each state, and from what causes they chiefly arise.  CHAPTER 3 The reason for there being many different sorts of   governments is this, that each state consists of a great number of parts; for, in the first place,   we see that all cities are made up of families: and again, of the multitude of these some must be   rich, some poor, and others in the middle station; and that, both of the rich and poor, some will be   used to arms, others not. We see also, that some of the common people are husbandmen, others attend   the market, and others are artificers. There is also a difference between the nobles in their   wealth, and the dignity in which they live: for instance, in the number of horses they breed;   for this cannot be supported without a large fortune: for which reason, in former times,   those cities whose strength consisted in horse became by that means oligarchies;   and they used horse in their expeditions against the neighbouring cities; as the Eretrians the   Chalcidians, the Magnetians, who lived near the river Meander, and many others in Asia. Moreover,   besides the difference of fortune, there is that which arises from family and merit; or, if there   are any other distinctions which make part of the city, they have been already mentioned in treating   of an aristocracy, for there we considered how many parts each city must necessarily be composed   of; and sometimes each of these have a share in the government, sometimes a few, sometimes more. It is evident then, that there must be many forms of government, differing from each   other in their particular constitution: for the parts of which they are composed   each differ from the other. For government is the ordering of the magistracies of the state;   and these the community share between themselves, either as they can attain them by force,   or according to some common equality which there is amongst them, as poverty, wealth,   or something which they both partake of. There must therefore necessarily be as many different   forms of governments as there are different ranks in the society, arising from the superiority of   some over others, and their different situations. And these seem chiefly to be two, as they say,   of the winds: namely, the north and the south; and all the others are declinations from these.   And thus in politics, there is the government of the many and the government of the few; or a   democracy and an oligarchy: for an aristocracy may be considered as a species of oligarchy, as being   also a government of the few; and what we call a free state may be considered as a democracy:   as in the winds they consider the west as part of the north, and the east as part of the south:   and thus it is in music, according to some, who say there are only two species of it,   the Doric and the Phrygian, and all other species of composition they call after one of these names;   and many people are accustomed to consider the nature of government in the same light; but it   is both more convenient and more correspondent to truth to distinguish governments as I have done,   into two species: one, of those which are established upon proper principles; of which   there may be one or two sorts: the other, which includes all the different excesses of these;   so that we may compare the best form of government to the most harmonious piece of music; the   oligarchic and despotic to the more violent tunes; and the democratic to the soft and gentle airs.  CHAPTER 4 We ought not to define a democracy as   some do, who say simply, that it is a government where the supreme power is lodged in the people;   for even in oligarchies the supreme power is in the majority. Nor should they define an oligarchy   a government where the supreme power is in the hands of a few: for let us suppose the number   of a people to be thirteen hundred, and that of these one thousand were rich, who would not   permit the three hundred poor to have any share in the government, although they were free,   and their equal in everything else; no one would say, that this government was a democracy. In like   manner, if the poor, when few in number, should acquire the power over the rich, though more   than themselves, no one would say, that this was an oligarchy; nor this, when the rest who   are rich have no share in the administration. We should rather say, that a democracy is when the   supreme power is in the hands of the freemen; an oligarchy, when it is in the hands of the rich:   it happens indeed that in the one case the many will possess it, in the other the few;   because there are many poor and few rich. And if the power of the state was to be distributed   according to the size of the citizens, as they say it is in Ethiopia, or according to their beauty,   it would be an oligarchy: for the number of those who are large and beautiful is small.  Nor are those things which we have already mentioned alone sufficient to describe these   states; for since there are many species both of a democracy and an oligarchy,   the matter requires further consideration; as we cannot admit, that if a few persons who are free   possess the supreme power over the many who are not free, that this government is a democracy:   as in Apollonia, in Ionia, and in Thera: for in each of these cities the honours of the   state belong to some few particular families, who first founded the colonies. Nor would the rich,   because they are superior in numbers, form a democracy, as formerly at Colophon;   for there the majority had large possessions before the Lydian war: but a democracy is a   state where the freemen and the poor, being the majority, are invested with the power of the   state. An oligarchy is a state where the rich and those of noble families, being few, possess it. We have now proved that there are various forms of government and have assigned a reason for it;   and shall proceed to show that there are even more than these, and what they are, and why; setting   out with the principle we have already laid down. We admit that every city consists not of one,   but many parts: thus, if we should endeavour to comprehend the different species of animals   we should first of all note those parts which every animal must have, as a certain sensorium,   and also what is necessary to acquire and retain food, as a mouth and a belly; besides certain   parts to enable it to move from place to place. If, then, these are the only parts of an animal   and there are differences between them; namely, in their various sorts of stomachs, bellies,   and sensoriums: to which we must add their motive powers; the number of the combinations of all   these must necessarily make up the different species of animals. For it is not possible that   the same kind of animal should have any very great difference in its mouth or ears; so that when all   these are collected, who happen to have these things similar in all, they make up a species   of animals of which there are as many as there are of these general combinations of necessary parts. The same thing is true of what are called states; for a city is not made of one but many parts, as   has already been often said; one of which is those who supply it with provisions, called husbandmen,   another called mechanics, whose employment is in the manual arts, without which the city could not   be inhabited; of these some are busied about what is absolutely necessary, others in what contribute   to the elegancies and pleasures of life; the third sort are your exchange-men, I mean by these your   buyers, sellers, merchants, and victuallers; the fourth are your hired labourers or workmen;   the fifth are the men-at-arms, a rank not less useful than the other, without you would have the   community slaves to every invader; but what cannot defend itself is unworthy of the name of a city;   for a city is self-sufficient, a slave not. So that when Socrates, in Plato’s Republic,   says that a city is necessarily composed of four sorts of people, he speaks elegantly but   not correctly, and these are, according to him, weavers, husbandmen, shoe-makers, and builders;   he then adds, as if these were not sufficient, smiths, herdsmen for what cattle are necessary,   and also merchants and victuallers, and these are by way of appendix to his first list; as if a city   was established for necessity, and not happiness, or as if a shoe-maker and a husbandman were   equally useful. He reckons not the military a part before the increase of territory and joining to   the borders of the neighbouring powers will make war necessary: and even amongst them who compose   his four divisions, or whoever have any connection with each other, it will be necessary to have some   one to distribute justice, and determine between man and man. If, then, the mind is a more valuable   part of man than the body, every one would wish to have those things more regarded in his city   which tend to the advantage of these than common matters, such are war and justice; to which may   be added council, which is the business of civil wisdom (nor is it of any consequence whether these   different employments are filled by different persons or one, as the same man is oftentimes   both a soldier and a husbandman): so that if both the judge and the senator are parts of the city,   it necessarily follows that the soldier must be so also. The seventh sort are those who serve   the public in expensive employments at their own charge: these are called the rich. The eighth are   those who execute the different offices of the state, and without these it could not possibly   subsist: it is therefore necessary that there should be some persons capable of governing and   filling the places in the city; and this either for life or in rotation: the office of senator,   and judge, of which we have already sufficiently treated, are the only ones remaining. If, then,   these things are necessary for a state, that it may be happy and just, it follows that the   citizens who engage in public affairs should be men of abilities therein. Several persons think,   that different employments may be allotted to the same person; as a soldier’s,   a husbandman’s, and an artificer’s; as also that others may be both senators and judges. Besides, every one supposes himself a man of political abilities, and that he is qualified   for almost every department in the state. But the same person cannot at once be poor and rich:   for which reason the most obvious division of the city is into two parts, the poor and rich;   moreover, since for the generality the one are few, the other many,   they seem of all the parts of a city most contrary to each other; so that as the one   or the other prevail they form different states; and these are the democracy and the oligarchy. But that there are many different states, and from what causes they arise, has been already   mentioned: and that there are also different species both of democracies and oligarchies   we will now show. Though this indeed is evident from what we have already said: there are also   many different sorts of common people, and also of those who are called gentlemen. Of the different   sorts of the first are husbandmen, artificers, exchange-men, who are employed in buying and   selling, seamen, of which some are engaged in war, some in traffic, some in carrying goods and   passengers from place to place, others in fishing, and of each of these there are often many,   those who let ships on freight at Tenedos; we may add to these those who live by their   manual labour and have but little property; so that they cannot live without some employ:   and also those who are not free-born on both sides, and whatever other sort of common people   birth, their abilities, or their education, or any such-like excellence which is attributed to them. The most pure democracy is that which is so called principally from that equality which prevails   in it: for this is what the law in that state directs; that the poor shall be in no greater   subjection than the rich; nor that the supreme power shall be lodged with either of these,   to be found in a democracy, it must be most so by every department of government being alike   open to all; but as the people are the majority, and what they vote is law, it follows that such   a state must be a democracy. This, then, is one species thereof. Another is, when the magistrates   are elected by a certain census; but this should be but small, and every one who was included   in which every citizen who is not infamous has a share in the government, but where the government   is in the laws. Another, where every citizen without exception has this right. Another is   place when everything is determined by a majority of votes, and not by a law; which happens when the   people are influenced by the demagogues: for where a democracy is governed by stated laws there is no   room for them, but men of worth fill the first offices in the state: but where the power is not   vested in the laws, there demagogues abound: for there the people rule with kingly power: the whole   composing one body; for they are supreme, not as individuals but in their collective capacity. Homer also discommends the government of many;   but whether he means this we are speaking of, or where each person exercises his power separately,   to be altogether absolute, that they may not be under the control of the law, and this is   the time when flatterers are held in repute. Nor is there any difference between such a people and   over better persons than themselves. For their decrees are like the others’ edicts;   their demagogues like the others’ flatterers: but their greatest resemblance consists in the mutual   them it is owing that the supreme power is lodged in the votes of the people, and not in the laws;   for they bring everything before them, as their influence is owing to their being supreme whose   the magistrates insist upon it, that the right of determining on their conduct lies in the people,   who gladly receive their complaints as the means of destroying all their offices. Any one, therefore, may with great justice blame such a government as being a democracy,   and not a free state; for where the government is not in the laws, then there is no free state,   for the law ought to be supreme over all things; and particular incidents which   arise should be determined by the magistrates or the state. If, therefore, a democracy is to   be reckoned a free state, it is evident that any such establishment which centres all power   cannot be general in their extent. Thus, then, we may describe the several species of democracies.  CHAPTER 5 Of the different species of oligarchies one is,   when the right to the offices is regulated by a certain census; so that the poor, although the   of public affairs. Another sort is, when the magistrates are men of very small fortune,   who upon any vacancy do themselves fill it up: and if they do this out of the community at large,   the state approaches to an aristocracy; if out of any particular class of people, it will be an   oligarchy. Another sort of oligarchy is, when the power is an hereditary nobility. The fourth is,   when the power is in the same hands as the other, but not under the control of law;   and this sort of oligarchy exactly corresponds to a tyranny in monarchies, and to that   particular species of democracies which I last mentioned in treating of that state: this has   the particular name of a dynasty. These are the different sorts of oligarchies and democracies. It should also be known, that it often happens that a free state, where the supreme power is   in the laws, may not be democratic, and yet in consequence of the established manners and customs   of the people, may be governed as if it was; so, on the other hand, where the laws may countenance   a more democratic form of government, these may make the state inclining to an oligarchy;   for the people do not easily change, but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small   degrees only that one thing takes place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain,   while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution   in the state. CHAPTER 6  It is evident from what has been said, that there are as many different sorts of   democracies and oligarchies as I have reckoned up: for, of necessity, either all ranks of the   for when the husbandmen, and those only who possess moderate fortunes, have the supreme power,   they will govern according to law; for as they must get their livings by their employs, they have   but little leisure for public business: they will therefore establish proper laws, and never call   public assemblies but when there is a necessity for them; and they will readily let every one   partake with them in the administration of public affairs as soon as they possess that fortune which   the law requires for their qualification: every one, therefore, who is qualified will have his   share in the government: for to exclude any would be to make the government an oligarchy,   and for all to have leisure to attend without they had a subsistence would be impossible:   is distinguished by the mode of electing their magistrates, in which every one is eligible, to   whose birth there are no objections, provided he is supposed to have leisure to attend: for which   reason in such a democracy the supreme power will be vested in the laws, as there will be nothing   to a share in the government, which he will not accept for the cause already assigned; for which   reason here also the supreme power will be in the law. The fourth species of democracy, the last   which was established in order of time, arose when cities were greatly enlarged to what they   were at first, and when the public revenue became something considerable; for then the populace, on   account of their numbers, were admitted to share in the management of public affairs, for then even   they were more so than others, as they were not hindered by having anything of their own to mind,   as the rich had; for which reason these last very often did not frequent the public assemblies and   the courts of justice: thus the supreme power was lodged in the poor, and not in the laws. These are   The first species of oligarchy is, when the generality of the state are men of moderate   and not too large property; for this gives them leisure for the management of public affairs: and,   as they are a numerous body, it necessarily follows that the supreme power must be in   the laws, and not in men; for as they are far removed from a monarchical government,   and have not sufficient fortune to neglect their private affairs, while they are too   many to be supported by the public, they will of course determine to be governed by the laws,   and not by each other. But if the men of property in the state are but few,   and their property is large, then an oligarchy of the second sort will take place;   for those who have most power will think that they have a right to lord it over the others;   and, to accomplish this, they will associate to themselves some who have an inclination for public   purpose. And if those few who have large fortunes should acquire still greater power, the oligarchy   will then alter into one of the third sort; for they will get all the offices of the state into   their own hands by a law which directs the son to succeed upon the death of his father; and,   after that, when, by means of their increasing wealth and powerful connections, they extend still   further their oppression, a monarchical dynasty will directly succeed wherein men will be supreme,   and not the law; and this is the fourth species of an oligarchy correspondent to the last-mentioned   There are besides two other states, a democracy and an oligarchy, one of which all speak of,   and it is always esteemed a species of the four sorts; and thus they reckon them up; a monarchy,   an oligarchy, a democracy, and this fourth which they call an aristocracy. There is also a fifth,   which bears a name that is also common to the other four, namely, a state:   but as this is seldom to be met with, it has escaped those who have endeavoured to enumerate   the different sorts of governments, which they fix at four only, as does Plato in his Republic. An aristocracy, of which I have already treated in the first book, is rightly called so; for   a state governed by the best men, upon the most virtuous principles, and not upon any hypothesis,   which even good men may propose, has alone a right to be called an aristocracy, for it is there   only that a man is at once a good man and a good citizen; while in other states men are good only   relative to those states. Moreover, there are some other states which are called by the same name,   have a share in the administration; and have therefore acquired the name of aristocracies;   for in those governments wherein virtue is not their common care, there are still men of worth   and approved goodness. Whatever state, then, like the Carthaginians, favours the rich, the   virtuous, and the citizens at large, is a sort of aristocracy: when only the two latter are held in   esteem, as at Lacedaemon, and the state is jointly composed of these, it is a virtuous democracy.   These are the two species of aristocracies after the first, which is the best of all governments.   CHAPTER 8 It now remains for us to treat of that government   which is particularly called a free state, and also of a tyranny; and the reason for my choosing   although they do not seem excesses, yet, to speak true, they have all departed from what a perfect   government is. Nay, they are deviations both of them equally from other forms, as I said at the   beginning. It is proper to mention a tyranny the last of all governments, for it is of all   others the least like one: but as my intention is to treat of all governments in general,   I shall now inquire into a free state and show what it is; and we shall the better understand   its positive nature as we have already described an oligarchy and a democracy; for a free state is   indeed nothing more than a mixture of them, and it has been usual to call those which incline   most to a democracy, a free state; those which incline most to an oligarchy, an aristocracy,   because those who are rich are generally men of family and education; besides,   they enjoy those things which others are often guilty of crimes to procure:   for which reason they are regarded as men of worth and honour and note. Since, then, it is the genius of an aristocracy to allot the larger part of the government to   the best citizens, they therefore say, that an oligarchy is chiefly composed of those men who   are worthy and honourable: now it seems impossible that where the government is in the hands of the   in the hands of the bad, there the laws should be good; nor is a government well constituted   because the laws are, without at the same time care is taken that they are observed;   for to enforce obedience to the laws which it makes is one proof of a good constitution   in the state-another is, to have laws well calculated for those who are to abide by them;   for if they are improper they must be obeyed: and this may be done two ways, either by their   likely to confer the honours of the state on the virtuous; for virtue is the object of an   aristocracy, riches of an oligarchy, and liberty of a democracy; for what is approved of by the   majority will prevail in all or in each of these three different states; and that which seems good   to most of those who compose the community will prevail: for what is called a state prevails in   many communities, which aim at a mixture of rich and poor, riches and liberty: as for the rich,   they are usually supposed to take the place of the worthy and honourable. As there are three things   which claim an equal rank in the state, freedom, riches, and virtue (for as for the fourth, rank,   it is an attendant on two of the others, for virtue and riches are the origin of family), it is   evident, that the conjuncture of the rich and the poor make up a free state; but that all three tend   to an aristocracy more than any other, except that which is truly so, which holds the first rank.  We have already seen that there are governments different from a monarchy, a democracy, and an   oligarchy; and what they are, and wherein they differ from each other; and also aristocracies   and states properly so called, which are derived from them; and it is evident that these are not   much unlike each other. CHAPTER 9  We shall next proceed to show how that government

    which is peculiarly called   a state arises alongside of democracy and oligarchy, and how it ought to be established;   for we must mark out wherein they differ from one another, and then from both these compose   a state of such parts of each of them as will show from whence they were taken. There are three different ways in which two states may be blended and joined together; for,   in the first place, all those rules may be adopted which the laws of each of them have ordered; as   for instance in the judicial department, for in an oligarchy the rich are fined if they do not come   to the court as jurymen, but the poor are not paid for their attendance; but in democracies they are,   while the rich are not fined for their neglect. Now these things, as being common to both, are fit   be joined together. In the second place, a medium may be taken between the different methods which   each state observes; for instance, in a democracy the right to vote in the public assembly is either   confined by no census at all, or limited by a very small one; in an oligarchy none enjoy   it but those whose census is high: therefore, as these two practices are contrary to each other,   a census between each may be established in such a state. In the third place, different laws of each   community may be adopted; as, for instance, as it seems correspondent to the nature of a democracy,   that the magistrates should be chosen by lot, but an aristocracy by vote, and in the one state   according to a census, but not in the other: let, then, an aristocracy and a free state copy   something from each of them; let them follow an oligarchy in choosing their magistrates by vote,   but a democracy in not admitting of any census, and thus blend together the different customs of   the two governments. But the best proof of a happy mixture of a democracy and an oligarchy is this,   those who speak of it in this manner are induced to it because both these governments are there   well blended together: and indeed this is common to all mediums, that the extremes of each side   should be discerned therein, as at Lacedaemon; for many affirm that it is a democracy from the   many particulars in which it follows that form of government; as for instance, in the first place,   and their education is such that the children of the poor may partake of it; and the same rules are   observed when they are youths and men, there is no distinction between a rich person and a poor one;   and in their public tables the same provision is served to all. The rich also wear only such   clothes as the poorest man is able to purchase. Moreover, with respect to two magistracies of   the highest rank, one they have a right to elect to, the other to fill; namely, the senate and the   ephori. Others consider it as an oligarchy, the principles of which it follows in many things,   as in choosing all their officers by vote, and not by lot; in there being but a few who have   a right to sit in judgment on capital causes and the like. Indeed, a state which is well composed   of two others ought to resemble them both, and neither, Such a state ought to have its means of   this to the forbearance of their neighbours, for this may happen to a bad government, but to every   member of the community’s not being willing that there should be the least alteration in   their constitution. Such is the method in which a free state or aristocracy ought to be established.  CHAPTER 10 It now remains to treat of a tyranny;   not that there is much to be said on that subject, but as it makes part of our plan,   since we enumerated it amongst our different sorts of governments. In the beginning of this   work we inquired into the nature of kingly government, and entered into a particular   examination of what was most properly called so, and whether it was advantageous to a state or not,   and what it should be, and how established; and we divided a tyranny into two pieces when we were   upon this subject, because there is something analogous between this and a kingly government,   for they are both of them established by law; for among some of the barbarians they elect a   monarch with absolute power, and formerly among the Greeks there were some such, whom they called   sesumnetes. Now these differ from each other; for some possess only kingly power regulated by law,   and rule those who voluntarily submit to their government; others rule despotically according   to their own will. There is a third species of tyranny, most properly so called, which is   the very opposite to kingly power; for this is the government of one who rules over his equals   and superiors without being accountable for his conduct, and whose object is his own advantage,   and not the advantage of those he governs; for which reason he rules by compulsion,   for no freemen will ever willingly submit to such a government. These are the different species of   tyrannies, their principles, and their causes. CHAPTER 11  We proceed now to inquire what form of government and what manner of life is best for communities   in general, not adapting it to that superior virtue which is above the reach of the vulgar, or   that education which every advantage of nature and fortune only can furnish, nor to those imaginary   plans which may be formed at pleasure; but to that mode of life which the greater part of mankind can   attain to, and that government which most cities may establish: for as to those aristocracies   which we have now mentioned, they are either too perfect for a state to support, or one so nearly   alike to that state we now going to inquire into, that we shall treat of them both as one. The opinions which we form upon these subjects must depend upon one common principle: for if   what I have said in my treatise on Morals is true, a happy life must arise from an   uninterrupted course of virtue; and if virtue consists in a certain medium, the middle life   must certainly be the happiest; which medium is attainable by every one. The boundaries of virtue   and vice in the state must also necessarily be the same as in a private person; for the form   of government is the life of the city. In every city the people are divided into three sorts;   the very rich, the very poor, and those who are between them. If this is universally admitted,   that the mean is best, it is evident that even in point of fortune mediocrity is to be preferred;   for that state is most submissive to reason; for those who are very handsome, or very strong,   or very noble, or very rich; or, on the contrary; those who are very poor, or very weak,   or very mean, with difficulty obey it; for the one are capricious and greatly flagitious,   the other rascally and mean, the crimes of each arising from their different excesses:   nor will they go through the different offices of the state; which is detrimental to it: besides,   those who excel in strength, in riches, or friends, or the like, neither know how nor are   willing to submit to command: and this begins at home when they are boys; for there they are   brought up too delicately to be accustomed to obey their preceptors: as for the very poor,   their general and excessive want of what the rich enjoy reduces them to a state too mean:   so that the one know not how to command, but to be commanded as slaves, the others   know not how to submit to any command, nor to command themselves but with despotic power. A city composed of such men must therefore consist of slaves and masters, not freemen;   where one party must hate, and the other despise, where there could be no possibility of friendship   or political community: for community supposes affection; for we do not even on the road   associate with our enemies. It is also the genius of a city to be composed as much as possible of   equals; which will be most so when the inhabitants are in the middle state: from whence it follows,   that that city must be best framed which is composed of those whom we say are naturally   its proper members. It is men of this station also who will be best assured of safety and protection;   for they will neither covet what belongs to others, as the poor do; nor will others covet   what is theirs, as the poor do what belongs to the rich; and thus, without plotting against any one,   or having any one plot against them, they will live free from danger: for which reason   Phocylides wisely wishes for the middle state, as being most productive of happiness. It is plain,   then, that the most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank,   and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part,   so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating. It is therefore the greatest happiness which the citizens can enjoy to possess a   moderate and convenient fortune; for when some possess too much, and others nothing at all,   the government must either be in the hands of the meanest rabble or else a pure oligarchy; or, from   the excesses of both, a tyranny; for this arises from a headstrong democracy or an oligarchy,   but very seldom when the members of the community are nearly on an equality with each other. We will   assign a reason for this when we come to treat of the alterations which different states are   likely to undergo. The middle state is therefore best, as being least liable to those seditions   and insurrections which disturb the community; and for the same reason extensive governments   are least liable to these inconveniences; for there those in a middle state are very numerous,   whereas in small ones it is easy to pass to the two extremes, so as hardly to have any in   a medium remaining, but the one half rich, the other poor: and from the same principle it is   that democracies are more firmly established and of longer continuance than oligarchies;   but even in those when there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune,   the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end. We ought to consider as a proof of what I now advance, that the best lawgivers   themselves were those in the middle rank of life, amongst whom was Solon,   as is evident from his poems, and Lycurgus, for he was not a king, and Charondas, and indeed most   others to oligarchies: for whenever the number of those in the middle state has been too small,   those who were the more numerous, whether the rich or the poor, always overpowered them and   assumed to themselves the administration of public affairs; from hence arose either a democracy or an   oligarchy. Moreover, when in consequence of their disputes and quarrels with each other,   free state; but, as the record of their victory, one which inclines to their own principles,   and form either a democracy or an oligarchy. Those who made conquests in Greece,   having all of them an eye to the respective forms of government in their own cities,   what was similar to their own; for which reason a government has never been established where the   supreme power has been placed amongst those of the middling rank, or very seldom; and, amongst a few,   one man only of those who have yet been conquerors has been persuaded to give the preference to   this order of men: it is indeed an established custom with the inhabitants of most cities not   to desire an equality, but either to aspire to govern, or when they are conquered, to submit. Thus we have shown what the best state is, and why. It will not be difficult to perceive of   the many states which there are, for we have seen that there are various forms both of democracies   and oligarchies, to which we should give the first place, to which the second, and in the   same manner the next also; and to observe what are the particular excellences and defects of each,   after we have first described the best possible; for that must be the best which is nearest to   this, that worst which is most distant from the medium, without any one has a particular   plan of his own which he judges by. I mean by this, that it may happen, that although one   form of government may be better than another, yet there is no reason to prevent another from   being preferable thereunto in particular circumstances and for particular purposes.  CHAPTER 12 After what has been said,   suitable for particular persons; first laying this down as a general maxim,   that that party which desires to support the actual administration of the state ought always   to be superior to that which would alter it. Every city is made up of quality and quantity:   by quality I mean liberty, riches, education, and family, and by quantity its relative populousness:   and quantity in another; thus the number of the ignoble may be greater than the number of those   shall overbalance the quality of the other; those must be properly adjusted to each other; for where   the number of the poor exceeds the proportion we have mentioned, there a democracy will rise up,   and if the husbandry should have more power than others, it will be a democracy of husbandmen;   to be most numerous: thus, should these be the husbandmen, it will be of these, and the best;   if of mechanics and those who hire themselves out, the worst possible: in the same manner it may be   than they are deficient in quantity, there an oligarchy ensues; and this oligarchy may be   of different species, according to the nature of the prevailing party. Every legislator in framing   his constitution ought to have a particular regard to those in the middle rank of life;   and if he intends an oligarchy, these should be the object of his laws; if a democracy,   or at least one of them, they give stability to the constitution; for there is no fear that   choose to serve the other. If any one would choose to fix the administration on the widest basis,   he will find none preferable to this; for to rule by turns is what the rich and the poor will   not submit to, on account of their hatred to each other. It is, moreover, allowed that an arbitrator   is the most proper person for both parties to trust to; now this arbitrator is the middle rank. Those who would establish aristocratical governments are mistaken not only in giving   too much power to the rich, but also in deceiving the common people; for at last, instead of an   imaginary good, they must feel a real evil, for the encroachments of the rich are more destructive   to the state than those of the poor. CHAPTER 13  There are five particulars in which, under fair pretences, the rich craftily endeavour   to undermine the rights of the people, these are their public assemblies, their offices of state,   their courts of justice, their military power, and their gymnastic exercises. With respect to their   public assemblies, in having them open to all, but in fining the rich only, or others very little,   this indulgence to those who are within the census; with respect to their courts of justice,   in fining the rich for non-attendance, but the poor not at all, or those a great deal, and these   very little, as was done by the laws of Charondas. In some places every citizen who was enrolled had   a right to attend the public assemblies and to try causes; which if they did not do, a very heavy   fine was laid upon them; that through fear of the fine they might avoid being enrolled, as they were   then obliged to do neither the one nor the other. The same spirit of legislation prevailed with   respect to their bearing arms and their gymnastic exercises; for the poor are excused if they have   no arms, but the rich are fined; the same method takes place if they do not attend their gymnastic   exercises, there is no penalty on one, but there is on the other: the consequence of which is,   that the fear of this penalty induces the rich to keep the one and attend the other,   while the poor do neither. These are the deceitful contrivances of oligarchical legislators. The contrary prevails in a democracy; for there they make the poor a proper allowance   for attending the assemblies and the courts, but give the rich nothing for doing it: whence   it is evident, that if any one would properly blend these customs together, they must extend   both the pay and the fine to every member of the community, and then every one would share in it,   whereas part only now do. The citizens of a free state ought to consist of those only who   bear arms: with respect to their census it is not easy to determine exactly what it ought to be,   but the rule that should direct upon this subject should be to make it as extensive as possible,   so that those who are enrolled in it make up a greater part of the people than those who are not;   for those who are poor, although they partake not of the offices of the state,   are willing to live quiet, provided that no one disturbs them in their property:   but this is not an easy matter; for it may not always happen, that those who are at the head of   public affairs are of a humane behaviour. In time of war the poor are accustomed to show no alacrity   without they have provisions found them; when they have, then indeed they are willing to fight. In some governments the power is vested not only in those who bear arms, but also in those who   have borne them. Among the Malienses the state was composed of these latter only, for all the   officers were soldiers who had served their time. And the first states in Greece which succeeded   for at that time the strength and excellence of the army depended on the horse, for as to the   heavy-armed foot they were useless without proper discipline; but the art of tactics was not known   to the ancients, for which reason their strength lay in their horse: but when cities grew larger,   and they depended more on their foot, greater numbers partook of the freedom of the city;   for which reason what we call republics were formerly called democracies. The ancient   governments were properly oligarchies or kingdoms; for on account of the few persons in each state,   it would have been impossible to have found a sufficient number of the middle rank; so these   being but few, and those used to subordination, they more easily submitted to be governed. We have now shown why there are many sorts of governments, and others different from those   we have treated of: for there are more species of democracies than one, and the like is true   of other forms, and what are their differences, and whence they arise; and also of all others   which is the best, at least in general; and which is best suited for particular people.  CHAPTER 14 We will now proceed to make some general   reflections upon the governments next in order, and also to consider each of them in particular;   beginning with those principles which appertain to each: now there are three things in all   states which a careful legislator ought well to consider, which are of great consequence to all,   variation of which the one will differ from the other. The first of these is the public assembly;   the second the officers of the state, that is, who they ought to be, and with what power they should   be entrusted, and in what manner they should be appointed; the third, the judicial department. Now it is the proper business of the public assembly to determine concerning war and peace,   making or breaking off alliances, to enact laws, to sentence to death, banishment, or confiscation   powers must necessarily be entrusted to the citizens in general, or all of them to some;   either to one magistrate or more; or some to one, and some to another, or some to all, but others   There are many methods of delegating these powers to the citizens at large, one of which is to let   In others the supreme council is composed of the different magistrates, and they succeed to the   offices of the community by proper divisions of tribes, wards, and other very small proportions,   till every one in his turn goes through them: nor does the whole community ever meet together,   without it is when new laws are enacted, or some national affair is debated, or to hear what the   magistrates have to propose to them. Another method is for the people to meet in a collective   body, but only for the purpose of holding the comitia, making laws, determining concerning   public business is conducted by the magistrates, who have their separate departments, and are   chosen out of the whole community either by vote or ballot. Another method is for the people in   general to meet for the choice of the magistrates, and to examine into their conduct; and also to   deliberate concerning war and alliances, and to leave other things to the magistrates,   whoever happen to be chosen, whose particular employments are such as necessarily require   persons well skilled therein. A fourth method is for every person to deliberate upon every subject   in public assembly, where the magistrates can determine nothing of themselves, and have only   the privilege of giving their opinions first; and this is the method of the most pure democracy,   which is analogous to the proceedings in a dynastic oligarchy and a tyrannic monarchy. These, then, are the methods in which public business is conducted in a democracy. When the   power is in the hands of part of the community only, it is an oligarchy and this also admits   of different customs; for whenever the officers of the state are chosen out of those who have a   moderate fortune, and these from that circumstance are many, and when they depart not from that line   which the law has laid down, but carefully follow it, and when all within the census are eligible,   certainly it is then an oligarchy, but founded on true principles of government from its moderation.   When the people in general do not partake of the deliberative power, but certain persons   chosen for that purpose, who govern according to law; this also, like the first, is an oligarchy.   When those who have the deliberative power elect each other, and the son succeeds to the father,   and when they can supersede the laws, such a government is of necessity a strict oligarchy.   When some persons determine on one thing, and others on another, as war and peace, and when   all inquire into the conduct of their magistrates, and other things are left to different officers,   elected either by vote or lot, then the government is an aristocracy or a free   state. When some are chosen by vote and others by lot, and these either from the people in general,   or from a certain number elected for that purpose, or if both the votes and the lots are open to all,   such a state is partly an aristocracy, partly a free government itself. These are the different   methods in which the deliberative power is vested in different states, all of whom follow   some regulation here laid down. It is advantageous to a democracy, in the present sense of the word,   by which I mean a state wherein the people at large have a supreme power, even over the laws,   to hold frequent public assemblies; and it will be best in this particular to imitate the example   of oligarchies in their courts of justice; for they fine those who are appointed to try causes   and their counsels will be best when all advise with each other, the citizens with the nobles,   the nobles with the citizens. It is also advisable when the council is to be composed of part of   the citizens, to elect, either by vote or lot, an equal number of both ranks. It is also proper, if   but such a number only as will make them equal to the nobles, or to reject many of them by lot.  In an oligarchy they should either call up some of the common people to the council,   or else establish a court, as is done in some other states, whom they call pre-advisers or   guardians of the laws, whose business should be to propose first what they should afterwards enact.   By this means the people would have a place in the administration of public affairs, without having   it in their power to occasion any disorder in the government. Moreover, the people may be allowed to   have a vote in whatever bill is proposed, but may not themselves propose anything contrary thereto;   or they may give their advice, while the power of determining may be with the magistrates   only. It is also necessary to follow a contrary practice to what is established in democracies,   for the people should be allowed the power of pardoning, but not of condemning, for the cause   for the power of pardoning is with the few, but not of condemning, which is always referred   to the people at large. And thus we determine concerning the deliberative power in any state,   and in whose hands it shall be. CHAPTER 15  We now proceed to consider the choice of magistrates; for this branch of public business   contains many different Parts, as how many there shall be, what shall be their particular office,   and with respect to time how long each of them shall continue in place; for some make it six   months, others shorter, others for a year, others for a much longer time; or whether   they should be perpetual or for a long time, or neither; for the same person may fill the same   office several times, or he may not be allowed to enjoy it even twice, but only once: and also with   respect to the appointment of magistrates, who are to be eligible, who is to choose them, and   in what manner; for in all these particulars we ought properly to distinguish the different ways   which may be followed; and then to show which of these is best suited to such and such governments. Now it is not easy to determine to whom we ought properly to give the name of magistrate,   for a government requires many persons in office; but every one of those who is either chosen by   vote or lot is not to be reckoned a magistrate. The priests, for instance, in the first place; for   these are to be considered as very different from civil magistrates: to these we may add the choregi   and heralds; nay, even ambassadors are elected: there are some civil employments which belong to   the citizens; and these are either when they are all engaged in one thing, as when as soldiers they   obey their general, or when part of them only are, as in governing the women or educating the youth;   and also some economic, for they often elect corn-meters: others are servile, and in which,   if they are rich, they employ slaves. But indeed they are most properly called magistrates,   who are members of the deliberative council, or decide causes, or are in some command,   the last more especially, for to command is peculiar to magistrates. But to speak truth,   this question is of no great consequence, nor is it the province of the judges to decide between   those who dispute about words; it may indeed be an object of speculative inquiry; but to inquire   what officers are necessary in a state, and how many, and what, though not most necessary,   may yet be advantageous in a well-established government, is a much more useful employment,   and this with respect to all states in general, as well as to small cities. In extensive governments it is proper to allot one employment to one person, as there are many   and others never be in office but once; and indeed everything is better done which has the whole   is necessary that a few of the citizens should execute many employments; for their numbers are   so small it will not be convenient to have many of them in office at the same time; for where shall   and the same laws as large ones; but the one will not want to employ them so often as the other;   so that different charges may be intrusted to the same person without any inconvenience,   for they will not interfere with each other, and for want of sufficient members in the community   it will be necessary. If we could tell how many magistrates are necessary in every city,   and how many, though not necessary, it is yet proper to have, we could then the better know   know what tribunals in different places should have different things under their jurisdiction,   for instance, decency of manners, shall the clerk of the market take cognisance of that if the cause   arises in the market, and another magistrate in another place, or the same magistrate everywhere:   or shall there be a distinction made of the fact, or the parties? as, for instance, in decency of   manners, shall it be one cause when it relates to a man, another when it relates to a woman? In different states shall the magistrates be different or the same? I mean, whether in a   democracy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, and a monarchy, the same persons shall have the same   power? or shall it vary according to the different formation of the government? as in an aristocracy   who are rich; in a democracy to the freemen? Or shall the magistrates differ as the communities   differ? For it may happen that the very same may be sometimes proper, sometimes otherwise: in this   state it may be necessary that the magistrate have great powers, in that but small. There are also   certain magistrates peculiar to certain states—as the pre-advisers are not proper in a democracy,   but a senate is; for one such order is necessary, whose business shall be to consider beforehand   and prepare those bills which shall be brought before the people that they may have leisure to   attend to their own affairs; and when these are few in number the state inclines to an oligarchy.   there are both these offices in the same state, the pre-adviser’s is superior to the senator’s,   the one having only a democratical power, the other an oligarchical: and indeed the power   of the senate is lost in those democracies, in which the people, meeting in one public assembly,   take all the business into their own hands; and this is likely to happen either when the community   in general are in easy circumstances, or when they are paid for their attendance; for they are then   at leisure often to meet together and determine everything for themselves. A magistrate whose   this, is to be found in an aristocracy, not in a democracy; for who can forbid the wives of the   poor from appearing in public? neither is such a one to be met with in an oligarchy; for the women   there are too delicate to bear control. And thus much for this subject. Let us endeavour to treat   differ from each other in three ways, from which, blended together, all the varieties which can be   imagined arise. The first of these differences is in those who appoint the magistrates,   the second consists in those who are appointed, the third in the mode of appointment; and each   of these three differ in three manners; for either all the citizens may appoint collectively,   or some out of their whole body, or some out of a particular order in it, according to fortune,   amongst those who had returned together to their country, and had reinstated themselves by force of   arms) and this either by vote or lot. Again, these several modes may be differently formed together,   as some magistrates may be chosen by part of the community, others by the whole; some out of part,   others out of the whole; some by vote, others by lot: and each of these different modes admit   of a four-fold subdivision; for either all may elect all by vote or by lot; and when all elect,   they may either proceed without any distinction, or they may elect by a certain division of tribes,   wards, or companies, till they have gone through the whole community: and some magistrates may be   elected one way, and others another. Again, if some magistrates are elected either by vote or lot   of all the citizens, or by the vote of some and the lot of some, or some one way and some another;   that is to say, some by the vote of all, others by the lot of all, there will then be twelve   are two adapted to a democracy; namely, to have all the magistrates chosen out of all the people,   either by vote or lot, or both; that is to say, some of them by lot, some by vote. In a   free state the whole community should not elect at the same time, but some out of the whole,   or out of some particular rank; and this either by lot, or vote, or both: and they should elect   either out of the whole community, or out of some particular persons in it, and this both by lot and   vote. In an oligarchy it is proper to choose some magistrates out of the whole body of the citizens,   In a free aristocracy, some magistrates should be chosen out of the community in general,   others out of a particular rank, or these by choice, those by lot. In a pure oligarchy, the   magistrates should be chosen out of certain ranks, and by certain persons, and some of those by lot,   others by both methods; but to choose them out of the whole community is not correspondent to   the nature of this government. It is proper in an aristocracy for the whole community to elect their   magistrates out of particular persons, and this by vote. These then are all the different ways   of electing of magistrates; and they have been allotted according to the nature of the different   communities; but what mode of proceeding is proper for different communities, or how the offices   ought to be established, or with what powers shall be particularly explained. I mean by the powers   the laws of the state; for different magistrates have different powers, as that of the general of   the army differs from the clerk of the market. CHAPTER 16  this also we shall divide in the same manner as we did the magisterial, into three parts. Of whom   the judges shall consist, and for what causes, and how. When I say of whom, I mean whether they   courts shall be appointed; by how, whether they shall be elected by vote or lot. Let us first   determine how many different courts there ought to be. Now these are eight. The first of these is   the court of inspection over the behaviour of the magistrates when they have quitted their office;   the second is to punish those who have injured the public; the third is to take cognisance of   those causes in which the state is a party; the fourth is to decide between magistrates   and private persons, who appeal from a fine laid upon them; the fifth is to determine disputes   which may arise concerning contracts of great value; the sixth is to judge between foreigners,   and of murders, of which there are different species; and these may all be tried by the   same judges or by different ones; for there are murders of malice prepense and of chance-medley;   there is also justifiable homicide, where the fact is admitted, and the legality of it disputed. There is also another court called at Athens the Court of Phreattae, which determines points   relating to a murder committed by one who has run away, to decide whether he shall return;   though such an affair happens but seldom, and in very large cities; the seventh, to determine   causes wherein strangers are concerned, and this whether they are between stranger and stranger   or between a stranger and a citizen. The eighth and last is for small actions, from one to five   drachma’s, or a little more; for these ought also to be legally determined, but not to be brought   before the whole body of the judges. But without entering into any particulars concerning actions   which have the jurisdiction of those matters which more particularly relate to the affairs of the   community and which if not well conducted occasion seditions and commotions in the state. Now,   of necessity, either all persons must have a right to judge of all these different causes, appointed   for that purpose, either by vote or lot, or all of all, some of them by vote, and others by lot,   or in some causes by vote, in others by lot. Thus there will be four sorts of judges. There will be   just the same number also if they are chosen out of part of the people only; for either all   the judges must be chosen out of that part either by vote or lot, or some by lot and some by vote,   or the judges in particular causes must be chosen some by vote, others by lot; by which means there   will be the same number of them also as was mentioned. Besides, different judges may be   joined together; I mean those who are chosen out of the whole people or part of them or both; so   that all three may sit together in the same court, and this either by vote, lot, or both. And thus   much for the different sorts of judges. Of these appointments that which admits all the community   to be judges in all causes is most suitable to a democracy; the second, which appoints that certain   persons shall judge all causes, to an oligarchy; the third, which appoints the whole community to   be judges in some causes, but particular persons in others, to an aristocracy or free state. BOOK 5 CHAPTER 1  We have now gone through those particulars we proposed to speak of; it remains that we next   consider from what causes and how alterations in government arise, and of what nature they are,   and to what the destruction of each state is owing; and also to what form any form   of polity is most likely to shift into, and what are the means to be used for the general   preservation of governments, as well as what are applicable to any particular state; and also of   the remedies which are to be applied either to all in general, or to any one considered separately,   when they are in a state of corruption: and here we ought first to lay down this principle, that   there are many governments, all of which approve of what is just and what is analogically equal;   and yet have failed from attaining thereunto, as we have already mentioned; thus democracies have   arisen from supposing that those who are equal in one thing are so in every other circumstance; as,   because they are equal in liberty, they are equal in everything else; and oligarchies,   from supposing that those who are unequal in one thing are unequal in all; that when men are so   in point of fortune, that inequality extends to everything else. Hence it follows, that those who   in some respects are equal with others think it right to endeavour to partake of an equality with   them in everything; and those who are superior to others endeavour to get still more; and it is this   are almost totally wrong; and, upon this account, when either party has not that share in the   administration which answers to his expectations, he becomes seditious: but those who of all others   have the greatest right to be so are the last that are; namely, those who excel in virtue; for they   alone can be called generally superior. There are, too, some persons of distinguished families who,   because they are so, disdain to be on an equality with others, for those esteem themselves noble   who boast of their ancestors’ merit and fortune: these, to speak truth, are the origin and fountain   from whence seditions arise. The alterations which men may propose to make in governments are two;   for either they may change the state already established into some other, as when they propose   to erect an oligarchy where there is a democracy; or a democracy, or free state, where there is an   oligarchy, or an aristocracy from these, or those from that; or else, when they have no objection   to the established government, which they like very well, but choose to have the sole management   in it themselves; either in the hands of a few or one only. They will also raise commotions   concerning the degree in which they would have the established power; as if, for instance, the   government is an oligarchy, to have it more purely so, and in the same manner if it is a democracy,   or else to have it less so; and, in like manner, whatever may be the nature of the government,   either to extend or contract its powers; or else to make some alterations in some parts of it;   as to establish or abolish a particular magistracy, as some persons say Lysander   endeavoured to abolish the kingly power in Sparta; and Pausanias that of the ephori. Thus   in Epidamnus there was an alteration in one part of the constitution, for instead of the philarchi   they established a senate. It is also necessary for all the magistrates at Athens; to attend in   the court of the Helisea when any new magistrate is created: the power of the archon also in that   state partakes of the nature of an oligarchy: inequality is always the occasion of sedition,   inequality. Thus kingly power is unequal when exercised over equals. Upon the whole, those who   Equality in number is when two things contain the same parts or the same quantity; equality in value   exceeds two, and two one in the same degree, for two is the same part of four that one is of two;   already said they dispute concerning proportionate value; for some persons, if they are equal in one   respect, think themselves equal in all; others, if they are superior in one thing, think they may   claim the superiority in all; from whence chiefly arise two sorts of governments, a democracy and an   oligarchy; for nobility and virtue are to be found only amongst a few; the contrary amongst the many;   But to establish a government entirely upon either of these equalities is wrong, and this the example   of those so established makes evident, for none of them have been stable; and for this reason,   that it is impossible that whatever is wrong at the first and in its principles should not at   last meet with a bad end: for which reason in some things an equality of numbers ought to take place,   in others an equality in value. However, a democracy is safer and less liable to sedition   than an oligarchy; for in this latter it may arise from two causes, for either the few in   power may conspire against each other or against the people; but in a democracy only one; namely,   against the few who aim at exclusive power; but there is no instance worth speaking of,   of a sedition of the people against themselves. Moreover, a government composed of men of moderate   fortunes comes much nearer to a democracy than an oligarchy, and is the safest of all such states.  CHAPTER 2 Since we are inquiring   into the causes of seditions and revolutions in governments, we must begin entirely with the first   principles from whence they arise. Now these, so to speak, are nearly three in number; which   we must first distinguish in general from each other, and endeavour to show in what situation   people are who begin a sedition; and for what causes; and thirdly, what are the beginnings   of political troubles and mutual quarrels with each other. Now that cause which of all others   most universally inclines men to desire to bring about a change in government is that   which I have already mentioned; for those who aim at equality will be ever ready for sedition,   if they see those whom they esteem their equals possess more than they do, as well as those also   who are not content with equality but aim at superiority, if they think that while they deserve   more than, they have only equal with, or less than, their inferiors. Now, what they aim at may   be either just or unjust; just, when those who are inferior are seditious, that they may be equal;   in which men will be seditious: the causes for which they will be so are profit and honour;   and their contrary: for, to avoid dishonour or loss of fortune by mulcts, either on their   own account or their friends, they will raise a commotion in the state. The original causes which   dispose men to the things which I have mentioned are, taken in one manner, seven in number,   in another they are more; two of which are the same with those that have been already mentioned:   not to get the possession of them for themselves (which was what I just now supposed), but when   they see others, some justly, others unjustly, engrossing them. The other causes are haughtiness,   fear, eminence, contempt, disproportionate increase in some part of the state. There are   also other things which in a different manner will occasion revolutions in governments;   as election intrigues, neglect, want of numbers, a too great dissimilarity of circumstances.  CHAPTER 3 What influence ill-treatment   and profit have for this purpose, and how they may be the causes of sedition, is almost self-evident;   them, they not only occasion seditions amongst each other, but against the state also who gave   them their power; and this their avarice has two objects, either private property or the property   of the state. What influence honours have, and how they may occasion sedition, is evident enough;   for those who are themselves unhonoured while they see others honoured, will be ready for any   disturbance: and these things are done unjustly when any one is either honoured or discarded   contrary to their deserts, justly when they are according to them. Excessive honours are also a   cause of sedition when one person or more are greater than the state and the power of the   government can permit; for then a monarchy or a dynasty is usually established: on which account   the ostracism was introduced in some places, as at Argos and Athens: though it is better to guard   against such excesses in the founding of a state, than when they have been permitted to take place,   to correct them afterward. Those who have been guilty of crimes will be the cause of sedition,   through fear of punishment; as will those also who expect an injury, that they may prevent it; as was   the case at Rhodes, when the nobles conspired against the people on account of the decrees   they expected would pass against them. Contempt also is a cause of sedition and conspiracies;   as in oligarchies, where there are many who have no share in the administration. The rich also even   in democracies, despising the disorder and anarchy which will arise, hope to better themselves by   the same means which happened at Thebes after the battle of Oenophyta, where, in consequence of bad   administration, the democracy was destroyed; as it was at Megara, where the power of the people was   lost through anarchy and disorder; the same thing happened at Syracuse before the tyranny of Gelon;   and at Rhodes there was the same sedition before the popular government was overthrown. Revolutions   in state will also arise from a disproportionate increase; for as the body consists of many parts,   as if the foot was to be four cubits long, and the rest of the body but two palms;   not only in quantity, but also in disposition of parts; so also a city consists of parts, some of   which may often increase without notice, as the number of poor in democracies and free states.   They will also sometimes happen by accident, as at Tarentum, a little after the Median war, where   so many of the nobles were killed in a battle by the lapygi, that from a free state the government   the Spartan, that they were obliged to admit several husbandmen to the freedom of the state:   and at Athens, through the unfortunate event of the infantry battles, the number of the nobles   was reduced by the soldiers being chosen from the list of citizens in the Lacedaemonian wars.   rich grow numerous or properties increase, they become oligarchies or dynasties. Governments also   sometimes alter without seditions by a combination of the meaner people; as at Hersea: for which   purpose they changed the mode of election from votes to lots, and thus got themselves chosen:   and by negligence, as when the citizens admit those who are not friends to the constitution into   the chief offices of the state, which happened at Orus, when the oligarchy of the archons was put   an end to at the election of Heracleodorus, who changed that form of government into a democratic   free state. By little and little, I mean by this, that very often great alterations silently take   place in the form of government from people’s overlooking small matters; as at Ambracia,   where the census was originally small, but at last became nothing at all, as if a little and nothing   at all were nearly or entirely alike. That state also is liable to seditions which is composed of   as a city cannot be composed of every multitude, so neither can it in every given time; for which   or afterwards admitted their neighbours to the freedom of their city, have been most liable to   revolutions; as when the Achaeans joined with the Traezenians in founding Sybaris; for soon after,   growing more powerful than the Traezenians, they expelled them from the city; from whence   came the proverb of Sybarite wickedness: and again, disputes from a like cause happened at   Thurium between the Sybarites and those who had joined with them in building the city; for they   assuming upon these, on account of the country being their own, were driven out. And at Byzantium   the new citizens, being detected in plots against the state, were driven out of the city by force   of arms. The Antisseans also, having taken in those who were banished from Chios, afterwards   did the same thing; and also the Zancleans, after having taken in the people of Samos. their city, were troubled with seditions: and the Syracusians, after the expulsion of their tyrants,   having enrolled strangers and mercenaries amongst their citizens, quarrelled with   each other and came to an open rupture: and the people of Amphipolis, having taken in a colony of   Chalcidians, were the greater part of them driven out of the city by them. Many persons occasion   of the state with their equals, as I have already mentioned; but in democracies the principal people   do the same because they have not more than an equal share with others who are not equal   the ground is not well adapted for one city; as at Clazomene, where the people who lived in that   part of the town called Chytrum quarrelled with them who lived in the island, and the Colophonians   with the Notians. At Athens too the disposition of the citizens is not the same, for those who live   in the Piraeus are more attached to a popular government than those who live in the city   properly so called; for as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line   but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice,   and next to that between poverty and riches, and so on in order, one cause having more influence   than another; one of which that I last mentioned. CHAPTER 4  But seditions in government do not arise for little things, but from them;   for their immediate cause is something of moment. Now, trifling quarrels are attended with the   as was the case with the Syracusians in a remote period; for a revolution in the government was   brought about by a quarrel between two young men who were in office, upon a love affair;   for one of them being absent, the other seduced his mistress; he in his turn, offended with this,   persuaded his friend’s wife to come and live with him; and upon this the whole city took   part either with the one or the other, and the government was overturned: therefore every one at   the beginning of such disputes ought to take care to avoid the consequences; and to smother up all   quarrels which may happen to arise amongst those in power, for the mischief lies in the beginning;   fault will be found afterwards to bear its full proportion to what follows. Moreover,   disputes between men of note involve the whole city in their consequences; in Hestiaea, after the   Median war: two brothers having a dispute about their paternal estate; he who was the poorer, from   the popular party on his side, while the other, who was rich, the men of fashion. And at Delphos,   a quarrel about a wedding was the beginning of all the seditions that afterwards arose amongst them;   for the bridegroom, being terrified by some unlucky omen upon waiting upon the bride,   went away without marrying her; which her relations resenting, contrived secretly to   convey some sacred money into his pocket while he was sacrificing, and then killed him as an impious   person. At Mitylene also, a dispute, which arose concerning a right of heritage, was the beginning   a man of fortune, leaving two daughters, Doxander, who was circumvented in procuring them in marriage   for his two sons, began a sedition, and excited the Athenians to attack them, being the host of   that state. There was also a dispute at Phocea, concerning a right of inheritance, between Mnasis,   the father of Mnasis, and Euthucrates, the father of Onomarchus, which brought on the Phoceans the   marriage; for a certain man having contracted his daughter in marriage, the father of the young   person to whom she was contracted, being archon, punishes him, upon which account he, resenting   the affront, associated himself with those who were excluded from any share in the government,   and brought about a revolution. A government may be changed either into an oligarchy, democracy,   or a free state; when the magistrates, or any part of the city acquire great credit, or are increased   in power, as the court of Areopagus at Athens, having procured great credit during the Median   war, added firmness to their administration; and, on the other hand, the maritime force,   composed of the commonalty, having gained the victory at Salamis, by their power at sea, got the   lead in the state, and strengthened the popular party: and at Argos, the nobles, having gained   democracy. And at Syracuse, the victory in their war with the Athenians being owing to the common   people, they changed their free state into a democracy: and at Chalcis, the people having taken   off the tyrant Phocis, together with the nobles, immediately seized the government: and at Ambracia   also the people, having expelled the tyrant Periander, with his party, placed the supreme   power in themselves. And this in general ought to be known, that whosoever has been the occasion of   part of the citizens, or the multitude, be they who they will, will be the cause of disputes in   the state. For either some persons, who envy them the honours they have acquired, will begin to be   seditious, or they, on account of the dignity they have acquired, will not be content with   their former equality. A state is also liable to commotions when those parts of it which seem to be   opposite to each other approach to an equality, as the rich and the common people; so that the part   which is between them both is either nothing at all, or too little to be noticed; for if one party   is so much more powerful than the other, as to be evidently stronger, that other will not be willing   to hazard the danger: for which reason those who are superior in excellence and virtue will never   be the cause of seditions; for they will be too few for that purpose when compared to the many. In   general, the beginning and the causes of seditions in all states are such as I have now described,   and revolutions therein are brought about in two ways, either by violence or fraud: if by violence,   either at first by compelling them to submit to the change when it is made. It may also   be brought about by fraud in two different ways, either when the people, being at first deceived,   willingly consent to an alteration in their government, and are afterwards obliged by force   to abide by it: as, for instance, when the four hundred imposed upon the people by telling them   that the king of Persia would supply them with money for the war against the Lacedaemonians;   and after they had been guilty of this falsity, they endeavoured to keep possession   of the supreme power; or when they are at first persuaded and afterwards consent to be governed:   and by one of these methods which I have mentioned are all revolutions in governments brought about.  CHAPTER 5 We ought now to inquire   into those events which will arise from these causes in every species of government. Democracies   will be most subject to revolutions from the dishonesty of their demagogues; for partly,   common fear will make the greatest enemies unite; and partly by setting the common people against   them: and this is what any one may continually see practised in many states. In the island of Cos,   for instance, the democracy was subverted by the wickedness of the demagogues, for the nobles   prevented the people from paying the trierarchs what was owing to them, who were obliged by the   number of actions they were harassed with to conspire together and destroy the popular state.   The same thing was brought about at Heraclea, soon after the settlement of the city, by the   same persons; for the citizens of note, being ill treated by them, quitted the city, but afterwards   joining together they returned and overthrew the popular state. Just in the same manner the   democracy was destroyed in Megara; for there the demagogues, to procure money by confiscations,   got the better of the people in a battle, and established an oligarchy. The like happened at   Cume, during the time of the democracy, which Thrasymachus destroyed; and whoever considers   what has happened in other states may perceive the same revolutions to have arisen from the   same causes. The demagogues, to curry favour with the people, drive the nobles to conspire together,   either by dividing their estates, or obliging them to spend them on public services,   or by banishing them, that they may confiscate the fortunes of the wealthy. In former times, when   the same person was both demagogue and general, the democracies were changed into tyrannies; and   indeed most of the ancient tyrannies arose from those states: a reason for which then subsisted,   but not now; for at that time the demagogues were of the soldiery; for they were not then powerful   by their eloquence; but, now the art of oratory is cultivated, the able speakers are at present the   demagogues; but, as they are unqualified to act in a military capacity, they cannot impose themselves   on the people as tyrants, if we except in one or two trifling instances. Formerly, too, tyrannies   were more common than now, on account of the very extensive powers with which some magistrates   were entrusted: as the prytanes at Miletus; for they were supreme in many things of the   last consequence; and also because at that time the cities were not of that very great extent,   the people in general living in the country, and being employed in husbandry, which gave them,   who took the lead in public affairs, an opportunity, if they had a turn for war,   to make themselves tyrants; which they all did when they had gained the confidence of the people;   and this confidence was their hatred to the rich. This was the case of Pisistratus at Athens,   when he opposed the Pediaci: and of Theagenes in Megara, who slaughtered the cattle belonging   to the rich, after he had seized those who kept them by the riverside. Dionysius also,   for accusing Daphnseus and the rich, was thought worthy of being raised to a tyranny, from the   confidence which the people had of his being a popular man in consequence of these enmities. A   government shall also alter from its ancient and approved democratic form into one entirely new,   if there is no census to regulate the election of magistrates; for, as the   election is with the people, the demagogues who are desirous of being in office, to flatter them,   entirely, or at least in a great measure, the magistrates should be elected by the tribes,   and not by the people at large. These are nearly the revolutions to which democracies are liable,   and also the causes from whence they arise. CHAPTER 6  There are two things which of all others most evidently occasion a revolution in an oligarchy;   one is, when the people are ill used, for then every individual is ripe for sedition;   more particularly if one of the oligarchy should happen to be their leader; as Lygdamis, at Naxus,   who was afterwards tyrant of that island. Seditions also which arise from different   causes will differ from each other; for sometimes a revolution is brought about by the rich who have   Massilia, Ister, Heraclea, and other cities; for those who had no share in the government ceased   not to raise disputes till they were admitted to it: first the elder brothers, and then the   in others the elder and younger brother: and where this is observed the oligarchy partakes something   hands of a few, it consisted of six hundred. At Cnidus the oligarchy was destroyed by the   nobles quarrelling with each other, because the government was in the hands of so few: for there,   brothers, the eldest only; for the people, taking advantage of their disputes, elected one of the   nobles for their general, and got the victory: for where there are seditions government is weak. And   under their excellent management, yet because the people were displeased that the power should be in   the hands of so few, they changed the government. Oligarchies also are subject to revolutions,   from those who are in office therein, from the quarrels of the demagogues with each other. The   demagogues are of two sorts; one who flatter the few when they are in power: for even these have   their demagogues; such was Charicles at Athens, who had great influence over the thirty; and,   in the same manner, Phrynichus over the four hundred. The others are those demagogues who   have a share in the oligarchy, and flatter the people: such were the state-guardians at Larissa,   who flattered the people because they were elected by them. And this will always happen   men either of great fortune or certain ranks, by the soldiers or by the people; as was the custom   at Abydos. And when the judicial department is not in the hands of the supreme power, the demagogues,   favouring the people in their causes, overturn the government; which happened at Heraclea in Pontus:   and also when some desire to contract the power of the oligarchy into fewer hands; for those who   endeavour to support an equality are obliged to apply to the people for assistance. An oligarchy   is also subject to revolutions when the nobility spend their fortunes by luxury; for such persons   are desirous of innovations, and either endeavour to be tyrants themselves or to support others in   being so, as Hypparinus supported Dionysius of Syracuse. And at Amphipolis one Cleotimus   collected a colony of Chalcidians, and when they came set them to quarrel with the rich: and at   the government. Sometimes they will try to raise commotions, sometimes they will rob the public,   and then quarrel with each other, or else fight with those who endeavour to detect them;   which was the case at Apollonia in Pontus. But if the members of an oligarchy agree among themselves   the state is not very easily destroyed without some external

    force. Pharsalus is a proof of this,   where, though the place is small, yet the citizens have great power, from the prudent use they make   of it. An oligarchy also will be destroyed when they create another oligarchy under it; that is,   when the management of public affairs is in the hands of a few, and not equally,   but when all of them do not partake of the supreme power, as happened once at Elis, where the supreme   of ninety, who held their places for life; and their mode of election was calculated to preserve   the power amongst each other’s families, like the senators at Lacedaemon. An oligarchy is liable to   a revolution both in time of war and peace; in war, because through a distrust in the citizens   the government is obliged to employ mercenary troops, and he to whom they give the command of   more than one general, they will very probably establish a dynasty: and sometimes, through fear   of this, they are forced to let the people in general have some share in the government,   because they are obliged to employ them. In peace, from their want of confidence in each other,   they will entrust the guardianship of the state to mercenaries and their general,   who will be an arbiter between them, and sometimes become master of both, which happened at Larissa,   when Simos and the Aleuadae had the chief power. The same thing happened at Abydos,   during the time of the political clubs, of which Iphiades’ was one. Commotions   also will happen in an oligarchy from one party’s overbearing and insulting another,   or from their quarrelling about their law-suits or marriages. How their marriages, for instance,   will have that effect has been already shown: and in Eretria, Diagoras destroyed the oligarchy of   the knights upon the same account. A sedition also arose at Heraclea, from a certain person   being condemned by the court; and at Thebes, in consequence of a man’s being guilty of adultery;   the punishment indeed which Eurytion suffered at Heraclea was just, yet it was illegally executed:   as was that at Thebes upon Archias; for their enemies endeavoured to have them publicly bound   in the pillory. Many revolutions also have been brought about in oligarchies by those who could   not brook the despotism which those persons assumed who were in power, as at Cnidus and   Chios. Changes also may happen by accident in what we call a free state and in an oligarchy;   wheresoever the senators, judges, and magistrates are chosen according to a certain census;   for it often happens that the highest census is fixed at first; so that a few only could have a   share in the government, in an oligarchy, or in a free state those of moderate fortunes only;   one’s fortune is equal to the census, so that the whole community may partake of all the honours   of government; and this change sometimes happens by little and little, and insensible approaches,   sometimes quicker. These are the revolutions and seditions that arise in oligarchies,   not into governments of a contrary form, but into those of the same government; as, for instance,   from having the supreme power in the law to vest it in the ruling party, or the contrariwise.  from there being so few persons in power (as we have already observed they do in oligarchies,   for in this particular an aristocracy is most near an oligarchy, for in both these states   the administration of public affairs is in the hands of a few; not that this arises from the   same cause in both, though herein they chiefly seem alike): and these will necessarily be most   likely to happen when the generality of the people are high-spirited and think themselves   equal to each other in merit; such were those at Lacedasmon, called the Partheniae (for these were,   as well as others, descendants of citizens), who being detected in a conspiracy against the state,   were sent to found Tarentum. They will happen also when some great men are disgraced by those   who have received higher honours than themselves, to whom they are no ways inferior in abilities,   as Lysander by the kings: or when an ambitious man cannot get into power, as Cinadon, who, in   the reign of Agesilaus, was chief in a conspiracy against the Spartans: and also when some are   too poor and others too rich, which will most frequently happen in time of war; as at Lacedaemon   during the Messenian war, which is proved by a poem of Tyrtaeus, called “Eunomia;” for some   persons being reduced thereby, desired that the lands might be divided: and also when some person   of very high rank might still be higher if he could rule alone, which seemed to be Pausanias’s   intention at Lacedaemon, when he was their general in the Median war, and Anno’s at Carthage. But   free states and aristocracies are mostly destroyed from want of a fixed administration of public   affairs; the cause of which evil arises at first from want of a due mixture of the democratic and   the oligarchic parts in a free state; and in an aristocracy from the same causes, and also from   virtue not being properly joined to power; but chiefly from the two first, I mean the undue   mixture of the democratic and oligarchic parts; for these two are what all free states endeavour   to blend together, and many of those which we call aristocracies, in this particular these   states differ from each other, and on this account the one of them is less stable than the other,   for that state which inclines most to an oligarchy is called an aristocracy, and that which inclines   most to a democracy is called a free state; on which account this latter is more secure than the   former, for the wider the foundation the securer the building, and it is ever best to live where   equality prevails. But the rich, if the community gives them rank, very often endeavour to insult   and tyrannise over others. On the whole, whichever way a government inclines, in that it will settle,   each party supporting their own. Thus a free state will become a democracy; an aristocracy   if they think themselves injured, directly take part with the contrary side) and a free state into   an oligarchy. The only firm state is that where every one enjoys that equality he has a right to   and fully possesses what is his own. And what I have been speaking of happened to the Thurians;   for the magistrates being elected according to a very high census, it was altered to a lower,   and they were subdivided into more courts, but in consequence of the nobles possessing all the land,   contrary to law; the state was too much of an oligarchy, which gave them an opportunity   of encroaching greatly on the rest of the people; but these, after they had been well inured to war,   so far got the better of their guards as to expel every one out of the country who possessed more   than he ought. Moreover, as all aristocracies are free oligarchies, the nobles therein endeavour to   have rather too much power, as at Lacedaemon, where property is now in the hands of a few,   and the nobles have too much liberty to do as they please and make such alliances as they   neither a democracy nor well-tempered aristocracy. But an aristocracy chiefly approaches to a secret   change by its being destroyed by degrees, as we have already said of all governments in general;   and this happens from the cause of the alteration being trifling; for whenever   anything which in the least regards the state is treated with contempt, after that something else,   and this of a little more consequence, will be more easily altered, until the whole fabric of   government is entirely subverted, which happened in the government of Thurium; for the law being   that they should continue soldiers for five years, some young men of a martial disposition, who were   in great esteem amongst their officers, despising those who had the management of public affairs,   and imagining they could easily accomplish their intention, first endeavoured to abolish this law,   with a view of having it lawful to continue the same person perpetually in the military,   perceiving that the people would readily appoint them. Upon this, the magistrates who are called   counselors first joined together with an intention to oppose it but were afterwards induced to agree   to it, from a belief that if that law was not repealed they would permit the management of all   other public affairs to remain in their hands; but afterwards, when they endeavoured to restrain some   of government was altered into a dynasty of those who first introduced the innovations. In short,   all governments are liable to be destroyed either from within or from without; from without when   they have for their neighbour a state whose policy is contrary to theirs, and indeed if it has great   power the same thing will happen if it is not their neighbour; of which both the Athenians and   the other the democracies. These are the chief causes of revolutions and dissensions   We are now to consider upon what the preservation of governments in general and of each state in   particular depends; and, in the first place, it is evident that if we are right in the causes   for things contrary produce contraries: but destruction and preservation are contrary to each   done contrary to law: and this ought chiefly to be attended to in matters of small consequence;   for an illegality that approaches insensibly, approaches secretly, as in a family small expenses   continually repeated consume a man’s income; for the understanding is deceived thereby, as by this   in another is false, for the whole and all the parts together are large, though made up of small   parts. The first therefore of anything is what the state ought to guard against. In the next place,   no credit ought to be given to those who endeavour to deceive the people with false pretences;   for they will be confuted by facts. The different ways in which they will attempt to do this have   been already mentioned. You may often perceive both aristocracies and oligarchies continuing   firm, not from the stability of their forms of government, but from the wise conduct of the   magistrates, both towards those who have a part in the management of public affairs, and those also   who have not: towards those who have not, by never injuring them; and also introducing those who are   or encroaching on the property of individuals; towards those who have, by behaving to each other   upon an equality; for that equality which the favourers of a democracy desire to have   established in the state is not only just, but convenient also, amongst those who are of the   same rank: for which reason, if the administration is in the hands of many, those rules which are   established in democracies will be very useful; as to let no one continue in office longer than six   months: that all those who are of the same rank may have their turn; for between these there is a   sort of democracy: for which reason demagogues are most likely to arise up amongst them, as we have   already mentioned: besides, by this means both aristocracies and democracies will be the less   liable to be corrupted into dynasties, because it will not be so easy for those who are magistrates   for a little to do as much mischief as they could in a long time: for it is from hence that   tyrannies arise in democracies and oligarchies; for either those who are most powerful in each   chief magistrates who have been long in power. Governments are sometimes preserved not only by   having the means of their corruption at a great distance, but also by its being very near them;   for those who are alarmed at some impending evil keep a stricter hand over the state;   for which reason it is necessary for those who have the guardianship of the constitution to be   able to awaken the fears of the people, that they may preserve it, and not like a night-guard to be   remiss in protecting the state, but to make the distant danger appear at hand. Great care ought   also to be used to endeavour to restrain the quarrels and disputes of the nobles by laws,   for to perceive an evil at its very first approach is not the lot of every one,   but of the politician. To prevent any alteration taking place in an oligarchy or free state on   account of the census, if that happens to continue the same while the quantity of money is increased,   it will be useful to take a general account of the whole amount of it in former times, to   compare it with the present, and to do this every year in those cities where the census is yearly,   in larger communities once in three or five years; and if the whole should be found much   larger or much less than it was at the time when the census was first established in the state,   let there be a law either to extend or contract it, doing both these according to its increase   or decrease; if it increases making the census larger, if it decreases smaller:   and if this latter is not done in oligarchies and free states, you will have a dynasty arise in the   one, an oligarchy in the other: if the former is not, free states will be changed into democracies,   and oligarchies into free states or democracies. It is a general maxim in democracies, oligarchies,   monarchies, and indeed in all governments, not to let any one acquire a rank far superior to   the rest of the community, but rather to endeavour to confer moderate honours for a continuance than   great ones for a short time; for these latter spoil men, for it is not every one who can bear   be all at once taken away, but rather by degrees. But, above all things, let this regulation be   made by the law, that no one shall have too much power, either by means of his fortune or friends;   but if he has, for his excess therein, let it be contrived that he shall quit the country. Now,   as many persons promote innovations, that they may enjoy their own particular manner of living,   there ought to be a particular officer to inspect the manners of every one,   and see that these are not contrary to the genius of the state in which he lives,   whether it may be an oligarchy, a democracy, or any other form of government; and, for the same   reason, those should be guarded against who are most prosperous in the city: the means of doing   which is by appointing those who are otherwise to the business and the offices of the state. I mean,   to oppose men of account to the common people, the poor to the rich, and to blend both these into one   body, and to increase the numbers of those who are in the middle rank; and this will prevent   necessary, both by the laws and every other method possible, to prevent those who are employed by the   public from being venal, and this particularly in an oligarchy; for then the people will not   be so much displeased from seeing themselves excluded from a share in the government (nay,   they will rather be glad to have leisure to attend their private affairs) as at suspecting that the   officers of the state steal the public money, then indeed they are afflicted with double concern,   both because they are deprived of the honours of the state, and pillaged by those who enjoy   them. There is one method of blending together a democracy and an aristocracy, if office brought no   profit; by which means both the rich and the poor will enjoy what they desire; for to admit all to a   share in the government is democratical; that the rich should be in office is aristocratical. This   must be done by letting no public employment whatsoever be attended with any emolument;   for the poor will not desire to be in office when they can get nothing by it, but had rather   attend to their own affairs: but the rich will choose it, as they want nothing of the community.   Thus the poor will increase their fortunes by being wholly employed in their own concerns;   and the principal part of the people will not be governed by the lower sort. To prevent the   exchequer from being defrauded, let all public money be delivered out openly in the face of the   whole city, and let copies of the accounts be deposited in the different wards tribes,   and divisions. But, as the magistrates are to execute their offices without any advantages,   the law ought to provide proper honours for those who execute them well. In democracies also it is   necessary that the rich should be protected, by not permitting their lands to be divided,   better if the people would prevent them when they offer to exhibit a number of unnecessary and yet   is necessary to take great care of the poor, and allot them public employments which are gainful;   and, if any of the rich insult them, to let their punishment be severer than if they insulted one   of their own rank; and to let estates pass by affinity, and not gift: nor to permit any person   to have more than one; for by this means property will be more equally divided, and the greater part   of the poor get into better circumstances. It is also serviceable in a democracy and an oligarchy   to allot those who take no part in public affairs an equality or a preference in other things;   in the state to be filled only by those who are best qualified to discharge them.  CHAPTER 9 There are three qualifications necessary for those   who fill the first departments in government; first of all, an affection for the established   in the third, virtue and justice correspondent to the nature of that particular state they are   placed in; for if justice is not the same in all states, it is evident that there must be different   species thereof. There may be some doubt, when all these qualifications do not in the same persons,   in what manner the choice shall be made; as for instance, suppose that one person is an   accomplished general, but a bad man and no friend to the constitution; another is just   and a friend to it, which shall one prefer? we should then consider of two qualities,   which of them the generality possess in a greater degree, which in a less; for which reason in the   choice of a general we should regard his courage more than his virtue as the more uncommon quality;   as there are fewer capable of conducting an army than there are good men: but, to protect the state   or manage the finances, the contrary rule should be followed; for these require greater virtue   be asked, if a man has abilities equal to his appointment in the state, and is affectionate   to the constitution, what occasion is there for being virtuous, since these two things   alone are sufficient to enable him to be useful to the public? it is, because those who possess   those qualities are often deficient in prudence; for, as they often neglect their own affairs,   in the same manner. In short, whatsoever the laws contain which we allow to be useful to the state   contributes to its preservation: but its first and principal support is (as has been often insisted   upon) to have the number of those who desire to preserve it greater than those who wish   to destroy it. Above all things that ought not to be forgotten which many governments now corrupted   neglect; namely, to preserve a mean. For many things seemingly favourable to a democracy destroy   a democracy, and many things seemingly favourable to an oligarchy destroy an oligarchy. Those who   think this the only virtue extend it to excess, not considering that as a nose which varies a   little from perfect straightness, either towards a hook nose or a flat one, may yet be beautiful and   agreeable to look at; but if this particularity is extended beyond measure, first of all the   properties of the part is lost, but at last it can hardly be admitted to be a nose at all,   on account of the excess of the rise or sinking: thus it is with other parts of the human body;   so also the same thing is true with respect to states; for both an oligarchy and a democracy may   something vary from their most perfect form and yet be well constituted; but if any one endeavours   to extend either of them too far, at first he will make the government the worse for it, but at last   there will be no government at all remaining. The lawgiver and the politician therefore should know   well what preserves and what destroys a democracy or an oligarchy, for neither the one nor the other   can possibly continue without rich and poor: but that whenever an entire equality of circumstances   prevails, the state must necessarily become of another form; so that those who destroy these   laws, which authorise an inequality in property, destroy the government. It is also an error in   democracies for the demagogues to endeavour to make the common people superior to the laws;   ought rather to speak in favour of the rich. In oligarchies, on the contrary, it is wrong   to support those who are in administration against the people. The oaths also which they take in an   oligarchy ought to be contrary to what they now are; for, at present, in some places they swear,   “I will be adverse to the common people, and contrive all I can against them;” whereas they   ought rather to suppose and pretend the contrary; expressing in their oaths, that they will not   injure the people. But of all things which I have mentioned, that which contributes most to   preserve the state is, what is now most despised, to educate your children for the state; for the   most useful laws, and most approved by every statesman, will be of no service if the citizens   are not accustomed to and brought up in the principles of the constitution; of a democracy,   there are in the city. But to educate a child fit for the state, it must not be done in the manner   which would please either those who have the power in an oligarchy or those who desire a democracy,   of the magistrates in an oligarchy are brought up too delicately, and the children of the poor   In democracies of the purest form they pursue a method which is contrary to their welfare;   the objects of a democracy, that the people in general should possess the supreme power, and   all enjoy freedom; for that which is just seems to be equal, and what the people think equal,   that is a law: now, their freedom and equality consists in every one’s doing what they please:   words of Euripides: but this is wrong, for no one ought to think it slavery to live in subjection to   and the means of their preservation. CHAPTER 10  It now remains that we speak of monarchies, their causes of corruption, and means of preservation;   and indeed almost the same things which have been said of other governments happen to kingdoms and   tyrannies; for a kingdom partakes of an aristocracy, a tyranny of the worst   species of an oligarchy and democracy; for which reason it is the worst that man can submit to,   as being composed of two, both of which are bad, and collectively retains all the corruptions   and all the defects of both these states. These two species of monarchies arise from principles   contrary to each other: a kingdom is formed to protect the better sort of people against the   multitude, and kings are appointed out of those, who are chosen either for their superior virtue   and actions flowing from virtuous principles, or else from their noble descent; but a tyrant is   chosen out of the meanest populace; an enemy to the better sort, that the common people may not   be oppressed by them. That this is true experience convinces us; for the generality of tyrants were   indeed mere demagogues, who gained credit with the people by oppressing the nobles. Some tyrannies   time, by kings who exceeded the power which their country allowed them, from a desire of governing   despotically: others were founded by those who were elected to the superior offices in the state;   religious affairs, and these chose one out of their body in whom the supreme power over all   the magistrates was placed. By all these means it was easy to establish a tyranny, if they chose it;   for their power was ready at hand, either by their being kings, or else by enjoying   the honours of the state; thus Phidon at Argos and other tyrants enjoyed originally the kingly power;   Phalaris and others in Ionia, the honours of the state. Pansetius at Leontium, Cypselus at Corinth,   Pisistratus at Athens, Dionysius at Syracuse, and others, acquired theirs by having been demagogues.   A kingdom, as we have said, partakes much of the nature of an aristocracy, and is bestowed   for those who have been benefactors to cities and states, or have it in their powers to be so,   have acquired this honour, and those who have prevented a people from falling into slavery   by war, as Codrus, or those who have freed them from it, as Cyrus, or the founders of cities,   or settlers of colonies, as the kings of Sparta, Macedon, and Molossus. A king desires to be   the guardian of his people, that those who have property may be secure in the possession of it,   and that the people in general meet with no injury; but a tyrant, as has been often said,   pleasure, but a king’s is virtue: what a tyrant therefore is ambitious of engrossing is wealth,   but a king rather honour. The guards too of a king are citizens, a tyrant’s foreigners. That a tyranny contains all that is bad both in a democracy and an oligarchy is evident;   with an oligarchy it has for its end gain, as the only means of providing the tyrant with guards   and the luxuries of life; like that it places no confidence in the people; and therefore deprives   them out of the city and their own habitations. With a democracy it quarrels with the nobles,   and destroys them both publicly and privately, or drives them into banishment, as rivals and   an impediment to the government; hence naturally arise conspiracies both amongst those who desire   take off the tallest stalks, hinting thereby, that it was necessary to make away with the   eminent citizens. We ought then in reason, as has been already said, to account for the changes   which arise in a monarchy from the same causes which produce them in other states: for, through   injustice received, fear, and contempt, many of those who are under a monarchical government   conspire against it; but of all species of injustice, injurious contempt has most influence   The dissolution too of a kingdom and a tyranny are generally the same; for monarchs abound in wealth   and honour, which all are desirous to obtain. Of plots: some aim at the life of those who govern,   others at their government; the first arises from hatred to their persons; which hatred may be owing   to many causes, either of which will be sufficient to excite their anger, and the generality of those   own advancement, but for revenge. Thus the plot against the children of Pisistratus arose from   their injurious treatment of Harmodius’s sister, and insulting him also; for Harmodius resenting   the injury done to his sister, and Aristogiton the injury done to Harmodius. Periander the tyrant of   Ambracia also lost his life by a conspiracy, for some improper liberties he took with a boy in   his cups: and Philip was slain by Pausanias for neglecting to revenge him of the affront he had   received from Attains; as was Amintas the Little by Darda, for insulting him on account of his age;   and the eunuch by Evagoras the Cyprian in revenge for having taken his son’s wife away from him. Many also who have had their bodies scourged with stripes have, through resentment, either killed   those who caused them to be inflicted or conspired against them, even when they had kingly power,   as at Mitylene Megacles, joining with his friends, killed the Penthelidee, who used to go about   striking those they met with clubs. Thus, in later times, Smendes killed Penthilus for whipping him   and dragging him away from his wife. Decamnichus also was the chief cause of the conspiracy against   Archelaus, for he urged others on: the occasion of his resentment was his having delivered him to   Euripides the poet to be scourged; for Euripides was greatly offended with him for having said   something of the foulness of his breath. And many others have been killed or conspired against   on the same account. Fear too is a cause which produces the same effects, as well in monarchies   as in other states: thus Artabanes conspired against Xerxes through fear of punishment for   having hanged Darius according to his orders, whom he supposed he intended to pardon,   as the order was given at supper-time. Some kings also have been dethroned and killed in consequence   of the contempt they were held in by the people; as some one conspired against Sardanapalus,   it may very probably be true of some one else. Dion also conspired against Dionysius the Younger,   seeing his subjects desirous of a conspiracy, and that he himself was always drunk: and even   a man’s friends will do this if they despise him; for from the confidence he places in them,   they think that they shall not be found out. Those also who think they shall gain his throne   will conspire against a king through contempt; for as they are powerful themselves, and despise   the danger, on account of their own strength, they will readily attempt it. Thus a general at   the head of his army will endeavour to dethrone the monarch, as Cyrus did Astyages, despising   both his manner of life and his forces; his forces for want of action, his life for its effeminacy:   thus Suthes, the Thracian, who was general to Amadocus, conspired against him. Sometimes more   than one of these causes will excite men to enter into conspiracies, as contempt and desire of gain;   as in the instance of Mithridates against Ariobarzanes. Those also who are of a bold   disposition, and have gained military honours amongst kings, will of all others be most like   to engage in sedition; for strength and courage united inspire great bravery: whenever, therefore,   these join in one person, he will be very ready for conspiracies, as he will easily conquer.   Those who conspire against a tyrant through love of glory and honour have a different motive in   view from what I have already mentioned; for, like all others who embrace danger, they have   only glory and honour in view, and think, not as some do, of the wealth and pomp they may acquire,   but engage in this as they would in any other noble action, that they may be illustrious and   distinguished, and destroy a tyrant, not to succeed in his tyranny, but to acquire renown.   No doubt but the number of those who act upon this principle is small, for we must suppose they   regard their own safety as nothing in case they should not succeed, and must embrace the opinion   of Dion (which few can do) when he made war upon Dionysius with a very few troops; for he said,   that let the advantage he made be ever so little it would satisfy him to have gained it; and that,   should it be his lot to die the moment he had gained footing in his country, he should think   states are, from too powerful neighbours: for it is evident, that an opposition of principles   will make them desirous of subverting it; and what they desire, all who can, do: and there   is a principle of opposition in one state to another, as a democracy against a tyranny,   as says Hesiod, “a potter against a potter;” for the extreme of a democracy is a tyranny;   a kingly power against an aristocracy, from their different forms of government—for which reason the   Lacedaemonians destroyed many tyrannies; as did the Syracusians during the prosperity of their   state. Nor are they only destroyed from without, but also from within, when those who have no share   in the power bring about a revolution, as happened to Gelon, and lately to Dionysius; to the first,   by means of Thrasybulus, the brother of Hiero, who nattered Gelon’s son, and induced him to lead   a life of pleasure, that he himself might govern; but the family joined together and endeavoured to   support the tyranny and expel Thrasybulus; but those whom they made of their party seized the   opportunity and expelled the whole family. Dion made war against his relation Dionysius,   and being assisted by the people, first expelled and then killed him. As there are two causes which   chiefly induce men to conspire against tyrants, hatred and contempt, one of these, namely hatred,   seems inseparable from them. Contempt also is often the cause of their destruction: for though,   but those who received it from them have, to speak truth, almost immediately all of them lost it;   victims to conspiracies. Part of their hatred may be very fitly ascribed to anger; for in some cases   this is their motive to action: for it is often a cause which impels them to act more powerfully   than hatred, and they proceed with greater obstinacy against those whom they attack,   as this passion is not under the direction of reason. Many persons also indulge this passion   through contempt; which occasioned the fall of the Pisistratidae and many others. But hatred is   more powerful than anger; for anger is accompanied with grief, which prevents the entrance of reason;   but hatred is free from it. In short, whatever causes may be assigned as the destruction of a   pure oligarchy unmixed with any other government and an extreme democracy, the same may be applied   to a tyranny; for these are divided tyrannies. Kingdoms are seldom destroyed by any outward   attack; for which reason they are generally very stable; but they have many causes of subversion   within; of which two are the principal; one is when those who are in power excite a sedition,   the other when they endeavour to establish a tyranny by assuming greater power than the law   gives them. A kingdom, indeed, is not what we ever see erected in our times, but rather monarchies   and tyrannies; for a kingly government is one that is voluntarily submitted to, and its supreme power   better than another as to be qualified for the greatness and dignity of government over them,   then these equals will not willingly submit to be commanded; but if any one assumes the government,   either by force or fraud, this is a tyranny. To what we have already said we shall add, the   causes of revolutions in an hereditary kingdom. One of these is, that many of those who enjoy it   power is not despotic; but they possess kingly honours only. Such a state is soon destroyed;   for a king exists but while the people are willing to obey, as their submission to him is voluntary,   but to a tyrant involuntary. These and such-like are the causes of the destruction of monarchies.  CHAPTER 11 Monarchies, in a word, are   preserved by means contrary to what I have already mentioned as the cause of their destruction;   but to speak to each separately: the stability of a kingdom will depend upon the power of the   king’s being kept within moderate bounds; for by how much the less extensive his power is, by so   much the longer will his government continue; for he will be less despotic and more upon an   equality of condition with those he governs; who, on that account, will envy him the less. It was on this account that the kingdom of the Molossi continued so long; and the   also by the moderation introduced into the other parts of it by Theopompus, and his establishment   of the ephori; for by taking something from the power he increased the duration of the kingdom,   so that in some measure he made it not less, but bigger; as they say he replied to his wife,   who asked him if he was not ashamed to deliver down his kingdom to his children reduced from   what he received it from his ancestors? No, says he, I give it him more lasting. Tyrannies are   preserved two ways most opposite to each other, one of which is when the power is delegated from   one to the other, and in this manner many tyrants govern in their states. Report says that Periander   founded many of these. There are also many of them to be met with amongst the Persians. What has been   already mentioned is as conducive as anything can be to preserve a tyranny; namely, to keep   down those who are of an aspiring disposition, to take off those who will not submit, to allow no   public meals, no clubs, no education, nothing at all, but to guard against everything that gives   rise to high spirits or mutual confidence; nor to suffer the learned meetings of those who are   at leisure to hold conversation with each other; and to endeavour by every means possible to keep   all the people strangers to each other; for knowledge increases mutual confidence; and to   oblige all strangers to appear in public, and to live near the city-gate, that all their actions   may be sufficiently seen; for those who are kept like slaves seldom entertain any noble thoughts:   in short, to imitate everything which the Persians and barbarians do, for they all contribute to   and for this purpose to employ spies: such were those women whom the Syracusians called   potagogides Hiero also used to send out listeners wherever there was any meeting or conversation;   for the people dare not speak with freedom for fear of such persons; and if any one does, there   accuse and come to blows with each other, friend with friend, the commons with the nobles, and the   rich with each other. It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it   should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being   employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants.   The Pyramids of Egypt are a proof of this, and the votive edifices of the Cyposelidse, and the temple   of Jupiter Olympus, built by the Pisistratidae, and the works of Polycrates at Samos; for all   these produced one end, the keeping the people poor. It is necessary also to multiply taxes,   as at Syracuse; where Dionysius in the space of five years collected all the private property of   that they may have employment and continually depend upon their general. A king is preserved   as every one has it in his desire and these chiefly in their power to destroy him. All these   things also which are done in an extreme democracy should be done in a tyranny, as permitting great   licentiousness to the women in the house, that they may reveal their husbands’ secrets;   and showing great indulgence to slaves also for the same reason; for slaves and women conspire not   against tyrants: but when they are treated with kindness, both of them are abettors of tyrants,   and extreme democracies also; and the people too in such a state desire to be despotic. For which   reason flatterers are in repute in both these: the demagogue in the democracy, for he is the proper   flatterer of the people; among tyrants, he who will servilely adapt himself to their humours;   for this is the business of flatterers. And for this reason tyrants always love the worst   of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to;   for they love the virtuous, but flatter none. Bad men too are fit for bad purposes; “like to   like,” as the proverb says. A tyrant also should show no favour to a man of worth or a freeman;   for he should think, that no one deserved to be thought these but himself; for he who supports his   dignity, and is a friend to freedom, encroaches upon the superiority and the despotism of the   tyrant: such men, therefore, they naturally hate, as destructive to their government.   A tyrant also should rather admit strangers to his table and familiarity than citizens,   the supports of a tyranny, for it comprehends whatsoever is wicked. But all these things may   of which is, that the citizens should be of poor abject dispositions; for such men never propose to   conspire against any one. The second is, that they should have no confidence in each other; for while   they have not this, the tyrant is safe enough from destruction. For which reason they are always at   enmity with those of merit, as hurtful to their government; not only as they scorn to be governed   despotically, but also because they can rely upon each other’s fidelity, and others can rely upon   theirs, and because they will not inform against their associates, nor any one else. The third is,   that they shall be totally without the means of doing anything; for no one undertakes what is   impossible for him to perform: so that without power a tyranny can never be destroyed. These,   their tyrannical plans tend to promote one of these three ends, that their people may neither   tyrannies: the other proceeds in a way quite contrary to what has been already described,   and which may be discerned from considering to what the destruction of a kingdom is owing;   for as one cause of that is, making the government approach near to a tyranny, so the safety of a   tyranny consists in making the government nearly kingly; preserving only one thing, namely power,   that not only the willing, but the unwilling also, must be obliged to submit; for if this   is once lost, the tyranny is at an end. This, then, as the foundation, must be preserved:   in other particulars carefully do and affect to seem like a king; first, appear to pay a great   attention to what belongs to the public; nor make such profuse presents as will offend the people;   while they are to supply the money out of the hard labour of their own hands, and see it given in   profusion to mistresses, foreigners, and fiddlers; keeping an exact account both of what you receive   and pay; which is a practice some tyrants do actually follow, by which means they seem rather   fathers of families than tyrants: nor need you ever fear the want of money while you have the   quit their kingdom to do this than to leave behind them money they have hoarded up; for their regents   will be much less desirous of making innovations, and they are more to be dreaded by absent tyrants   than the citizens; for such of them as he suspects he takes with him, but these regents must be left   behind. He should also endeavour to appear to collect such taxes and require such services as   the exigencies of the state demand, that whenever they are wanted they may be ready in time of war;   and particularly to take care that he appear to collect and keep them not as his own property,   but the public’s. His appearance also should not be severe, but respectable, so that he should   inspire those who approach him with veneration and not fear; but this will not be easily accomplished   if he is despised. If, therefore, he will not take the pains to acquire any other, he ought   to endeavour to be a man of political abilities, and to fix that opinion of himself in the judgment   of his subjects. He should also take care not to appear to be guilty of the least offence against   modesty, nor to suffer it in those under him: nor to permit the women of his family to treat   others haughtily; for the haughtiness of women has been the ruin of many tyrants. With respect to the   pleasures of sense, he ought to do directly contrary to the practice of some tyrants at   present; for they do not only continually indulge themselves in them for many days together, but   they seem also to desire to have other witnesses of it, that they may wonder at their happiness;   whereas he ought really to be moderate in these, and, if not, to appear to others to avoid them-for   it is not the sober man who is exposed either to plots or contempt, but the drunkard; not the early   riser, but the sluggard. His conduct in general should also be contrary to what is reported of   former tyrants; for he ought to improve and adorn his city, so as to seem a guardian   for from persons of such a character men entertain less fears of suffering anything illegal while   they suppose that he who governs them is religious and reverences the gods; and they will be less   inclined to raise insinuations against such a one, as being peculiarly under their protection:   but this must be so done as to give no occasion for any suspicion of hypocrisy. He should also   take care to show such respect to men of merit in every particular, that they should   not think they could be treated with greater distinction by their fellow-citizens in a free   state. He should also let all honours flow immediately from himself, but every censure   from his subordinate officers and judges. It is also a common protection of all monarchies   not to make one person too great, or, certainly, not many; for they will support each other: but,   if it is necessary to entrust any large powers to one person, to take care that it is not one   of an ardent spirit; for this disposition is upon every opportunity most ready for a revolution:   and, if it should seem necessary to deprive any one of his power, to do it by degrees,   and not reduce him all at once. It is also necessary to abstain from all kinds of insolence;   those who have a delicate sense of honour; for, as those who love money are touched to the quick   disgrace: therefore, either never employ personal punishment, or, if you do, let it be only in the   make amends for any seeming disgrace by bestowing greater honours. But of all persons who are most   likely to entertain designs against the person of a tyrant, those are chiefly to be feared and   guarded against who regard as nothing the loss of their own lives, so that they can but accomplish   their purpose: be very careful therefore of those who either think themselves affronted,   or those who are dear to them; for those who are excited by anger to revenge regard as nothing   their own persons: for, as Heraclitus says, it is dangerous to fight with an angry man who will   purchase with his life the thing he aims at. As all cities are composed of two sorts of persons,   the rich and the poor, it is necessary that both these should find equal protection from him   who governs them, and that the one party should not have it in their power to injure the other;   does, he will have no occasion either to make his slaves free, or to deprive citizens of their arms;   for the strength of either of the parties added to his own forces will render him superior to any   conspiracy. It would be superfluous to go through all particulars; for the rule of conduct which the   tyrant ought to pursue is evident enough, and that is, to affect to appear not the tyrant,   but the king; the guardian of those he governs, not their plunderer, but their protector, and to   affect the middle rank in life, not one superior to all others: he should, therefore, associate   his nobles with him and soothe his people; for his government will not only be necessarily more   honourable and worthy of imitation, as it will be over men of worth, and not abject wretches who   perpetually both hate and fear him; but it will be also more durable. Let him also frame his life so   that his manners may be consentaneous to virtue, or at least let half of them be so, that he may   not be altogether wicked, but only so in part. CHAPTER 12  Indeed an oligarchy and a tyranny are of all governments of the shortest duration. The   tyranny of Orthagoras and his family at Sicyon, it is true, continued longer than any other:   the reason for which was, that they used their power with moderation,   and were in many particulars obedient to the laws; and, as Clisthenes was an able general,   he never fell into contempt, and by the care he took that in many particulars his government   should be popular. He is reported also to have presented a person with a crown who adjudged the   victory to another; and some say that it is the statue of that judge which is placed in the forum. They say also, that Pisistratus submitted to be summoned into the court of the Areopagites.   The second that we shall mention is the tyranny of the Cypselidse, at Corinth, which continued   seventy-seven years and six months; for Cypselus was tyrant there thirty years,   Periander forty-four, and Psammetichus, the son of Georgias, three years; the reason for which was,   that Cypselus was a popular man, and governed without guards. Periander indeed ruled like   a tyrant, but then he was an able general. The third was that of the Pisistradidae at Athens;   years he was only fifteen in power, and his son eighteen; so that the whole time   was thirty-three years. Of the rest we shall mention that of Hiero, and Gelo at Syracuse;   and this did not continue long, for both their reigns were only eighteen years; for Gelo died   in the eighth year of his tyranny, and Hiero in his tenth. Thrasybulus fell in his eleventh month,   and many other tyrannies have continued a very short time. We have now gone through   the general cases of corruption and means of preservation both in free states and monarchies.   In Plato’s Republic, Socrates is introduced treating upon the changes which different   governments are liable to: but his discourse is faulty; for he does not particularly mention   of nothing being immutable, but that in time everything will alter; he conceives that nature   will then produce bad men, who will not submit to education, and in this, probably, he is not wrong;   for it is certain that there are some persons whom it is impossible by any education to make good   men; but why should this change be more peculiar to what he calls the best-formed government, than   as the cause of the alteration of all things, we find that those which did not begin to exist at   the same time cease to be at the same time; so that, if anything came into beginning the   day before the solstice, it must alter at the same time. Besides, why should such a form of   government be changed into the Lacedaemonian? for, in general, when governments alter,   they alter into the contrary species to what they before were, and not into one like their former.   And this reasoning holds true of other changes; for he says, that from the Lacedaemonian form it   changes into an oligarchy, and from thence into a democracy, and from a democracy into a tyranny:   and sometimes a contrary change takes place, as from a democracy into an oligarchy, rather than   into a monarchy. With respect to a tyranny he neither says whether there will be any change in   it; or if not, to what cause it will be owing; or if there is, into what other state it will alter:   but the reason of this is, that a tyranny is an indeterminate government; and, according to him,   every state ought to alter into the first, and most perfect, thus the continuity and circle would   be preserved. But one tyranny often changed into another; as at Syria, from Myron’s to Clisthenes’;   or into an oligarchy, as was Antileo’s at Chalcas; or into a democracy, as was Gelo’s at Syracuse;   or into an aristocracy, as was Charilaus’s at Lacedaemon, and at Carthage. An oligarchy is also   changed into a tyranny; such was the rise of most of the ancient tyrannies in Sicily; at Leontini,   into the tyranny of Panaetius; at Gela, into that of Cleander; at Rhegium into that of Anaxilaus;   changed into an oligarchy because those who are in power are avaricious and greedy of money,   that those who have nothing should have an equal share in the rule of the state with themselves,   and there are many laws to prevent it. But in Carthage, which is a democracy, money-getting   is creditable, and yet their form of government remains unaltered. It is also absurd to say, that   in an oligarchy there are two cities, one of the poor and another of the rich; for why should this   happen to them more than to the Lacedaemonians, or any other state where all possess not equal   property, or where all are not equally good? for though no one member of the community should be   poorer than he was before, yet a democracy might nevertheless change into an oligarchy; if the   rich should be more powerful than the poor, and the one too negligent, and the other attentive:   and though these changes are owing to many causes, yet he mentions but one only, that the citizens   become poor by luxury, and paying interest-money; as if at first they were all rich, or the greater   part of them: but this is not so, but when some of those who have the principal management of public   nothing of consequence will follow, nor when such states do alter is there any more reason   for their altering into a democracy than any other. Besides, though some of the members of   the community may not have spent their fortunes, yet if they share not in the honours of the state,   or if they are ill-used and insulted, they will endeavour to raise seditions, and bring about a   revolution, that they may be allowed to do as they like; which, Plato says, arises from too   much liberty. Although there are many oligarchies and democracies, yet Socrates, when he is treating   of the changes they may undergo, speaks of them as if there was but one of each sort. BOOK 6 CHAPTER 1  We have already shown what is the nature of the supreme council in the state, and wherein one may differ from another, and how the different magistrates should be regulated;   and also to what causes both the destruction and preservation of governments are owing. As there are very many species of democracies, as well as of other states, it will not be amiss   to consider at the same time anything which we may have omitted to mention concerning either of them,   and also to inquire into the combinations of all these different modes of government   as from an aristocracy to be an oligarchy, and from a free state to be a democracy. Now,   I mean by those combinations of government (which I ought to examine into, but have not yet done),   namely, whether the deliberative department and the election of magistrates is regulated   in a manner correspondent to an oligarchy, or the judicial to an aristocracy, or the deliberative   part only to an oligarchy, and the election of magistrates to an aristocracy, or whether,   in any other manner, everything is not regulated according to the nature of the government. But   we will first consider what particular sort of democracy is fitted to a particular city,   to what. It is also necessary to show clearly, not only which of these governments is best for   a state, but also how it ought to be established there, and other things we will treat of briefly. And first, we will speak of a democracy; and this will at the same time show clearly the nature of   its opposite which some persons call an oligarchy; and in doing this we must examine into all the   parts of a democracy, and everything that is connected therewith; for from the manner in which   these are compounded together different species of democracies arise: and hence it is that they   are more than one, and of various natures. Now, there are two causes which occasion there being   so many democracies; one of which is that which we have already mentioned; namely, there being   different sorts of people; for in one country the majority are husbandmen, in another mechanics,   and hired servants; if the first of these is added to the second, and the third to both of them,   that it will be no longer the same government; the other is that which we will now speak of.   The different things which are connected with democracies and seem to make part of these states,   do, from their being joined to them, render them different from others: this attending a few, that   more, and another all. It is necessary that he who would found any state which he may happen to   approve of, or correct one, should be acquainted with all these particulars. All founders of states   endeavour to comprehend within their own plan everything of nearly the same kind with it;   but in doing this they err, in the manner I have already described in treating of the preservation   and destruction of governments. I will now speak of these first principles and manners,   and whatever else a democratical state requires. CHAPTER 2  this as if here only liberty was to be found; for they affirm that this is the end proposed   by every democracy. But one part of liberty is to govern and be governed alternately; for, according   to democratical justice, equality is measured by numbers, and not by worth: and this being just,   it is necessary that the supreme power should be vested in the people at large; and that what the   majority determine should be final: so that in a democracy the poor ought to have more power than   the rich, as being the greater number; for this is one mark of liberty which all framers of a   democracy lay down as a criterion of that state; another is, to live as every one likes; for this,   they say, is a right which liberty gives, since he is a slave who must live as he likes not. This,   then, is another criterion of a democracy. Hence arises the claim to be under no command whatsoever   to any one, upon any account, any otherwise than by rotation, and that just as far only as   demands. These things being premised, and such being the government, it follows that such rules   as the following should be observed in it, that all the magistrates should be chosen out of all   the people, and all to command each, and each in his turn all: that all the magistrates should be   chosen by lot, except to those offices only which required some particular knowledge and skill:   that no census, or a very small one, should be required to qualify a man for any office:   that none should be in the same employment twice, or very few, and very seldom, except in the army:   that the whole community should be qualified to judge in all causes   whatsoever, let the object be ever so extensive, ever so interesting, or of ever so high a nature;   and decide concerning public affairs as well as private contracts: that the supreme power should   be in the public assembly; and that no magistrate should be allowed any discretionary power but in a   few instances, and of no consequence to public business. Of all magistrates a senate is best   suited to a democracy, where the whole community is not paid for giving their attendance; for in   that case it loses its power; for then the people will bring all causes before them, by appeal,   as we have already mentioned in a former book. In the next place, there should, if possible,   be a fund to pay all the citizens—who have any share in the management of public affairs,   either as members of the assembly, judges, and magistrates; but if this cannot be done,   at least the magistrates, the judges the senators, and members of the supreme assembly,   and also those officers who are obliged to eat at a common table ought to be paid. Moreover,   as an oligarchy is said to be a government of men of family, fortune, and education; so, on   the contrary, a democracy is a government in the hands of men of no birth, indigent circumstances,   and mechanical employments. In this state also no office should be for life; and, if any such should   remain after the government has been long changed into a democracy, they should endeavour by degrees   to all democracies; namely, to be established on that principle of justice which is homogeneous to   those governments; that is, that all the members of the state, by number, should enjoy an equality,   which seems chiefly to constitute a democracy, or government of the people: for it seems perfectly   equal that the rich should have no more share in the government than the poor, nor be alone   in power; but that all should be equal, according to number; for thus, they think, the equality and   liberty of the state best preserved. CHAPTER 3  In the next place we must inquire how this equality is to be procured.   Shall the qualifications be divided so that five hundred rich should be equal to a thousand poor,   or shall the thousand have equal power with the five hundred? or shall we not establish   our equality in this manner? but divide indeed thus, and afterwards taking an equal number both   out of the five hundred and the thousand, invest them with the power of creating the magistrates   and judges. Is this state then established according to perfect democratical justice,   or rather that which is guided by numbers only? For the defenders of a democracy say, that that   is just which the majority approve of: but the favourers of an oligarchy say, that that is just   which those who have most approve of; and that we ought to be directed by the value of property.   for if it should happen that an individual should have more than the rest who are rich, according   to oligarchical justice, this man alone has a right to the supreme power; but if superiority   of numbers is to prevail, injustice will then be done by confiscating the property of the rich, who   be collected from the definition of right which is common to them both; for they both say that what   the majority of the state approves of ought to be established. Be it so; but not entirely: but since   a city happens to be made up of two different ranks of people, the rich and the poor, let that   be established which is approved of by both these, or the greater part: but should there be opposite   sentiments, let that be established which shall be approved of by the greater part: but let this   be according to the census; for instance, if there should be ten of the rich and twenty of the poor,   and six of the first and fifteen of the last should agree upon any measure, and the remaining   census when added together should determine which opinion should be law, and should these happen to   be equal, it should be regarded as a case similar to an assembly or court of justice dividing   equally upon any question that comes before them, who either determine it by lot or some   such method. But although, with respect to what is equal and just, it may be very difficult to   establish the truth, yet it is much easier to do than to persuade those who have it in their power   to encroach upon others to be guided thereby; for the weak always desire what is equal and just,   but the powerful pay no regard thereunto. CHAPTER 4  There are four kinds of democracies. The best is that which is composed of those first in order,   one would place so, was he to divide the people; for the best part of these are the husbandmen. We   as their property is but small, they will not be at leisure perpetually to hold public assemblies,   but will be continually employed in following their own business, not having otherwise the   means of living; nor will they be desirous of what another enjoys, but will rather like to   follow their own business than meddle with state affairs and accept the offices of government,   which will be attended with no great profit; for the major part of mankind are rather desirous   of riches than honour (a proof of this is, that they submitted to the tyrannies in ancient times,   and do now submit to the oligarchies, if no one hinders them in their usual occupations,   or deprives them of their property; for some of them soon get rich, others are removed from   poverty); besides, their having the right of election and calling their magistrates   to account for their conduct when they come out of office, will satisfy their desire of honours,   if any

    of them entertain that passion: for in some states, though the commonalty have not the right   of electing the magistrates, yet it is vested in part of that body chosen to represent them:   and it is sufficient for the people at large to possess the deliberative power: and this ought to   be considered as a species of democracy; such was that formerly at Mantinsea: for which reason it is   proper for the democracy we have been now treating of to have a power (and it has been usual for them   to have it) of censuring their magistrates when out of office, and sitting in judgment upon all   causes: but that the chief magistrates should be elected, and according to a certain census,   which should vary with the rank of their office, or else not by a census, but according to their   abilities for their respective appointments. A state thus constituted must be well constituted;   for the magistracies will be always filled with the best men with the approbation of the people;   who will not envy their superiors: and these and the nobles should be content with this part in the   administration; for they will not be governed by their inferiors. They will be also careful to use   conduct; for it is very serviceable to the state to have them dependent upon others, and not to be   permitted to do whatsoever they choose; for with such a liberty there would be no check to that   evil particle there is in every one: therefore it is necessary and most for the benefit of the   are unblemished, and that the people are not oppressed. It is now evident that this is the   best species of democracy, and on what account; because the people are such and have such powers   as they ought to have. To establish a democracy of husbandmen some of those laws which were observed   in many ancient states are universally useful; as, for instance, on no account to permit any one to   possess more than a certain quantity of land, or within a certain distance from the city. Formerly   also, in some states, no one was allowed to sell their original lot of land. They also mention a   law of one Oxylus, which forbade any one to add to their patrimony by usury. We ought also to follow   the law of the Aphutaeans, as useful to direct us in this particular we are now speaking of;   for they having but very little ground, while they were a numerous people,   and at the same time were all husbandmen, did not include all their lands within the census, but   divided them in such a manner that, according to the census, the poor had more power than the rich.   Next to the commonalty of husbandmen is one of shepherds and herdsmen; for they have many things   in common with them, and, by their way of life, are excellently qualified to make good soldiers,   whom other democracies are composed are much worse than these; for their lives are wretched nor have   they any business with virtue in anything they do; these are your mechanics, your exchange-men,   and hired servants; as all these sorts of men frequent the exchange and the citadel,   they can readily attend the public assembly; whereas the husbandmen, being more dispersed in   the country, cannot so easily meet together; nor are they equally desirous of doing it with these   others! When a country happens to be so situated that a great part of the land lies at a distance   from the city, there it is easy to establish a good democracy or a free state for the people   in general will be obliged to live in the country; so that it will be necessary in such a democracy,   though there may be an exchange-mob at hand, never to allow a legal assembly without the inhabitants   of the country attend. We have shown in what manner the first and best democracy ought to   be established, and it will be equally evident as to the rest, for from these we should proceed as   a guide, and always separate the meanest of the people from the rest. But the last and worst,   which gives to every citizen without distinction a share in every part of the administration, is what   and manners. We have already noticed almost every cause that can destroy either this or any other   state. Those who have taken the lead in such a democracy have endeavoured to support it, and   freedom, not only legitimately but naturally born, and also if either of their parents were citizens,   that is to say, if either their father or mother; and this method is better suited to this state   than any other: and thus the demagogues have usually managed. They ought, however, to take   rank, and then stop; for, if they proceed still further, they will make the state disorderly,   and the nobles will ill brook the power of the common people, and be full of resentment against   it; which was the cause of an insurrection at Cyrene: for a little evil is overlooked,   but when it becomes a great one it strikes the eye. It is, moreover, very-useful in such a state   to do as Clisthenes did at Athens, when he was desirous of increasing the power of the people,   and as those did who established the democracy in Cyrene; that is, to institute many tribes   and fraternities, and to make the religious rites of private persons few, and those common;   and every means is to be contrived to associate and blend the people together as much as possible;   and that all former customs be broken through. Moreover, whatsoever is practised in a tyranny   seems adapted to a democracy of this species; as, for instance, the licentiousness of the slaves,   the women, and the children; for this to a certain degree is useful in such a state;   and also to overlook every one’s living as they choose; for many will support such a government:   for it is more agreeable to many to live without any control than as prudence would direct.  CHAPTER 5 It is also the business of the legislator and all   those who would support a government of this sort not to make it too great a work, or too perfect;   but to aim only to render it stable: for, let a state be constituted ever so badly, there is   by all those ways which we have described in assigning the causes of the preservation and   destruction of governments; avoiding what is hurtful, and by framing such laws, written   and unwritten, as contain those things which chiefly tend to the preservation of the state;   nor to suppose that that is useful either for a democratic or an oligarchic form of government   which contributes to make them more purely so, but what will contribute to their duration: but   our demagogues at present, to flatter the people, occasion frequent confiscations in the courts;   for which reason those who have the welfare of the state really at heart should act directly opposite   to what they do, and enact a law to prevent forfeitures from being divided amongst the people   or paid into the treasury, but to have them set apart for sacred uses: for those who are of a bad   disposition would not then be the less cautious, as their punishment would be the same; and the   nothing by it: they should also take care that the causes which are brought before the public   should be as few as possible, and punish with the utmost severity those who rashly brought an action   against any one; for it is not the commons but the nobles who are generally prosecuted:   for in all things the citizens of the same state ought to be affectionate to each other, at least   not to treat those who have the chief power in it as their enemies. Now, as the democracies which   have been lately established are very numerous, and it is difficult to get the common people   to attend the public assemblies without they are paid for it, this, when there is not a sufficient   by taxes, confiscations, and fines imposed by corrupt courts of justice: which things have   already destroyed many democracies. Whenever, then, the revenues of the state are small,   there should be but few public assemblies and but few courts of justice: these, however, should have   rich would not fear the expense, although they should receive nothing for their attendance,   though the poor did; and judgment also would be given much better; for the rich will not choose   to be long absent from their own affairs, but will willingly be so for a short time: and, when there   follow; for now they divide the surplus of the public money amongst the poor; these receive   it and again want the same supply, while the giving it is like pouring water into a sieve:   but the true patriot in a democracy ought to take care that the majority of the community are not   too poor, for this is the cause of rapacity in that government; he therefore should endeavour   that they may enjoy perpetual plenty; and as this also is advantageous to the rich, what can   be saved out of the public money should be put by, and then divided at once amongst the poor,   if possible, in such a quantity as may enable every one of them to purchase a little field,   and, if that cannot be done, at least to give each of them enough to procure the implements   of trade and husbandry; and if there is not enough for all to receive so much at once, then to divide   it according to tribes or any other allotment. In the meantime let the rich pay them for necessary   services, but not be obliged to find them in useless amusements. And something like this was   the manner in which they managed at Carthage, and preserved the affections of the people;   for by continually sending some of their community into colonies they procured plenty. It is also   with what is necessary, induce them to work; or to imitate the conduct of the people at Tarentum:   for they, permitting the poor to partake in common of everything which is needful for them, gain the   affections of the commonalty. They have also two different ways of electing their magistrates;   for some are chosen by vote, others by lot; by the last, that the people at large may   have some share in the administration; by the former, that the state may be well governed:   the same may be accomplished if of the same magistrates you choose some by vote,   others by lot. And thus much for the manner in which democracies ought to be established.  CHAPTER 6 What has been already said will almost   of itself sufficiently show how an oligarchy ought to be founded; for he who would frame such   a state should have in his view a democracy to oppose it; for every species of oligarchy should   be founded on principles diametrically opposite to some species of democracy. The first and best-framed oligarchy is that which approaches near to what we call a free state;   in which there ought to be two different census, the one high, the other low:   from the former the supreme magistrates: nor should any one be excluded from a part of the   administration who was within the census; which should be so regulated that the commonalty who are   included in it should by means thereof be superior to those who have no share in the government;   of the better sort of the people. Much in the same manner ought that oligarchy to   be established which is next in order: but as to that which is most opposite to a pure democracy,   and approaches nearest to a dynasty and a tyranny, as it is of all others the worst, so it requires   the greatest care and caution to preserve it: for as bodies of sound and healthy constitutions and   ships which are well manned and well found for sailing can bear many injuries without perishing,   while a diseased body or a leaky ship with an indifferent crew cannot support the least shock;   is the preservation of a democracy; for these are opposed to those rights which are founded in rank:   on the contrary, the preservation of an oligarchy depends upon the due regulation of the different   orders in the society. CHAPTER 7  As the greater part of the community are divided into four sorts of people; husbandmen, mechanics,   traders, and hired servants; and as those who are employed in war may likewise be divided   into four; the horsemen, the heavy-armed soldier, the light-armed, and the sailor,   where the nature of the country can admit a great number of horse; there a powerful oligarchy may   but those who can support the expense of horsemen must be persons of some considerable fortune.   may be established; for the heavy-armed are rather made up of men of substance than the poor: but the   is very great and a sedition arises, the other parts of the community fight at a disadvantage;   but a remedy for this evil is to be learned from skilful generals, who always mix a proper number   of light-armed soldiers with their horse and heavy-armed: for it is with those that the   populace get the better of the men of fortune in an insurrection; for these being lighter are   easily a match for the horse and the heavy-armed: so that for an oligarchy to form a body of troops   some young and some old, the fathers should teach their sons, while they were very young,   a light and easy exercise; but, when they are grown up, they should be perfect in every warlike   exercise. Now, the admission of the people to any share in the government should either be (as   I said before) regulated by a census, or else, as at Thebes, allowed to those who for a certain time   have ceased from any mechanic employment, or as at Massalia, where they are chosen according to   their worth, whether citizens or foreigners. With respect to the magistrates of the highest rank   which it may be necessary to have in a state, the services they are bound to do the public should   be expressly laid down, to prevent the common people from being desirous of accepting their   employments, and also to induce them to regard their magistrates with favour when they know what   a price they pay for their honours. It is also necessary that the magistrates, upon entering   into their offices, should make magnificent sacrifices and erect some public structure,   that the people partaking of the entertainment, and seeing the city ornamented with votive   gifts in their temples and public structures, may see with pleasure the stability of the government:   add to this also, that the nobles will have their generosity recorded: but now this is   not the conduct which those who are at present at the head of an oligarchy pursue, but the contrary;   for they are not more desirous of honour than of gain; for which reason such oligarchies may more   properly be called little democracies. Thus we have explained on what principles a democracy and   an oligarchy ought to be established. CHAPTER 8  After what has been said I proceed next to treat particularly of the magistrates; of what nature   they should be, how many, and for what purpose, as I have already mentioned: for without necessary   magistrates no state can exist, nor without those which contribute to its dignity and good order can   exist happily: now it is necessary that in small states the magistrates should be few; in a large   one, many: also to know well what offices may be joined together, and what ought to be separated.   certain magistrate should be appointed to inspect their contracts and preserve good order; for of   necessity, in almost every city there must be both buyers and sellers to supply each other’s mutual   wants: and this is what is most productive of the comforts of life; for the sake of which men seem   to have joined together in one community. A second care, and nearly related to the first, is to have   an eye both to the public and private edifices in the city, that they may be an ornament;   and also to take care of all buildings which are likely to fall: and to see that the highways   are kept in proper repair; and also that the landmarks between different estates are preserved,   that there may be no disputes on that account; and all other business of the same nature. Now,   this business may be divided into several branches, over each of which in populous cities   they appoint a separate person; one to inspect the buildings, another the fountains, another   the harbours; and they are called the inspectors of the city. A third, which is very like the last,   and conversant nearly about the same objects, only in the country, is to take care of what   is done out of the city. The officers who have this employment we call inspectors of the lands,   or inspectors of the woods; but the business of all three of them is the same. There must also   be other officers appointed to receive the public revenue and to deliver it out to those who are in   the different departments of the state: these are called receivers or quaestors. There must also be   another, before whom all private contracts and sentences of courts should be enrolled,   as well as proceedings and declarations. Sometimes this employment is divided amongst many, but there   is an officer whose business is of all others the most necessary, and yet most difficult; namely,   to take care that sentence is executed upon those who are condemned; and that every one pays the   fines laid on him; and also to have the charge of those who are in prison. This office is very   made very profitable, or, if they do, will they be willing to execute it according to law; but it is   most necessary, as it is of no service to pass judgment in any cause without that judgment is   carried into execution: for without this human society could not subsist: for which reason it   is best that this office should not be executed by one person, but by some of the magistrates of   the other courts. In like manner, the taking care that those fines which are ordered by the judges   are levied should be divided amongst different persons. And as different magistrates judge   different causes, let the causes of the young be heard by the young: and as to those which are   already brought to a hearing, let one person pass sentence, and another see it executed: as, for   instance, let the magistrates who have the care of the public buildings execute the sentence which   the inspectors of the markets have passed, and the like in other cases: for by so much the less odium   attends those who carry the laws into execution, by so much the easier will they be properly put   in force: therefore for the same persons to pass the sentence and to execute it will subject them   to general hatred; and if they pass it upon all, they will be considered as the enemies of all.   Thus one person has often the custody of the prisoner’s body, while another sees the sentence   against him executed, as the eleven did at Athens: for which reason it is prudent to separate these   offices, and to give great attention thereunto as equally necessary with anything we have already   mentioned; for it will certainly happen that men of character will decline accepting this office,   and worthless persons cannot properly be entrusted with it, as having themselves rather an occasion   to be a separate office from others; nor should it be continually allotted to any individuals,   but the young men; where there is a city-guard, the youths ought in turns to take these offices   upon them. These, then, as the most necessary magistrates, ought to be first mentioned: next   to these are others no less necessary, but of much higher rank, for they ought to be men of great   skill and fidelity. These are they who have the guard of the city, and provide everything that is   and to take care to muster and marshal the citizens. Over all these there are sometimes   general or polemarch; but where there are horse and light-armed troops, and bowmen, and sailors,   they sometimes put distinct commanders over each of these; who again have others under them,   and thus much for this department. Since some of the magistrates, if not all, have business with   the public money, it is necessary that there should be other officers, whose employment   should be nothing else than to take an account of what they have, and correct any mismanagement   therein. But besides all these magistrates there is one who is supreme over them all,   who very often has in his own power the disposal of the public revenue and taxes; who presides over   the people when the supreme power is in them; for there must be some magistrate who has a power to   summon them together, and to preside as head of the state. These are sometimes called preadvisers;   but where there are many, more properly a council. These are nearly the civil magistrates which are   requisite to a government: but there are other persons whose business is confined to religion;   as the priests, and those who are to take care of the temples, that they are kept in proper repair,   or, if they fall down, that they may be rebuilt; and whatever else belongs to public worship. This   charge is sometimes entrusted to one person, as in very small cities: in others it is delegated   to many, and these distinct from the priesthood, as the builders or keepers of holy places,   and officers of the sacred revenue. Next to these are those who are appointed to have the general   care of all those public sacrifices to the tutelar god of the state, which the laws do not entrust to   the priests: and these in different states have different appellations. To enumerate in few words   the different departments of all those magistrates who are necessary: these are either religion, war,   taxes, expenditures, markets, public buildings, harbours, highways. Belonging to the courts   of justice there are scribes to enroll private contracts; and there must also be guards set over   the prisoners, others to see the law is executed, council on either side, and also others to watch   over the conduct of those who are to decide the causes. Amongst the magistrates also may finally   be reckoned those who are to give their advice in public affairs. But separate states, who are   peculiarly happy and have leisure to attend to more minute particulars, and are very attentive   to good order, require particular magistrates for themselves; such as those who have the government   of the women; who are to see the laws are executed; who take care of the boys and preside   over their education. To these may be added those who have the care of their gymnastic exercises,   their theatres, and every other public spectacle which there may happen to be. Some of these,   however, are not of general use; as the governors of the women: for the poor are obliged to employ   their wives and children in servile offices for want of slaves. As there are three magistrates to   whom some states entrust the supreme power; namely, guardians of the laws, preadvisers,   and senators; guardians of the laws suit best to an aristocracy, preadvisers to an oligarchy,   and a senate to a democracy. And thus much briefly concerning all magistrates. BOOK 7 CHAPTER 1  He who proposes to make that inquiry which is necessary concerning what government is best,   ought first to determine what manner of living is most eligible; for while this remains uncertain it   interfere, it is highly probable, that those who enjoy the best government will live the most   of life is most desirable for all; and afterwards whether this life is the same to the man and the   citizen, or different. As I imagine that I have already sufficiently shown what sort of life is   best in my popular discourses on that subject, I think I may very properly repeat the same here; as   most certainly no one ever called in question the propriety of one of the divisions; namely, that as   the body, and what to the soul, it is evident that all these must conspire to make a man happy: for   no one would say that a man was happy who had no fortitude, no temperance, no justice, no prudence;   was either hungry or dry, or would murder his dearest friend for a farthing; and also was in   every particular as wanting in his understanding as an infant or an idiot. These truths are so   evident that all must agree to them; though some may dispute about the quantity and the degree:   for they may think, that a very little virtue is sufficient for happiness; but for riches,   property, power, honour, and all such things, they endeavour to increase them without bounds:   but to such we reply, that it is easy to prove from what experience teaches us in these cases,   be found in pleasure or virtue or both, certain it is, that those whose morals are most pure,   and whose understandings are best cultivated, will enjoy more of it, although their fortune is but   moderate than those do who own an exuberance of wealth, are deficient in those; and this utility   any one who reflects may easily convince himself of; for whatsoever is external has its boundary,   as a machine, and whatsoever is useful in its excess is either necessarily hurtful, or at   best useless to the possessor; but every good quality of the soul the higher it is in degree,   so much the more useful it is, if it is permitted on this subject to use the word useful as well as   noble. It is also very evident, that the accidents of each subject take place of each other,   so that if the soul is more noble than any outward possession, as the body, both in itself and with   respect to us, it must be admitted of course that the best accidents of each must follow the same   analogy. Besides, it is for the sake of the soul that these things are desirable; and it is on this   that every one enjoys as much happiness as he possesses virtue and wisdom, and acts according   not from any external good, but in Himself, and because such is His nature. For good fortune is   something different from happiness, as every good which depends not on the mind is owing to chance   or fortune; but it is not from fortune that any one is wise and just: hence it follows, that that   city is happiest which is the best and acts best: for no one can do well who acts not well; nor can   the deeds either of man or city be praiseworthy without virtue and wisdom; for whatsoever is just,   or wise, or prudent in a man, the same things are just, wise, and prudent in a city. not go through a complete investigation of it, as it properly belongs to another question: let us   at present suppose so much, that a man’s happiest life, both as an individual and as a citizen, is a   who are not convinced by what I have said, their doubts shall be answered hereafter, at present we   shall proceed according to our intended method. CHAPTER 2  It now remains for us to say whether the happiness of any individual man and the city is the same or   must place the happiness of the city in riches if it possesses them; those who prefer a life   which enjoys a tyrannic power over others will also think, that the city which has many others   under its command is most happy: thus also if any one approves a man for his virtue,   he will think the most worthy city the happiest: but here there are two particulars which require   of the community and enjoy the rights of a citizen, or whether to live as a stranger,   without interfering in public affairs; and also what form of government is to be preferred,   and what disposition of the state is best; whether the whole community should be eligible to a share   in the administration, or only the greater part, and some only: as this, therefore,   is a subject of political examination and speculation, and not what concerns the individual,   and the first of these is what we are at present engaged in, the one of these I am not obliged   to speak to, the other is the proper business of my present design. It is evident that government   must be the best which is so established, that every one therein may have it in his power to   act virtuously and live happily: but some, who admit that a life of virtue is most eligible,   still doubt which is preferable a public life of active virtue, or one entirely disengaged from   what is without and spent in contemplation; which some say is the only one worthy of a philosopher;   and one of these two different modes of life both now and formerly seem to have been chosen by all   those who were the most virtuous men; I mean the public or philosophic. And yet it is of no little   consequence on which side the truth lies; for a man of sense must naturally incline to the better   choice; both as an individual and a citizen. Some think that a tyrannic government over those near   us is the greatest injustice; but that a political one is not unjust: but that still is a restraint   public and active life is the only life for man: for that private persons have no opportunity of   practising any one virtue, more than they have who are engaged in public life the management of   the state. These are their sentiments; others say, that a tyrannical and despotical mode of   government is the only happy one; for even amongst some free states the object of their laws seems   to be to tyrannise over their neighbours: so that the generality of political institutions,   wheresoever dispersed, if they have any one common object in view, have all of them this,   well as by the manner in which they educated their children, that all which they had in view was to   make them soldiers: besides, among all nations, those who have power enough and reduce others to   servitude are honoured on that account; as were the Scythians, Persians, Thracians, and Gauls:   with some there are laws to heighten the virtue of courage; thus they tell us that at Carthage they   allowed every person to wear as many rings for distinction as he had served campaigns. There was   a halter; among the Scythians, at a festival, none were permitted to drink out of the cup was carried   about who had not done the same thing. Among the Iberians, a warlike nation, they fixed as many   columns upon a man’s tomb as he had slain enemies: and among different nations different things of   absurd to those who are willing to take this subject into their consideration to inquire   govern and tyrannise over its neighbours, whether they will, or will not: for how can that belong   not only justly, but unjustly also: for a conquest may be unjustly made. But we see nothing of this   in the arts: for it is the business neither of the physician nor the pilot to use either persuasion   or force, the one to his patients, the other to his passengers: and yet many seem to think   a despotic government is a political one, and what they would not allow to be just or proper,   if exercised over themselves, they will not blush to exercise over others; for they endeavour to be   wisely governed themselves, but think it of no consequence whether others are so or not:   but a despotic power is absurd, except only where nature has framed the one party for dominion,   the other for subordination; and therefore no one ought to assume it over all in general, but those   only which are the proper objects thereof: thus no one should hunt men either for food or sacrifice,   but what is fit for those purposes, and these are wild animals which are eatable.  laws, although it should happen to be so situated as to have no connection with any other state,   though its constitution should not be framed for war or conquest; for it would then have   no occasion for these. It is evident therefore that the business of war is to be considered   as commendable, not as a final end, but as the means of procuring it. It is the duty of a good   partake of every intercourse, of a good life, and of the happiness which results from it:   and in this respect some laws and customs differ from others. It is also the duty of a legislator,   if he has any neighbouring states to consider in what manner he shall oppose each of them,   will be considered hereafter. CHAPTER 3  We will now speak to those who, while they agree that a life of virtue is most eligible,   yet differ in the use of it addressing ourselves to both these parties; for there are some who   disapprove of all political governments, and think that the life of one who is really free is   different from the life of a citizen, and of all others most eligible: others again think that the   citizen is the best; and that it is impossible for him who does nothing to be well employed;   but that virtuous activity and happiness are the same thing. Now both parties in some particulars   say what is right, in others what is wrong, thus, that the life of a freeman is better than the life   of a slave is true, for a slave, as a slave, is employed in nothing honourable; for the common   servile employments which he is commanded to perform have nothing virtuous in them;   but, on the other hand, it is not true that a submission to all sorts of governments is slavery;   for the government of freemen differs not more from the government of slaves than slavery and   freedom differ from each other in their nature; and how they do has been already mentioned. To   prefer doing of nothing to virtuous activity is also wrong, for happiness consists in action,   and many noble ends are produced by the actions of the just and wise. From what we have already   determined on this subject, some one probably may think, that supreme power is of all things best,   as that will enable a man to command very many useful services from others; so that he who can   obtain this ought not to give it up to another, but rather to seize it: and, for this purpose,   the father should have no attention or regard for the son, or the son for the father, or friend for   friend; for what is best is most eligible: but to be a member of the community and be in felicity   is best. What these persons advance might probably be true, if the supreme good was certainly theirs   who plunder and use violence to others: but it is most unlikely that it should be so; for it is   a mere supposition: for it does not follow that their actions are honourable who thus assume the   a father to a child, a master to a slave: so that he who so far forsakes the paths of virtue can   never return back from whence he departed from them: for amongst equals whatever is fair and   just ought to be reciprocal; for this is equal and right; but that equals should not partake of what   is equal, or like to like, is contrary to nature: but whatever is contrary to nature is not right;   therefore, if there is any one superior to the rest of the community in virtue and abilities for   active life, him it is proper to follow, him it is right to obey, but the one alone will not do,   but must be joined to the other also: and, if we are right in what we have now said, it follows   that happiness consists in virtuous activity, and that both with respect to the community as well as   the individual an active life is the happiest: not that an active life must necessarily refer   to other persons, as some think, or that those studies alone are practical which are pursued   to teach others what to do; for those are much more so whose final object is in themselves,   and to improve the judgment and understanding of the man; for virtuous activity has an end,   therefore is something practical; nay, those who contrive the plan which others follow are more   particularly said to act, and are superior to the workmen who execute their designs. But it   is not necessary that states which choose to have no intercourse with others should remain inactive;   for the several members thereof may have mutual intercourse with each other; for there are many   opportunities for this among the different citizens; the same thing is true of every   individual: for, was it otherwise, neither could the Deity nor the universe be perfect; to neither   of whom can anything external separately exist. Hence it is evident that that very   same life which is happy for each individual is happy also for the state and every member of it.  CHAPTER 4 As I have now finished   it now remains that I should first say what ought to be the establishment of a city which one should   form according to one’s wish; for no good state can exist without a moderate proportion of what   as are impossible: I mean relative to the number of citizens and the extent of the territory:   for as other artificers, such as the weaver and the shipwright, ought to have such materials as   are fit for their work, since so much the better they are, by so much superior will the work itself   necessarily be; so also ought the legislator and politician endeavour to procure proper materials   for the business they have in hand. Now the first and principal instrument of the politician is the   number of the people; he should therefore know how many, and what they naturally ought to be:   in like manner the country, how large, and what it is. Most persons think that it is necessary for a   city to be large to be happy: but, should this be true, they cannot tell what is a large one   and what a small one; for according to the multitude of the inhabitants they estimate   the greatness of it; but they ought rather to consider its strength than its numbers; for a   state has a certain object in view, and from the power which it has in itself of accomplishing it,   its greatness ought to be estimated; as a person might say, that Hippocrates was a   greater physician, though not a greater man, than one that exceeded him in the size of his body:   but if it was proper to determine the strength of the city from the number of the inhabitants,   it should never be collected from the multitude in general who may happen to be in it; for in a city   there must necessarily be many slaves, sojourners, and foreigners; but from those who are really part   of the city and properly constitute its members; a multitude of these is indeed a proof of a large   city, but in a state where a large number of mechanics inhabit, and but few soldiers,   such a state cannot be great; for the greatness of the city, and the number of men in it, are not   the same thing. This too is evident from fact, that it is very difficult, if not impossible,   to govern properly a very numerous body of men; for of all the states which appear well governed   we find not one where the rights of a citizen are open to an indiscriminate multitude. And this is   also evident from the nature of the thing; for as law is a certain order, so good law is of course a   that DIVINE POWER which comprehends the universe. Not but that, as quantity and variety are usually   essential to beauty, the perfection of a city consists in the largeness of it as far as that   largeness is consistent with that order already mentioned: but still there is a determinate size   to all cities, as well as everything else, whether animals, plants, or machines, for each of these,   due growth, or are badly constructed, as a ship a span long is not properly a ship, nor one of two   may be quite useless: so is it with a city; one that is too small has not in itself the power of   self-defence, but this is essential to a city: one that is too large is capable of self-defence   in what is necessary; but then it is a nation and not a city: for it will be very difficult   to accommodate a form of government to it: for who would choose to be the general of such an unwieldy   multitude, or who could be their herald but a stentor? The first thing therefore necessary is,   that a city should consist of such numbers as will be sufficient to enable the inhabitants to   live happily in their political community: and it follows, that the more the inhabitants exceed that   necessary number the greater will the city be: but this must not be, as we have already said, without   collected from the actions both of the governors and the governed. Now, as it belongs to the first   to direct the inferior magistrates and to act as judges, it follows that they can neither determine   causes with justice nor issue their orders with propriety without they know the characters of   their fellow-citizens: so that whenever this happens not to be done in these two particulars,   the state must of necessity be badly managed; for in both of them it is not right to determine too   hastily and without proper knowledge, which must evidently be the case where the number   of the citizens is too many: besides, it is more easy for strangers and sojourners to assume the   rights of citizens, as they will easily escape detection in so great a multitude. It is evident,   that they may be the better able to be sufficient in themselves, while at the same time they are not   too large to be under the eye and government of the magistrates. And thus let us determine the   extent of a city. CHAPTER 5  What we have said concerning a city may nearly be applied to a country; for as to what soil it   should be, every one evidently will commend it if it is such as is sufficient in itself   to furnish what will make the inhabitants happy; for which purpose it must be able to supply them   with all the necessaries of life; for it is the having these in plenty, without any want, which   makes them content. As to its extent, it should be such as may enable the inhabitants to live at   their ease with freedom and temperance. Whether we have done right or wrong in fixing this limit to   the territory shall be considered more minutely hereafter, when we come particularly to inquire   into property, and what fortune is requisite for a man to live on, and how and in what manner   they ought to employ it; for there are many doubts upon this question, while each party insists upon   their own plan of life being carried to an excess, the one of severity, the other of indulgence. What   the situation of the country should be it is not difficult to determine, in some particulars   respecting that we ought to be advised by those who are skilful in military affairs. It should   be difficult of access to an enemy, but easy to the inhabitants: and as we said, that the number   of inhabitants ought to be such as can come under the eye of the magistrate, so should it be with   the country; for then it is easily defended. As to the position of the city, if one could   place it to one’s wish, it is convenient to fix it on the seaside: with respect to the country,   one situation which it ought to have has been already mentioned, namely, that it should be   so placed as easily to give assistance to all places, and also to receive the necessaries of   life from all parts, and also wood, or any other materials which may happen to be in the country.  CHAPTER 6 But with respect to placing a city   in the neighbourhood of the sea, there are some who have many doubts whether it is serviceable   or hurtful to a well-regulated state; for they say, that the resort of persons brought up under   their numbers; for a multitude of merchants must necessarily arise from their trafficking backward   and forward upon the seas, which will hinder the well-governing of the city: but if this   inconvenience should not arise, it is evident that it is better, both on account of safety and also   for the easier acquisition of the necessaries of life, that both the city and the country should   be near the sea; for it is necessary that those who are to sustain the attack of the enemy should   be ready with their assistance both by land and by sea, and to oppose any inroad, both ways if   possible but if not, at least where they are most powerful, which they may do while they possess   both. A maritime situation is also useful for receiving from others what your own country will   not produce, and exporting those necessaries of your own growth which are more than you   have occasion for; but a city ought to traffic to supply its own wants, and not the wants of others;   for those who themselves furnish an open market for every one, do it for the sake of gain; which   it is not proper for a well-established state to do, neither should they encourage such a commerce.   Now, as we see that many places and cities have docks and harbours lying very convenient for   the city, while those who frequent them have no communication with the citadel, and yet they are   that if any good arises from such an intercourse the city will receive it, but if anything hurtful,   it will be easy to restrain it by a law declaring and deputing whom the state will allow to have an   intercourse with each other, and whom not. As to a naval power, it is by no means doubtful that it is   necessary to have one to a certain degree; and this not only for the sake of the city itself,   but also because it may be necessary to appear formidable to some of the neighbouring states,   or to be able to assist them as well by sea as by land; but to know how great that force should be,   the health of the state should be inquired into, and if that appears vigorous and enables   her to take the lead of other communities, it is necessary that her force should correspond with   her actions. As for that multitude of people which a maritime power creates, they are by   no means necessary to a state, nor ought they to make a part of the citizens; for the mariners and   infantry, who have the command, are freemen, and upon these depends a naval engagement:   but when there are many servants and husbandmen, there they will always have a number of sailors,   though the extent of their city is much inferior to some others. And thus we determine concerning   the country, the port, the city, the sea, and a maritime power: as to the number of the citizens,   what that ought to be we have already said. CHAPTER 7  to be of: but this any one will easily perceive who will cast his eye over the states of Greece,   Those who live in cold countries, as the north of Europe, are full of courage, but wanting in   not being politicians, they cannot reduce their neighbours under their power: but the Asiatics,   whose understandings are quick, and who are conversant in the arts, are deficient in courage;   and therefore are always conquered and the slaves of others: but the Grecians, placed as it were   between these two boundaries, so partake of them both as to be at the same time both courageous and   sensible; for which reason Greece continues free, and governed in the best manner possible, and   capable of commanding the whole world, could they agree upon one system of policy. Now this is the   difference between the Grecians and other nations, that the latter have but one of these qualities,   whereas in the former they are both happily blended together. Hence it is evident, that those   persons ought to be both sensible and courageous who will readily obey a legislator, the object of   whose laws is virtue. As to what some persons say, that the military must be mild and tender to those   they know, but severe and cruel to those they know not, it is courage which makes any one lovely;   rises higher against our friends and acquaintance than against those we know not: for which reason   Archilaus accusing his friends says very properly to himself, Shall my friends insult me? The spirit   of freedom and command also is what all inherit who are of this disposition for courage is   commanding and invincible. It also is not right for any one to say, that you should be severe to   those you know not; for this behaviour is proper for no one: nor are those who are of a noble   disposition harsh in their manners, excepting only to the wicked; and when they are particularly so,   it is, as has been already said, against their friends, when they think they have injured them;   which is agreeable to reason: for when those who think they ought to receive a favour from any one   do not receive it, beside the injury done them, they consider what they are deprived of: hence   the saying, “Cruel are the wars of brothers;” and this, “Those who have greatly loved do greatly   hate.” And thus we have nearly determined how many the inhabitants of a city ought to be,   and what their natural disposition, and also the country how large, and of what sort is necessary;   I say nearly, because it is needless to endeavour at as great accuracy in those things which are   CHAPTER 8 As in natural   bodies those things are not admitted to be parts of them without which the whole would not exist,   so also it is evident that in a political state everything that is necessary thereunto   is not to be considered as a part of it, nor any other community from whence one whole is made;   for one thing ought to be common and the same to the community, whether they partake of it equally   person, and another for the benefit of another, in this there is nothing like a community,   excepting that one makes it and the other uses it; as, for instance, between any instrument employed   in making any work, and the workmen, as there is nothing common between the house and the builder,   but the art of the builder is employed on the house. Thus property is necessary for states,   but property is no part of the state, though many species of it have life; but a city is a community   of equals, for the purpose of enjoying the best life possible: but the happiest life is the best   which consists in the perfect practice of virtuous energies: as therefore some persons have great,   others little or no opportunity of being employed in these, it is evident that this is the cause of   the difference there is between the different cities and communities there are to be found;   for while each of these endeavour to acquire what is best by various and different means, they give   rise to different modes of living and different forms of government. We are now to consider what   those things are without which a city cannot possibly exist; for what we call parts of the   things necessary to a city: first, the inhabitants must have food: secondly, arts, for many   an armed force within themselves, both to support their government against those of their own body   it from without: fourthly, a certain revenue, as well for the internal necessities of the state as   for the business of war: fifthly, which is indeed the chief concern, a religious establishment:   sixthly in order, but first of all in necessity, a court to determine both criminal and civil causes.   These things are absolutely necessary, so to speak, in every state; for a city is a number   of people not accidentally met together, but with a purpose of ensuring to themselves sufficient   independency and self-protection; and if anything necessary for these purposes is wanting, it is   impossible that in such a situation these ends can be obtained. It is necessary therefore that a city   should be capable of acquiring all these things: for this purpose a proper number of husbandmen are   necessary to procure food, also artificers and soldiers, and rich men, and priests and judges,   to determine what is right and proper. CHAPTER 9  shall be open to all; for it is possible to continue the same persons always husbandmen,   employments which we have already mentioned; or shall some of them be appropriated to particulars,   for, as we have already said, it is possible that all may be common to all,   or not, but only common to some; and this is the difference between one government and another:   Since we are inquiring what is the best government possible, and it is admitted to be that in which   the citizens are happy; and that, as we have already said, it is impossible to obtain   really men of intrinsic and not relative goodness, none of them should be permitted to exercise any   mechanic employment or follow merchandise, as being ignoble and destructive to virtue;   neither should they be husband-men, that they may be at leisure to improve in virtue and perform the   duty they owe to the state. With respect to the employments of a soldier, a senator, and a judge,   which are evidently necessary to the community, shall they be allotted to different persons,   for in some cases the same persons may execute them, in others they should be different,   where the different employments require different abilities, as when courage is wanting for one,   judgment for the other, there they should be allotted to different persons; but when it is   their own terms, to be always under command; there these different employments should be   trusted to one person; for those who have arms in their hands have it in their option whether   they will or will not assume the supreme power: to these two (namely, those who have courage and   judgment) the government must be entrusted; but not in the same manner, but as nature directs;   what requires courage to the young, what requires judgment to the old; for with the young is   courage, with the old is wisdom: thus each will be allotted the part they are fit for according to   their different merits. It is also necessary that the landed property should belong to these men;   for no mechanic ought to be admitted to the rights of a citizen, nor any other sort of people whose   employment is not entirely noble, honourable, and virtuous; this is evident from the principle we   at first set out with; for to be happy it is necessary to be virtuous; and no one should   say that a city is happy while he considers only one part of its citizens, but for that purpose he   ought to examine into all of them. It is evident, therefore, that the landed property should belong   to these, though it may be necessary for them to have husbandmen, either slaves, barbarians,   or servants. There remains of the different classes of the people whom we have enumerated,   the priests, for these evidently compose a rank by themselves; for neither are they to be reckoned   amongst the husbandmen nor the mechanics; for reverence to the gods is highly becoming every   state: and since the citizens have been divided into orders, the military and the council, and   it is proper to offer due worship to the gods, and since it is necessary that those who are employed   in their service should have nothing else to do, let the business of the priesthood be allotted to   parts it consists, and that husbandmen, mechanic, and mercenary servants are necessary to a city;   but that the parts of it are soldiers and sailors, and that these are always different from those,   but from each other only occasionally. CHAPTER 10  It seems neither now nor very lately to have been known to those philosophers who have made   politics their study, that a city ought to be divided by families into different orders of men;   and that the husbandmen and soldiers should be kept separate from each other;   which custom is even to this day preserved in Egypt and in Crete; also Sesostris having founded   it in Egypt, Minos in Crete. Common meals seem also to have been an ancient regulation, and to   have been established in Crete during the reign of Minos, and in a still more remote period in Italy;   for those who are the best judges in that country say that one Italus being king of Aenotria., from   whom the people, changing their names, were called Italians instead of Aenotrians, and that part of   Europe was called Italy which is bounded by the Scylletic Gulf on the one side and the Lametic   on the other, the distance between which is about half a day’s journey. This Italus, they relate,   made the Aenotrians, who were formerly shepherds, husbandmen, and gave them different laws from what   they had before, and to have been the first who established common meals, for which reason some of   his descendants still use them, and observe some of his laws. The Opici inhabit that part which   lies towards the Tyrrhenian Sea, who both now are and formerly were called Ausonians. The Chones   inhabited the part toward Iapigia and the Ionian Sea which is called Syrtis. These Chones were   descended from the Aenotrians. Hence arose the custom of common meals, but the separation of the   citizens into different families from Egypt: for the reign of Sesostris is of much higher antiquity   than that of Minos. As we ought to think that most other things were found out in a long, nay,   even in a boundless time (reason teaching us that want would make us first invent that which was   necessary, and, when that was obtained, then those things which were requisite for the conveniences   and ornament of life), so should we conclude the same with respect to a political state;   now everything in Egypt bears the marks of the most remote antiquity, for these people seem to   be the most ancient of all others, and to have acquired laws and political order; we should   therefore make a proper use of what is told us of them, and endeavour to find out what they have   omitted. We have already said, that the landed property ought to belong to the military and those   who partake of the government of the state; and that therefore the husbandmen should be a separate   order of people; and how large and of what nature the country ought to be: we will first treat of   the division of the land, and of the husbandmen, how many and of what sort they ought to be; since   we by no means hold that property ought to be common, as some persons have said, only thus far,   in friendship, it should be their custom to let no citizen want subsistence. As to common meals,   it is in general agreed that they are proper in well-regulated cities; my reasons for approving of   them shall be mentioned hereafter: they are what all the citizens ought to partake of; but it will   not be easy for the poor, out of what is their own, to furnish as much as they are ordered to do,   and supply their own house besides. The expense also of religious worship should be defrayed by   the whole state. Of necessity therefore the land ought to be divided into two parts, one of which   should belong to the community in general, the other to the individuals separately; and each of   these parts should again be subdivided into two: half of that which belongs to the public should be   appropriated to maintain the worship of the gods, the other half to support the common meals. Half   of that which belongs to the individuals should be at the extremity of the country, the other   half near the city, so that these two portions being allotted to each person, all would partake   of land in both places, which would be both equal and right; and induce them to act in concert with   greater harmony in any war with their neighbours: for when the land is not divided in this manner,   much consequence and more than is necessary; for which reason in some places there is a law which   forbids the inhabitants of the borders to have any vote in the council when they are debating upon a   war which is made against them as their private interest might prevent their voting impartially.   Thus therefore the country ought to be divided and for the reasons before mentioned. Could one have   one’s choice, the husbandmen should by all means be slaves, not of the same nation, or men of any   spirit; for thus they would be laborious in their business, and safe from attempting any novelties:   next to these barbarian servants are to be preferred, similar in natural disposition to   these we have already mentioned. Of these, let those who are to cultivate the private property   belong to the public. In what manner these slaves ought to be used, and for what reason it is very   proper that they should have the promise of their liberty made them, as a reward for their services,   shall be mentioned hereafter. CHAPTER 11  We have already mentioned that both the city and all the country should communicate both with the   be particularly desirous of in the position of the city with respect to itself: in the first place,   health is to be consulted as the first thing necessary: now a city which fronts the east   and receives the winds which blow from thence is esteemed most healthful; next to this that which   has a northern position is to be preferred, as best in winter. It should next be contrived that   it may have a proper situation for the business of government and for defence in war: that in   war the citizens may have easy access to it; but that it may be difficult of access to, and hardly   to be taken by, the enemy. In the next place particularly, that there may be plenty of water,   save rain-water, so that there may be no want of it in case they should be driven into the town   in time of war. And as great care should be taken of the health of the inhabitants, the first thing   that they may have good water to drink; and this not be negligently taken care of; for what we   chiefly and most frequently use for the support of the body must principally influence the health of   governments the waters ought to be appropriated to different purposes, and if they are not equally   from that which is for other uses. As to fortified places, what is proper for some governments is not   proper for all; as, for instance, a lofty citadel is proper for a monarchy and an oligarchy; a city   built upon a plain suits a democracy; neither of these for an aristocracy, but rather many strong   places. As to the form of private houses, those are thought to be best and most useful for their   different purposes which are distinct and separate from each other, and built in the modern manner,   after the plan of Hippodamus: but for safety in time of war, on the contrary, they should   be built as they formerly were; for they were such that strangers could not easily find their way out   of them, and the method of access to them such as an enemy could with difficulty find out if he   which may easily be contrived if any one will so regulate them as the planters do their rows   of vines; not that the buildings throughout the city should be detached from each other,   only in some parts of it; thus elegance and safety will be equally consulted. With respect to walls,   those who say that a courageous people ought not to have any, pay too much respect to obsolete   notions; particularly as we may see those who pride themselves therein continually confuted by   take refuge within their walls—but since it very often happens, that those who make the attack are   too powerful for the bravery and courage of those few who oppose them to resist, if you would not   suffer the calamities of war and the insolence of the enemy, it must be thought the part of a   good soldier to seek for safety under the shelter and protection of walls more especially since so   many missile weapons and machines have been most ingeniously invented to besiege cities   with. Indeed to neglect surrounding a city with a wall would be similar to choosing a country which   is easy of access to an enemy, or levelling the eminences of it; or as if an individual should not   have a wall to his house lest it should be thought that the owner of it was a coward: nor should this   be left unconsidered, that those who have a city surrounded with walls may act both ways, either as   not only necessary to have walls, but care must be taken that they may be a proper ornament to   the city, as well as a defence in time of war; not only according to the old methods, but the modern   improvements also: for as those who make offensive war endeavour by every way possible to gain   advantages over their adversaries, so should those who are upon the defensive employ all the means   already

    known, and such new ones as philosophy can invent, to defend themselves: for those who are   well prepared are seldom first attacked. CHAPTER 12  necessary that the walls should have bulwarks and towers in proper places and at proper distances,   it is evident that it will be very necessary to have some of these in the towers; let the   buildings for this purpose be made the ornaments of the walls. As to temples for public worship,   in proper places, and contiguous to each other, except those temples which the law or the oracle   orders to be separate from all other buildings; and let these be in such a conspicuous eminence,   that they may have every advantage of situation, and in the neighbourhood of that part of the city   which is best fortified. Adjoining to this place there ought to be a large square, like that which   they call in Thessaly The Square of Freedom, in which nothing is permitted to be bought or sold;   into which no mechanic nor husbandman, nor any such person, should be permitted to enter,   unless commanded by the magistrates. It will also be an ornament to this place if the gymnastic   exercises of the elders are performed in it. It is also proper, that for performing these exercises   the citizens should be divided into distinct classes, according to their ages, and that the   young persons should have proper officers to be with them, and that the seniors should be with   the magistrates; for having them before their eyes would greatly inspire true modesty and ingenuous   fear. There ought to be another square separate from this for buying and selling, which should be   so situated as to be commodious for the reception of goods both by sea and land. As the citizens   may be divided into magistrates and priests, it is proper that the public tables of the priests   should be in buildings near the temples. Those of the magistrates who preside over contracts,   indictments, and such-like, and also over the markets, and the public streets near the square,   the other for those who are at leisure, and this for necessary business. The same order which I   the surveyors of the woods and overseers of the grounds, must necessarily have their common tables   and their towers, for the purpose of protection against an enemy. There ought also to be temples   erected at proper places, both to the gods and the heroes; but it is unnecessary to dwell longer   and most minutely on these particulars—for it is by no means difficult to plan these things,   it is rather so to carry them into execution; for the theory is the child of our wishes,   but the practical part must depend upon fortune; for which reason we shall decline saying anything   farther upon these subjects. CHAPTER 13  We will now show of what numbers and of what sort of people a government ought to consist, that the   state may be happy and well administered. As there are two particulars on which the excellence and   the other, that the means to accomplish it should be adapted to that purpose; for it may happen that   these may either agree or disagree with each other; for the end we propose may be good,   but in taking the means to obtain it we may err; at other times we may have the right and proper   of medicine the physician does not sometimes know in what situation the body ought to be,   to be healthy; nor what to do to procure the end he aims at. In every art and science, therefore,   we should be master of this knowledge, namely, the proper end, and the means to obtain it. Now it is   evident that all persons are desirous to live well and be happy; but that some have the means thereof   in their own power, others not; and this either through nature or fortune; for many ingredients   are necessary to a happy life; but fewer to those who are of a good than to those who are of a bad   disposition. There are others who continually have the means of happiness in their own power,   by which a state may be best administered, and that state is best administered where the people   are the happiest, it is evident that happiness is a thing we should not be unacquainted with. Now,   I have already said in my treatise on Morals (if I may here make any use of what I have there shown),   that happiness consists in the energy and perfect practice of virtue; and this not relatively, but   simply; I mean by relatively, what is necessary in some certain circumstances; by simply, what   for they arise from virtue and are necessary, and on that account are virtuous; though it   is more desirable that neither any state nor any individual should stand in need of them; but those   actions which are intended either to procure honour or wealth are simply good; the others   eligible only to remove an evil; these, on the contrary, are the foundation and means of relative   good. A worthy man indeed will bear poverty, disease, and other unfortunate accidents with a   noble mind; but happiness consists in the contrary to these (now we have already determined in our   what is simply good; it is evident, therefore, that all the actions of such a one must be worthy   and simply good): this has led some persons to conclude, that the cause of happiness was external   goods; which would be as if any one should suppose that the playing well upon the lyre was owing to   the instrument, and not to the art. It necessarily follows from what has been said, that some things   city we earnestly wish that there may be plenty of those things which are supposed to be under the   dominion of fortune (for some things we admit her to be mistress over); but for a state to be worthy   and great is not only the work of fortune but of knowledge and judgment also. But for a state to be   worthy it is necessary that those citizens which are in the administration should be worthy also;   but as in our city every citizen is to be so, we must consider how this may be accomplished;   for if this is what every one could be, and not some individuals only, it would be more desirable;   good three ways; by nature, by custom, by reason. In the first place, a man ought to be born a man,   and not any other animal; that is to say, he ought to have both a body and soul; but it avails not to   be only born with some things, for custom makes great alterations; for there are some things in   nature capable of alteration either way which are fixed by custom, either for the better or   the worse. Now, other animals live chiefly a life of nature; and in very few things according to   to make all these accord with each other; for if men followed reason, and were persuaded that   it was best to obey her, they would act in many respects contrary to nature and custom. What men   ought naturally to be, to make good members of a community, I have already determined;   the rest of this discourse therefore shall be upon education; for some things are acquired by habit,   As every political community consists of those who govern and of those who are governed,   let us consider whether during the continuance of their lives they ought to be the same persons   or different; for it is evident that the mode of education should be adapted to this distinction.   Now, if one man differed from another as much, as we believe, the gods and heroes differ from men:   in the first place, being far their superiors in body; and, secondly, in the soul:   so that the superiority of the governors over the governed might be evident beyond a doubt,   it is certain that it would be better for the one always to govern, the other always to be governed:   but, as this is not easy to obtain, and kings are not so superior to those they govern as   Scylax informs us they are in India, it is evident that for many reasons it is necessary that all in   their turns should both govern and be governed: for it is just that those who are equal should   have everything alike; and it is difficult for a state to continue which is founded in injustice;   for all those in the country who are desirous of innovation will apply themselves to those who are   under the government of the rest, and such will be their numbers in the state, that it will be   impossible for the magistrates to get the better of them. But that the governors ought to excel   the governed is beyond a doubt; the legislator therefore ought to consider how this shall be,   and how it may be contrived that all shall have their equal share in the administration. Now,   with respect to this it will be first said, that nature herself has directed us in our choice,   becomes to obey, the latter to command; for no one when he is young is offended at his being under   government, or thinks himself too good for it; more especially when he considers that he himself   shall receive the same honours which he pays when he shall arrive at a proper age. In some respects   it must be acknowledged that the governors and the governed are the same, in others they are   different; it is therefore necessary that their education should be in some respect the same,   in others different: as they say, that he will be a good governor who has first learnt to obey.   Now of governments, as we have already said, some are instituted for the sake of him who commands;   others for him who obeys: of the first sort is that of the master over the servant;   of the latter, that of freemen over each other. Now some things which are commanded differ from   others; not in the business, but in the end proposed thereby: for which reason many works,   even of a servile nature, are not disgraceful for young freemen to perform; for many things   which are ordered to be done are not honourable or dishonourable so much in their own nature as   in the end which is proposed, and the reason for which they are undertaken. Since then we   have determined, that the virtue of a good citizen and good governor is the same as of a good man;   and that every one before he commands should have first obeyed, it is the business of the legislator   to consider how his citizens may be good men, what education is necessary to that purpose,   and what is the final object of a good life. The soul of man may be divided into two parts;   that which has reason in itself, and that which hath not, but is capable of obeying its dictates:   and according to the virtues of these two parts a man is said to be good:   but of those virtues which are the ends, it will not be difficult for those to determine who   and this is equally evident both in the works of art as well as in those of nature; but that is   superior which has reason. Reason itself also is divided into two parts, in the manner we usually   divide it; the theoretic and the practical; which division therefore seems necessary for this part   also: the same analogy holds good with respect to actions; of which those which are of a superior   eligible to every one which will procure the best ends. Now life is divided into labour and rest,   war and peace; and of what we do the objects are partly necessary and useful, partly noble:   and we should give the same preference to these that we do to the different parts of the soul   and its actions, as war to procure peace; labour, rest; and the useful, the noble. The politician,   the different parts of the soul and their actions; more particularly to those things which are of a   superior nature and ends; and, in the same manner, to the lives of men and their different actions.  They ought to be fitted both for labour and war, but rather for rest and peace; and also to do   what is necessary and useful, but rather what is fair and noble. It is to those objects that   the education of the children ought to tend, and of all the youths who want instruction. All the   Grecian states which now seem best governed, and the legislators who founded those states,   in their laws and education; but eagerly to have attended to what is useful and productive of gain:   and nearly of the same opinion with these are some persons who have written lately, who, by praising   and victory the end of his government. But how contrary to reason this is, is easily proved by   extensive command, that they may have everything desirable in the greater abundance; so Thibron   and others who have written on that state seem to approve of their legislator for having procured   them an extensive command by continually enuring them to all sorts of dangers and hardships): for   it is evident, since the Lacedemonians have now no hope that the supreme power will be in their   own hand, that neither are they happy nor was their legislator wise. This also is ridiculous,   that while they preserved an obedience to their laws, and no one opposed their being governed   by them, they lost the means of being honourable: but these people understand not rightly what sort   of government it is which ought to reflect honour on the legislator; for a government of freemen is   nobler than despotic power, and more consonant to virtue. Moreover, neither should a city be thought   happy, nor should a legislator be commended, because he has so trained the people as to conquer   their neighbours; for in this there is a great inconvenience: since it is evident that upon this   principle every citizen who can will endeavour to procure the supreme power in his own city;   which crime the Lacedaemonians accuse Pausanias of, though he enjoyed such great honours. Such reasoning and such laws are neither political, useful nor true:   but a legislator ought to instil those laws on the minds of men which are most useful for them,   both in their public and private capacities. The rendering a people fit for war, that they   may enslave their inferiors ought not to be the care of the legislator; but that they may   not themselves be reduced to slavery by others. In the next place, he should take care that the   object of his government is the safety of those who are under it, and not a despotism over all:   in the third place, that those only are slaves who are fit to be only so. Reason indeed concurs   with experience in showing that all the attention which the legislator pays to the business of war,   and all other rules which he lays down, should have for their object rest and peace;   since most of those states (which we usually see) are preserved by war; but,   after they have acquired a supreme power over those around them, are ruined; for during peace,   who never taught them how to be at rest. CHAPTER 15  As there is one end common to a man both as an individual and a citizen, it is evident that   a good man and a good citizen must have the same object in view; it is evident that all the virtues   which lead to rest are necessary; for, as we have often said, the end of war is peace, of labour,   rest; but those virtues whose object is rest, and those also whose object is labour, are necessary   for a liberal life and rest; for we want a supply of many necessary things that we may be at rest. A   city therefore ought to be temperate, brave, and patient; for, according to the proverb, “Rest is   not for slaves;” but those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of those who attack them.   Bravery, therefore, and patience are necessary for labour, philosophy for rest, and temperance   and justice in both; but these chiefly in time of peace and rest; for war obliges men to be just and   temperate; but the enjoyment of pleasure, with the rest of peace, is more apt to produce insolence;   those indeed who are easy in their circumstances, and enjoy everything that can make them happy,   have great occasion for the virtues of temperance and justice. Thus if there are, as the poets tell   us, any inhabitants in the happy isles, to these a higher degree of philosophy, temperance, and   justice will be necessary, as they live at their ease in the full plenty of every sensual pleasure.   It is evident, therefore, that these virtues are necessary in every state that would be happy or   worthy; for he who is worthless can never enjoy real good, much less is he qualified to be at   rest; but can appear good only by labour and being at war, but in peace and at rest the meanest of   creatures. For which reason virtue should not be cultivated as the Lacedaemonians did; for they did   was to be procured by a particular virtue; but since there are greater goods than those of war,   it is evident that the enjoyment of those which are valuable in themselves should be desired,   rather than those virtues which are useful in war; but how and by what means this is to be   nature, custom, and reason, arid shown what sort of men nature must produce for this purpose;   it remains then that we determine which we shall first begin by in education, reason or custom,   for these ought always to preserve the most entire harmony with each other;   for it may happen that reason may err from the end proposed, and be corrected by custom. In   the first place, it is evident that in this as in other things, its beginning or production arises   from some principle, and its end also arises from another principle, which is itself an end. Now,   with us, reason and intelligence are the end of nature; our production, therefore,   and our manners ought to be accommodated to both these. In the next place, as the soul   and the body are two distinct things, so also we see that the soul is divided into two parts,   the reasoning and not-reasoning, with their habits which are two in number, one belonging to each,   namely appetite and intelligence; and as the body is in production before the soul,   so is the not-reasoning part of the soul before the reasoning; and this is evident; for anger,   will and desire are to be seen in children nearly as soon as they are born; but reason and   before the soul; next the appetites for the sake of the mind; the body for the sake of the soul.  CHAPTER 16 If then the legislator ought to take care   to matrimony; at what time and in what situation it is proper that the citizens should engage in   the nuptial contract. Now, with respect to this alliance, the legislator ought both to consider   the parties and their time of life, that they may grow old at the same part of time, and that their   bodily powers may not be different; that is to say, the man being able to have children, but the   woman too old to bear them; or, on the contrary, the woman be young enough to produce children,   but the man too old to be a father; for from such a situation discords and disputes continually   arise. In the next place, with respect to the succession of children, there ought not to be too   great an interval of time between them and their parents; for when there is, the parent can receive   no benefit from his child’s affection, or the child any advantage from his father’s protection;   neither should the difference in years be too little, as great inconveniences may arise from it;   as it prevents that proper reverence being shown to a father by a boy who considers him as nearly   to return from this digression, care ought to be taken that the bodies of the children may   be such as will answer the expectations of the legislator; this also will be affected by the   same means. Since season for the production of children is determined (not exactly,   but to speak in general), namely, for the man till seventy years, and the woman till fifty,   the entering into the marriage state, as far as time is concerned, should be regulated by these   periods. It is extremely bad for the children when the father is too young; for in all animals   whatsoever the parts of the young are imperfect, and are more likely to be productive of females   than males, and diminutive also in size; the same thing of course necessarily holds true in men;   as a proof of this you may see in those cities where the men and women usually marry very young,   the people in general are very small and ill framed; in child-birth also the women suffer more,   and many of them die. And thus some persons tell us the oracle of Traezenium should be explained,   as if it referred to the many women who were destroyed by too early marriages, and not their   gathering their fruits too soon. It is also conducive to temperance not to marry too soon;   for women who do so are apt to be intemperate. It also prevents the bodies of men from acquiring   their full size if they marry before their growth is completed; for this is the determinate period,   which prevents any further increase; for which reason the proper time for a woman to marry   is eighteen, for a man thirty-seven, a little more or less; for when they marry at that time   their bodies are in perfection, and they will also cease to have children at a proper time;   reasonably be expected, they will be just arriving into perfection when their parents are sinking   down under the load of seventy years. And thus much for the time which is proper for marriage;   but moreover a proper season of the year should be observed, as many persons do now, and appropriate   the winter for this business. The married couple ought also to regard the precepts of physicians   and naturalists, each of whom have treated on these subjects. What is the fit disposition of   the body will be better mentioned when we come to speak of the education of the child; we will just   body of a wrestler to be either a good citizen, or to enjoy a good constitution, or to be the father   of healthy children; neither should he be infirm or too much dispirited by misfortunes, but between   both these. He ought to have a habit of labour, but not of too violent labour; nor should that   be confined to one object only, as the wrestler’s is; but to such things as are proper for freemen.   These things are equally necessary both for men and women. Women with child should also take care   the legislator to effect if he commands them once every day to repair to the worship of the gods   who are supposed to preside over matrimony. But, contrary to what is proper for the body, the mind   ought to be kept as tranquil as possible; for as plants partake of the nature of the soil, so does   the child receive much of the disposition of the mother. With respect to the exposing or bringing   up of children, let it be a law, that nothing imperfect or maimed shall be brought up,……….   As the proper time has been pointed out for a man and a woman to enter into the marriage state, so   also let us determine how long it is advantageous for the community that they should have children;   for as the children of those who are too young are imperfect both in body and mind, so also   those whose parents are too old are weak in both: while therefore the body continues in perfection,   which (as some poets say, who reckon the different periods of life by sevens) is till fifty years,   past that age it is better they should have no more. With respect to any connection between   a man and a woman, or a woman and a man, when either of the parties are betrothed,   let it be held in utter detestation on any pretext whatsoever; but should any one be guilty of such   CHAPTER 17 When a child is born it must be supposed that   the strength of its body will depend greatly upon the quality of its food. Now whoever will examine   into the nature of animals, and also observe those people who are very desirous their children should   acquire a warlike habit, will find that they feed them chiefly with milk, as being best accommodated   to their bodies, but without wine, to prevent any distempers: those motions also which are   on account of their extreme ductility, some people even now use particular machines that their bodies   for this is very serviceable for their health; and also to enure them to the business of war;   for which reason it is customary with many of the barbarians to dip their children in   rivers when the water is cold; with others to clothe them very slightly, as among the Celts;   for whatever it is possible to accustom children to, it is best to accustom them to it at first,   of the heat. These, then, and such-like things ought to be the first object of our attention:   teach him nothing at all, not even necessary labour, lest it should hinder his growth;   but he should be accustomed to use so much motion as not to acquire a lazy habit of body; which he   will get by various means and by play also: his play also ought to be neither illiberal nor too   laborious nor lazy. Their governors and preceptors also should take care what sort of tales   and stories it may be proper for them to hear; for all these ought to pave the way for their future   instruction: for which reason the generality of their play should be imitations of what they are   afterwards to do seriously. They too do wrong who forbid by laws the disputes between boys and their   for the struggles of the heart and the compression of the spirits give strength to those who labour,   their manner of life, and those with whom they converse; and to take care that they are never   in the company of slaves. At this time and till they are seven years old it is necessary that they   everything which is illiberal and the like. Indeed it is as much the business of the legislator as   anything else, to banish every indecent expression out of the state: for from a permission to speak   whatever is shameful, very quickly arises the doing it, and this particularly with young people:   for which reason let them never speak nor hear any such thing: but if it appears that any freeman has   done or said anything that is forbidden before he is of age to be thought fit to partake of the   let him be treated as you would a slave, on account of his being infamous. Since we forbid   his speaking everything which is forbidden, it is necessary that he neither sees obscene stories   nor pictures; the magistrates therefore are to take care that there are no statues or pictures   of anything of this nature, except only to those gods to whom the law permits them, and to which   the law allows persons of a certain age to pay their devotions, for themselves, their wives,   and children. It should also be illegal for young persons to be present either at iambics or   comedies before they are arrived at that age when they are allowed to partake of the pleasures of   the table: indeed a good education will preserve them from all the evils which attend on these   things. We have at present just touched upon this subject; it will be our business hereafter, when   we properly come to it, to determine whether this care of children is unnecessary, or, if necessary,   in what manner it must be done; at present we have only mentioned it as necessary. Probably   the saying of Theodoras, the tragic actor, was not a bad one: That he would permit no one,   not even the meanest actor, to go upon the stage before him, that he might first engage the ear of   the audience. The same thing happens both in our connections with men and things: what we meet with   first pleases best; for which reason children should be kept strangers to everything which is   accomplished, the two next may be very properly employed in being spectators of those exercises   they will afterwards have to learn. There are two periods into which education ought to be divided,   according to the age of the child; the one is from his being seven years of age to the time   of puberty; the other from thence till he is one-and-twenty: for those who divide ages by   the number seven are in general wrong: it is much better to follow the division of nature;   must first consider if any regulation whatsoever is requisite for children; in the next place,   if it is advantageous to make it a common care, or that every one should act therein as he pleases,   BOOK 8 CHAPTER 1  No one can doubt that the magistrate ought greatly to interest himself in the care of youth; for   its particular nature; for the form and manners of each government are peculiar to itself; and these,   as they originally established it, so they usually still preserve it. For instance, democratic forms   and manners a democracy; oligarchic, an oligarchy: but, universally, the best manners produce the   best government. Besides, as in every business and art there are some things which men are to   learn first and be made accustomed to, which are necessary to perform their several works; so it   is evident that the same thing is necessary in the practice of virtue. As there is one end in view in   every city, it is evident that education ought to be one and the same in each; and that this should   be a common care, and not the individual’s, as it now is, when every one takes care of his own   children separately; and their instructions are particular also, each person teaching them as they   please; but what ought to be engaged in ought to be common to all. Besides, no one ought to think   that any citizen belongs to him in particular, but to the state in general; for each one is a   part of the state, and it is the natural duty of each part to regard the good of the whole:   and for this the Lacedaemonians may be praised; for they give the greatest attention to education,   and make it public. It is evident, then, that there should be laws concerning education,   and that it should be public. CHAPTER 2  What education is, and how children ought to be instructed, is what should be well known;   they would have a child taught, both with respect to their improvement in virtue and a happy life:   nor is it clear whether the object of it should be to improve the reason or rectify the morals.   From the present mode of education we cannot determine with certainty to which men incline,   whether to instruct a child in what will be useful to him in life; or what tends to virtue,   and what is excellent: for all these things have their separate defenders. As to virtue,   there is no particular in which they all agree: for as all do not equally esteem all virtues,   it reasonably follows that they will not cultivate the same. It is evident that what is necessary   ought to be taught to all: but that which is necessary for one is not necessary for all;   for there ought to be a distinction between the employment of a freeman and a slave.   The first of these should be taught everything useful which will not make those who know it mean.   Every work is to be esteemed mean, and every art and every discipline which renders the body, the   mind, or the understanding of freemen unfit for the habit and practice of virtue: for which reason   all those arts which tend to deform the body are called mean, and all those employments which are   exercised for gain; for they take off from the freedom of the mind and render it sordid. There   are also some liberal arts which are not improper for freemen to apply to in a certain degree; but   to endeavour to acquire a perfect skill in them is exposed to the faults I have just mentioned;   for there is a great deal of difference in the reason for which any one does or learns anything:   for it is not illiberal to engage in it for one’s self, one’s friend, or in the cause of virtue;   while, at the same time, to do it for the sake of another may seem to be acting the part of   a servant and a slave. The mode of instruction which now prevails seems to partake of both parts.  to teach children—reading, gymnastic exercises, and music, to which (in the fourth place) some add   painting. Reading and painting are both of them of singular use in life, and gymnastic exercises, as   productive of courage. As to music, some persons may doubt, as most persons now use it for the sake   of pleasure: but those who originally made it part of education did it because, as has been already   said, nature requires that we should not only be properly employed, but to be able to enjoy leisure   honourably: for this (to repeat what I have already said) is of all things the principal. But,   though both labour and rest are necessary, yet the latter is preferable to the first;   and by all means we ought to learn what we should do when at rest: for we ought not to employ that   time at play; for then play would be the necessary business of our lives. But if this cannot be,   play is more necessary for those who labour than those who are at rest: for he who labours requires   relaxation; which play will supply: for as labour is attended with pain and continued exertion,   it is necessary that play should be introduced, under proper regulations, as a medicine:   for such an employment of the mind is a relaxation to it, and eases with pleasure. Now rest itself   seems to partake of pleasure, of happiness, and an agreeable life: but this cannot be theirs   who labour, but theirs who are at rest; for he who labours, labours for the sake of some end which he   has not: but happiness is an end which all persons think is attended with pleasure and not with pain:   but all persons do not agree in making this pleasure consist in the same thing; for each   one has his particular standard, correspondent to his own habits; but the best man proposes the best   pleasure, and that which arises from the noblest actions. But it is evident, that to live a life of   rest there are some things which a man must learn and be instructed in; and that the object of this   which is given for labour has for its object other things; for which reason the ancients made music a   part of education; not as a thing necessary, for it is not of that nature, nor as a thing useful,   as reading, in the common course of life, or for managing of a family, or for learning anything as   useful in public life. Painting also seems useful to enable a man to judge more accurately of the   productions of the finer arts: nor is it like the gymnastic exercises, which contribute to health   and strength; for neither of these things do we see produced by music; there remains   for it then to be the employment of our rest, which they had in view who introduced it; and,   thinking it a proper employment for freemen, to them they allotted it; as Homer sings: “How right to call Thalia to the feast:” and of some others he says: “The bard was call’d, to ravish every ear:” and, in another place, he makes Ulysses say the happiest part of man’s life is  “When at the festal board, in order plac’d, They hear the song.” It is evident, then, that there is a certain education in which a child may be instructed,   not as useful nor as necessary, but as noble and liberal: but whether this is one or more than one,   and of what sort they are, and how to be taught, shall be considered hereafter: we are now got so   far on our way as to show that we have the testimony of the ancients in our favour, by   what they have delivered down upon education—for music makes this plain. Moreover, it is necessary   to instruct children in what is useful, not only on account of its being useful in itself, as,   of instruction: thus they should be instructed in painting, not only to prevent their being mistaken   in purchasing pictures, or in buying or selling of vases, but rather as it makes them judges of   the beauties of the human form; for to be always hunting after the profitable ill agrees with great   and freeborn souls. As it is evident whether a boy should be first taught morals or reasoning,   and whether his body or his understanding should be first cultivated, it is plain that boys should   be first put under the care of the different masters of the gymnastic arts, both to form their   Now those states which seem to take the greatest care of their children’s education, bestow their   chief attention on wrestling, though it both prevents the increase of the body and hurts   the form of it. This fault the Lacedaemonians did not fall into, for they made their children   fierce by painful labour, as chiefly useful to inspire them with courage: though, as we have   already often said, this is neither the only thing nor the principal thing necessary to attend to;   and even with respect to this they may not thus attain their end; for we do not find either in   other animals, or other nations, that courage necessarily attends the most cruel, but rather   the milder, and those who have the dispositions of lions: for there are many people who are eager   both to kill men and to devour human flesh, as the Achaeans and Heniochi in Pontus, and many   but are men of no courage. Nay, we know that the Lacedaemonians themselves, while they continued   both in war and gymnastic exercises), did not acquire their superiority by training their youth   to these exercises, but because those who were disciplined opposed those who were not disciplined   at all. What is fair and honourable ought then to take place in education of what is fierce   and cruel: for it is not a wolf, nor any other wild beast, which will brave any noble danger,   while they do not take care to instruct them in what is necessary to do, to speak the real truth,   render them mean and vile, accomplished only in one duty of a citizen, and in every other respect,   what we see at present: for now they have rivals in their mode of education, whereas formerly they   had not. That gymnastic exercises are useful, and in what manner, is admitted; for during   youth it is very proper to go through a course of those which are most gentle, omitting that   violent diet and those painful exercises which are prescribed as necessary; that they may not prevent   the growth of the body: and it is no small proof that they have this effect, that amongst the   Olympic candidates we can scarce find two or three who have gained a victory both when boys and men:   because the necessary exercises they went through when young deprived them of their   strength. When they have allotted three years from the time of puberty to other parts of education,   they are then of a proper age to submit to labour and a regulated diet; for it is impossible for the   mind and body both to labour at the same time, as they are productive of contrary evils to each   other; the labour of the body preventing the progress of the mind, and the mind of the body.  CHAPTER 5 With respect to music we have   already spoken a little in a doubtful manner upon this subject. It will be proper to go over again   more particularly what we then said, which may serve as an introduction to what any other person   may choose to offer thereon; for it is no easy matter to distinctly point out what power it has,   nor on what accounts one should apply it, whether as an amusement and refreshment, as sleep or wine;   as these are nothing serious, but pleasing, and the killers of care, as Euripides says; for which   reason they class in the same order and use for the same purpose all these, namely, sleep, wine,   and music, to which some add dancing; or shall we rather suppose that music tends to be productive   of virtue, having a power, as the gymnastic exercises have to form the body in a certain way,   to influence the manners so as to accustom its professors to rejoice rightly? or shall we say,   that it is of any service in the conduct of life, and an assistant to prudence? for this also is a   third property which has been attributed to it. Now that boys are not to be instructed in it as   play is evident; for those who learn don’t play, for to learn is rather troublesome; neither is   no means fit for what is as yet imperfect; but it may be thought that the earnest attention of boys   in this art is for the sake of that amusement they will enjoy when they come to be men and completely   formed; but, if this is the case, why are they themselves to learn it, and not follow the   practice of the kings of the Medes and Persians, who enjoy the pleasure of music by hearing others   who make this science their particular study and business, than those who have only spent so much   time at it as was sufficient just to learn the principles of it. But if this is a reason for   a child’s being taught anything, they ought also to learn the art of cookery, but this is absurd.   The same doubt occurs if music has a power of improving the manners; for why should they on this   a judgment on the merits of the performance by hearing others, as the Lacedaemonians; for they,   without having ever learnt music, are yet able to judge accurately what is good and what is bad; the   same reasoning may be applied if music is supposed to be the amusement of those who live an elegant   and easy life, why should they learn themselves, and not rather enjoy the benefit of others’ skill.   Let us here consider what is our belief of the immortal gods in this particular. Now we   find the poets never represent Jupiter himself as singing and playing; nay, we ourselves treat the   a buffoon. But probably we may consider this subject more at large hereafter. The first   question is, whether music is or is not to make a part of education? and of those three things which   have been assigned as its proper employment, which is the right? Is it to instruct, to amuse, or to   employ the vacant hours of those who live at rest? or may not all three be properly allotted to it?   for it appears to partake of them all; for play is necessary for relaxation, and relaxation pleasant,   as it is a medicine for that uneasiness which arises from labour. It is admitted also that   a happy life must be an honourable one, and a pleasant one too, since happiness consists in both   these; and we all agree that music is one of the most pleasing things, whether alone or accompanied   with a voice; as Musseus says, “Music’s the sweetest joy of man;” for which reason it is   joy. So that from this any one may suppose that it is necessary to instruct young persons in it;   for all those pleasures which are harmless are not only conducive to the final end of life,   they often cease from their labour and apply to amusement, with no further view than to acquire   the pleasure attending it. It is therefore useful to enjoy such pleasures as these. There are some   but not what should be; but while men seek the one they accept the other for it;   because there is some likeness in human actions to the end; for the end is pursued for the sake   of nothing else that attends it; but for itself only; and pleasures like these are sought for, not   on account of what follows them, but on account of what has gone before them, as labour and grief;   for which reason they seek for happiness in these sort of pleasures; and that this is the reason   as it is very serviceable during the hours of relaxation from labour, probably no one doubts;   we should also inquire whether besides this use it may not also have another of nobler nature—and we   ought not only to partake of the common pleasure arising from it (which all have the sensation of,   for music naturally gives pleasure, therefore the use of it is agreeable to all ages and all   dispositions); but also to examine if it tends anything to improve our manners and our souls.   And this will be easily known if we feel our dispositions any way influenced thereby; and that   they are so is evident from many other instances, as well as the music at the Olympic games; and   this confessedly fills the soul with enthusiasm; but enthusiasm is an affection of the soul which   therewith; and this when they are conveyed even without rhythm or verse. Moreover, as music is one   of those things which are pleasant, and as virtue itself consists in rightly enjoying, loving,   and hating, it is evident that we ought not to learn or accustom ourselves to anything so much as   to judge right and rejoice in honourable manners and noble actions. But anger and mildness, courage   and modesty, and their contraries, as well as all other dispositions of the mind, are most naturally   imitated by music and poetry; which is plain by experience, for when we hear these our very soul   is altered; and he who is affected either with joy or grief by the imitation of any objects,   is in very nearly the same situation as if he was affected by the objects themselves; thus,   if any person is pleased with seeing a statue of any one on no other account but its beauty,   now it happens in the other senses there is no imitation of manners; that is to say, in the   touch and the taste; in the objects of sight, a very little; for these are merely representations   of things, and the perceptions which they excite are in a manner common to all. Besides,   statues and paintings are not properly imitations of manners, but rather signs and marks which show   the body is affected by some passion. However, the difference is not great, yet young men   ought not to view the paintings of Pauso, but of Polygnotus, or any other painter or statuary who   expresses manners. But in poetry and music there are imitations of manners; and this is evident,   for different harmonies differ from each other so much by nature, that those who hear them   are differently affected, and are not in the same disposition of mind when one is performed as when   another is; the one, for instance, occasions grief 13406 and contracts the soul, as the mixed Lydian:   others soften the mind, and as it were dissolve the heart: others fix it in a firm and settled   state, such is the power of the Doric music only; while the Phrygian fills the soul with enthusiasm,   as has been well described by those who have written philosophically upon this part of   education; for they bring examples of what they advance from the things themselves. The   same holds true with respect to rhythm; some fix the disposition, others occasion a change in it;   influence music has over the disposition of the mind, and how variously it can fascinate it:   and if it can do this, most certainly it is what youth ought to be instructed in. And indeed the   learning of music is particularly adapted to their disposition; for at their time of life   they do not willingly attend to anything which is not agreeable; but music is naturally one of   the most agreeable things; and there seems to be a certain connection between harmony and rhythm;   for which reason some wise men held the soul itself to be harmony; others, that it contains it.  CHAPTER 6 We will now determine whether it   is proper that children should be taught to sing, and play upon any instrument, which we have before   made a matter of doubt. Now, it is well known that it makes a great deal of difference when you   it is a thing very difficult, if not impossible, for a man to be a good judge of what he himself   cannot do. It is also very necessary that children should have some employment which will amuse them;   for which reason the rattle of Archytas seems well contrived, which they give children to play with,   cannot sit still: this therefore is well adapted to infants, as instruction ought   to be their rattle as they grow up; hence it is evident that they should be so taught music   as to be able to practise it. Nor is it difficult to say what is becoming or unbecoming of their   place, it is necessary for them to practise, that they may be judges of the art: for which reason   this should be done when they are young; but when they are grown older the practical part may be   dropped; while they will still continue judges of what is excellent in the art, and take a proper   pleasure therein, from the knowledge they acquired of it in their youth. As to the censure which some   persons throw upon music, as something mean and low, it is not difficult to answer that, if we   will but consider how far we propose those who are to be educated so as to become good citizens   and also what instruments they should play upon; for in these there is probably a difference. Such   then is the proper answer to that censure: for it must be admitted, that in some cases nothing can   prevent music being attended, to a certain degree, with the bad effects which are ascribed to it;   it is therefore clear that the learning of it should never prevent the business of riper years;   nor render the body effeminate, and unfit for the business of war or the state; but it should   be practised by the young, judged of by the old. That children may learn music properly,   it is necessary that they should not be employed in those parts of it which are the objects of   dispute between the masters in that science; nor should they perform such pieces as are wondered at   from the difficulty of their execution; and which, from being first exhibited in the public games,   are now become a part of education; but let them learn so much of it as to be able to   receive proper pleasure from excellent music and rhythms; and not that only which music must make   should use; thus, they should never be taught to play upon the flute, or any other instrument which   requires great skill, as the harp or the like, but on such as will make them good judges of music,   or any other instruction: besides, the flute is not a moral instrument, but rather one that will   inflame the passions, and is therefore rather to be used when the soul is to be animated   than when instruction is intended. Let me add also, that there is something therein which is   for which reason our forefathers very properly forbade the use of it to youth and freemen,   though they themselves at first used it; for when their riches procured them greater leisure, they   grew more animated in the cause of virtue; and both before and after the Median war their noble   actions so exalted their minds that they attended to every part of education; selecting no one in   particular, but endeavouring to collect the whole: for which reason they introduced the flute also,   as one of the instruments they were to learn to play on. At Lacedaemon the choregus himself played   on the flute; and it was so common at Athens that almost every freeman understood it, as is evident   from the tablet which Thrasippus dedicated when he was choregus; but afterwards they rejected it as   dangerous; having become better judges of what tended to promote virtue and what did not. For   the same reason many of the ancient instruments were thrown aside, as the dulcimer and the lyre;   as also those which were to inspire those who played on them with pleasure, and which required   a nice finger and great skill to play well on. What the ancients tell us, by way of fable, of the   flute is indeed very rational; namely, that after Minerva had found it, she threw it away: nor are   they wrong who say that the goddess disliked it for deforming the face of him who played thereon:   not but that it is more probable that she rejected it as the knowledge thereof contributed nothing   to the improvement of the mind. Now, we regard Minerva as the inventress of arts and sciences.   As we disapprove of a child’s being taught to understand instruments, and to play like a   master (which we would have confined to those who are candidates for the prize in that science; for   they play not to improve themselves in virtue, but to please those who hear them, and gratify their   confined to those who are paid for doing it; for it usually gives people sordid notions, for the   end they have in view is bad: for the impertinent spectator is accustomed to make them change their   music; so that the artists who attend to him regulate their bodies according to his motions.  CHAPTER 7 We are now to enter into an   or whether some peculiar ones are to be selected; and also whether we should give   the same directions to those who are engaged in music as part of education, or whether there   is something different from these two. Now, as all music consists in melody and rhythm,   we ought not to be unacquainted with the power which each of these has in education; and whether   we should rather choose music in which melody prevails, or rhythm: but when I consider how many   things have been well written upon these subjects, not only by some musicians of the present age,   but also by some philosophers who are perfectly skilled in that part of music which belongs to   education; we will refer those who desire a very particular knowledge therein to those writers,   and shall only treat of it in general terms, without descending to particulars. Melody is   divided by some philosophers, whose notions we approve of, into moral, practical, and that which   fills the mind with enthusiasm: they also allot to each of these a particular kind of harmony which   but many; both for instruction and purifying the soul (now I use the word purifying at   third place, as an agreeable manner of spending the time and a relaxation from the uneasiness of   moral in education: but to please the ear, when others play, the most active and enthusiastic;   for that passion which is to be found very strong in some souls is to be met with also in all;   but the difference in different persons consists in its being in a less or greater degree, as pity,   fear, and enthusiasm also; which latter is so powerful in some as to overpower the soul:   sedate and composed as if they had employed the art of the physician: and this must necessarily   happen to the compassionate, the fearful, and all those who are subdued by their passions: nay, all   persons, as far as they are affected with those passions, admit of the same cure, and are restored   to tranquillity with pleasure. In the same manner, all music which has the power of purifying the   soul affords a harmless pleasure to man. Such, therefore, should be the harmony and such the   music which those who contend with each other in the theatre should exhibit: but as the audience   is composed of two sorts of people, the free and the well-instructed, the rude the mean mechanics,   and hired servants, and a long collection of the like, there must be some music and some spectacles   to please and soothe them; for as their minds are as it were perverted from their natural habits,   so also is there an unnatural harmony, and overcharged music which is accommodated to   their taste: but what is according to nature gives pleasure to every one, therefore those who are   to contend upon the theatre should be allowed to use this species of music. But in education ethic   melody and ethic harmony should be used, which is the Doric, as we have already said, or any other   which those philosophers who are skilful in that music which is to be employed in education shall   approve of. But Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, is very wrong when he permits only the Phrygian music   to be used as well as the Doric, particularly as amongst other instruments he banishes the flute;   for they are both pathetic and raise the mind: and this the practice of the poets proves;   for in their bacchanal songs, or whenever they describe any violent emotions of the mind,   the flute is the instrument they chiefly use: and the Phrygian harmony is most suitable to these   subjects. Now, that the dithyrambic measure is Phrygian is allowed by general consent;   when Philoxenus endeavoured to compose dithyrambic music for Doric harmony, he naturally fell back   again into Phrygian, as being fittest for that purpose; as every one indeed agrees,   the middle as being between the two extremes, and the Doric has this relation with respect to other   harmonies, it is evident that is what the youth ought to be instructed in. There are two things to   be taken into consideration, both what is possible and what is proper; every one then should chiefly   endeavour to attain those things which contain both these qualities: but this is to be regulated   by different times of life; for instance, it is not easy for those who are advanced in years to   sing such pieces of music as require very high notes, for nature points out to them those which   are gentle and require little strength of voice (for which reason some who are skilful in music   justly find fault with Socrates for forbidding the youth to be instructed in gentle harmony; as if,   like wine, it would make them drunk, whereas the effect of that is to render men bacchanals, and   not make them languid): these therefore are what should employ those who are grown old. Moreover,   if there is any harmony which is proper for a child’s age, as being at the same time   elegant and instructive, as the Lydian of all others seems chiefly to be-These then are as it   were the three boundaries of education, moderation, possibility, and decorum. as fishermen at Tarentum and Byzantium, masters of galleys at Athens, merchants at AEgina and Chios,   there may be. As for gentlemen, they are such as are distinguished either by their fortune, their   but that both shall share it. For if liberty and equality, as some persons suppose, are chiefly   in it should be eligible, but as soon as he was below it should lose that right. Another sort is,   like these in other particulars, but there the people govern, and not the law: and this takes   is uncertain. When the people possess this power they desire   monarchs in a tyranny: for their manners are the same, and they both hold a despotic power   support they give to each other, the flatterer to the tyrant, the demagogue to the people: and to   opinions they entirely direct; for these are they whom the multitude obey. Besides, those who accuse   in the votes of the people cannot, properly speaking, be a democracy: for their decrees   majority, have no share in it; while all those who are included therein take part in the management   and this chiefly happens when there has been any alteration in the government;   people which I have enumerated must have a share in the government, or some only, and others not;   for these reasons, therefore, this government is a species of democracy. Another species   paid to those who go to the public assemblies. A third species is where every freeman has a right   the poorest people were at leisure to attend to them, as they received wages for so doing; nay,   the different sorts of democracies, and such are the causes which necessarily gave birth to them. affairs, and as they are not powerful enough to govern without law, they will make a law for that   class of democracies. CHAPTER 7  that differ both from oligarchies and free states, wherein not only the rich but also the virtuous   There is also a third, which is, whenever a free state inclines to the dominion of a few.  to place that free state here is, because this, as well as those aristocracies already mentioned,   for this reason that also, as I have said, will be taken into consideration in its proper place. good, there the laws should not be good, but bad; or, on the contrary, that where the government is   being the best relative to the particular state, or the best absolutely. An aristocracy seems most   and this will at the same time show what are the proper boundaries of both these governments,   to be observed in a free state which is composed of both. This, then, is one way in which they may   when a person may properly call the same state a democracy and an oligarchy. It is evident that   in the bringing up of their children, for the rich and poor are brought up in the same manner;   preservation in itself, and not without; and when I say in itself, I do not mean that it should owe   if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate;   others. What has been said will show us why of so many free states some have changed to democracies,   either the rich get the better of the poor, or the poor of the rich, neither of them will establish a   established either democracies or oligarchies, not considering what was serviceable to the state, but   it follows that we should now show what particular form of government is most   now it may happen that quality may exist in one of those parts of which the city is composed,   of family, the number of the poor than that of the rich; but not so that the quantity of the one   and the democracy will be a particular species according to that class of men which may happen   of any other set between these two. But when the rich and the noble prevail more by their quality   to these they should be entrusted; and whenever their number exceeds that of the two others,   the rich and the poor should agree to conspire together against them, for neither of these will   for not attending; with respect to offices, in permitting the poor to swear off, but not granting   those where kingly power was established, were governed by the military. First of all the horse,   and which properly attended to the state must necessarily be happy; and according to the   of goods, and to call the magistrates to account for their behaviour when in office. Now these   to some: to entrust all to all is in the spirit of a democracy, for the people aim at equality.   them execute them by turn, and not altogether, as was done by Tellecles, the Milesian, in his state.   war or peace, and inquiring into the conduct of their magistrates, while the remaining part of the   if they do not attend, so should they reward the poor for coming to the public assemblies:   the common people in the state are very numerous, either not to pay every one for his attendance,   should be referred back again to the magistrates: whereas the contrary takes place in republics;   to serve the public in so numerous a society, where some may be passed over for a long time,   attention of one person, than when that attention is divided amongst many; but in small states it   we find others to succeed them in turn? Small states will sometimes want the same magistrates   how many different offices one might assign to one magistrate. It is also necessary to   and also what things should always come under the cognisance of the same magistrate; as,   the offices of the state are allotted to those who are well educated; in an oligarchy to those   The pre-advisers indeed must always be few for they are peculiar to an oligarchy: and where   business is to control the manners of the boys, or women, or who takes any department similar to   at large of the establishment of magistrates, beginning from first principles. Now, they   family, or virtue, or some other rule (as at Megara, where the right of election was   different methods of electing the magistrates, without blending the two together. Of these there   some by vote, some by lot, others by both: by lot is most correspondent to that form of government.   of a magistrate, what should be his particular province, as the management of the finances or   Of the three parts of which a government is formed, we now come to consider the judicial; and   shall be the whole people, or some particulars; by for what causes I mean, how many different   for murder, and those wherein strangers are the parties, let us particularly treat of those courts   more which is the inequality: thus most states, though they have some notion of what is just, yet   but not when those who are unequal are treated in a different manner correspondent to that   aim after an equality are the cause of seditions. Equality is twofold, either in number or value.   is by proportion as two exceeds one, and three two by the same number-thus by proportion four   that is to say, half. Now, all agree in what is absolutely and simply just; but, as we have   there being in no place a hundred of the first to be met with, but enough of the last everywhere.   unjust, when

    those who are equal are so, that they may be superior. These, then, are the situations   but influencing in a different manner; for profit and honour sharpen men against each other;   for when the magistrates are haughty and endeavour to make greater profits than their office gives   it ought to increase proportion-ably to preserve its symmetry, which would otherwise be destroyed;   it might otherwise be changed into an animal of a different form, if it increase beyond proportion   was turned into a democracy; and at Argos, where so many of the citizens were killed by Cleomenes   Revolutions also sometimes take place in a democracy, though seldomer; for where the   different nations, till their differences are blended together and undistinguishable; for   reason all those republics which have hitherto been originally composed of different people   The Appolloniats, in the Euxine Sea, having admitted their sojourners to the freedom of   seditions in oligarchies because they think themselves ill-used in not sharing the honours   to them. The situation of the place will also sometimes occasion disturbances in the state when   of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions;   greatest consequences when they arise between persons of the first distinction in the state,   for the beginning is said to be half of the business, so that what was then but a little   the other’s having concealed part of the effects, and some money which his father had found, engaged   of great evils, and a war with the Athenians, in which Paches took their city, for Timophanes,   sacred war. The government too of Epidamnus was changed from a quarrel that arose from an intended   great credit by the battle of Mantinea against the Lacedaemonians, endeavoured to dissolve the   a state being powerful, whether private persons, or magistrates, a certain tribe, or any particular   by informing against men of property, they induce them to join together through self-defence, for a   entered into a combination with each other. And at Rhodes the demagogues, by distributing of bribes,   drove out the nobles, till the number of those who were banished was considerable, who, returning,   will endeavour with all their power to make the people superior even to the laws. To prevent this   no share in the administration, which is in the hands of a very few indeed: and this happened at   younger also: for in some places the father and son are never in office at the same time;   of a free state. At Ister it was changed into a democracy; in Heraclea, instead of being in the   as we have just mentioned, if the father was in office, the son could not; or, if there were many   formerly at Erithria, during the oligarchy of the Basilides, although the state flourished greatly   in every oligarchy where the magistrates do not elect themselves, but are chosen out of   AEgina a certain person who brought an action against Chares attempted on that account to alter   power in general was in the hands of a very few out of whom a senate was chosen, consisting but   the army will very often assume the tyranny, as Timophanes did at Corinth; and if they appoint   when the city grows rich, through peace or some other happy cause, it becomes so little that every   and the causes to which they are owing: and indeed both democracies and oligarchies sometimes alter,   CHAPTER 7 Commotions also arise in aristocracies,   an oligarchy; or the contrary, an aristocracy may change into a democracy (for the poor,   please. Thus the city of the Locrians was ruined from an alliance with Dionysius; which state was   fresh alterations that were making, they found that they could do nothing, for the whole form   the Lacedaemonians are a proof; for the one, when conquerors everywhere destroyed the oligarchies;   in governments. CHAPTER 8  we have assigned for their destruction, we know also the means of their preservation;   other. In well-tempered governments it requires as much care as anything whatsoever, that nothing be   false argument; if every part is little, then the whole is little: now, this in one sense is true,   of most consequence amongst them into office; nor disgracing those who are desirous of honour;   state establish a tyranny, as the demagogues in the one, the dynasties in the other, or the   as well as to prevent those who are not already engaged in them from taking a part therein;   prosperity: but if this rule is not observed, let not those honours which were conferred all at once   those seditions which arise from an inequality of condition. But above all, in every state it is   nor even the produce of them, which in some states is done unperceivably. It would be also   expensive public entertainments of plays, music, processions, and the like. In an oligarchy it   the rich in a democracy, to the poor in an oligarchy: but still all the principal offices   constitution; second place, abilities every way completely equal to the business of their office;   than the generality are possessed of, but only that knowledge which is common to all. It may   though they know them and love themselves, so nothing will prevent their serving the public   and thus by setting them at variance with the rich, dividing one city into two; whereas they   if that is by law established; of an oligarchy, if that is; for if there are bad morals in one man,   but so as they may be able to conduct either of these forms of governments. But now the children   hardy with exercise and labour; so that they are both desirous of and able to promote innovations.   the reason of which is, that they define liberty wrong: now, there are two things which seem to be   that is in such a democracy every one may live as he likes; “as his inclination guides,” in the   government, but protection. Thus I have mentioned the causes of corruption in different states,   were established in this manner after the cities were considerably enlarged—others before that   for formerly the people appointed officers for life, who came to be at the head of civil and   according to worth, as either virtue, family, beneficent actions, or these joined with power;   has no regard to the common good, except for his own advantage; his only object is   them of the use of arms: it is also common to them both to persecute the populace, to drive   to govern and those who desire not to be slaves; hence arose Periander’s advice to Thrasybulus to   on them for that purpose: sometimes it is owing to their being deprived of their private fortunes.   who are under the influence of that passion will join in a conspiracy, not for the sake of their   having seen him spinning with his wife, if what is related of him is true, or if not of him,   his death sufficiently glorious. A tyranny also is exposed to the same destruction as all other   for instance, those who raised themselves to the supreme power generally preserved it;   for, falling into an effeminate way of life, they soon grew despicable, and generally fell   admitted upon great occasions: but where many are equal, and there are none in any respect so much   are naturally proper objects of contempt only: another is, that they are insolent while their   Lacedaemonians from their government’s being from the beginning divided into two parts, and   support slavery; and to endeavour to know what every one who is under their power does and says;   is the less chance of its being concealed; and to endeavour that the whole community should mutually   his subjects into his own coffers. A tyrant also should endeavour to engage his subjects in a war,   by his friends, but a tyrant is of all persons the man who can place no confidence in friends,   as these are his enemies, but the others have no design against him. These and such-like are   be comprehended in three divisions, for there are three objects which a tyranny has in view; one   then, are the three objects which the inclinations of tyrants desire to see accomplished; for all   have mutual confidence, power, nor spirit. This, then, is one of the two methods of preserving   supreme power of the state in your own hands. It is also much better for those tyrants who   and not a tyrant; and, moreover., always to seem particularly attentive to the worship of the gods;   more particularly from corporal punishment; which you must be most cautious never to exercise over   when anything affects their property, so are men of honour and principle when they receive any   manner in which a father would correct his son, and not with contempt; and, upon the whole,   but that the tyrant should attach to himself that party which is the most powerful; which, if he   but it was not continual: for Pisistratus himself was twice expelled; so that out of thirty-three   what changes the best and first governments are liable to; for he only assigns the general cause,   to all other forms, and indeed to all other things that exist? and in respect to his assigned time,   and the like in many other cities. It is absurd also to suppose, that a state is   and not because those who are by far richer than their fellow citizens think it unfair   who possess so much-for in many oligarchies it is not allowable to be employed in money-getting,   affairs lose their fortunes, they will endeavour to bring about a revolution; but when others do,   and also the judicial department, and what is best suited to what state;   and to allot to each that mode of conduct which is peculiar to and advantageous for them;   which we have mentioned; for as these are blended together the government is altered,   and also what particular oligarchy to a particular people; and of other states, what is advantageous   the democracy will not only differ in the particular of better or worse, but in this,   Now the foundation of a democratical state is liberty, and people have been accustomed to say   that person is, in his turn, under his also. This also is conducive to that equality which liberty   that all their appointments should be limited to a very short time, or at least as many as possible:   as at Athens, where the people at large judge the magistrates when they come out of office,   to diminish the power; and also elect by lot instead of vote. These things, then, appertain   Both the propositions are unjust; for if we agree with what the few propose we erect a tyranny:   are few, as we have already said. What then that equality is, which both parties will admit, must   four of the rich should join with the remaining five of the poor in opposing it, that party whose   as we have already said, and this also is the most ancient of any. I call that the first which every   see, then, that a democracy may be framed where the majority live by tillage or pasturage; for,   their power with moderation, as there are others to whom full power is delegated to censure their   state that the offices thereof should be filled by the principal persons in it, whose characters   stout in body, and able to continue in the open air all night. The generality of the people of   few citizens can bear, nor is it easy to preserve for any long time, unless well supported by laws   make the people powerful by collecting together as many persons as they could and giving them their   care, and do this no longer than the common people are superior to the nobles and those of the middle   no difficulty in its continuing a few days: they should therefore endeavour to procure its safety   community would not be so ready to condemn those whom they sat in judgment on when they were to get   public revenue, is fatal to the nobles; for the deficiencies therein must be necessarily made up   very extensive jurisdictions, but should continue sitting a few days only, for by this means the   are sufficient revenues, a different conduct ought to be pursued from what the demagogues at present   worthy of a sensible and generous nobility to divide the poor amongst them, and supplying them   from those who are within the latter the ordinary officers of the state ought to be chosen;   for those who are to have the management of public affairs ought always to be chosen out   so the worst-established governments want most looking after. A number of citizens   be easily established: for the safety of the inhabitants depends upon a force of that sort;   Where the troops are chiefly heavy-armed, there an oligarchy, inferior in power to the other,   light-armed and the sailors always contribute to support a democracy: but where the number of these   from these is to form it against itself: but as a city is composed of persons of different ages,   The first thing necessary is to establish proper regulators in the markets; for which purpose a   is one supreme over the rest; these are called proctors, notaries, and the like. Next to these   disagreeable on account of the odium attending it, so that no one will engage therein without it is   for a guard than being qualified to guard others. This, therefore, ought by no means   necessary for war; whose business it is, both in war and peace, to defend the walls and the gates,   more officers, sometimes fewer: thus in little cities there is only one whom they call either   according to their different divisions; all of which join together to make one military body:   will also be equally uncertain what government is best: for, provided no unexpected accidents   happily according to their circumstances; he ought, therefore, first to know what manner   what is good, relative to man, may be divided into three sorts, what is external, what appertains to   but was afraid of the flies that flew round him: nor would abstain from the meanest theft if he   that these external goods produce not virtue, but virtue them. As to a happy life, whether it is to   as the subjects themselves, of which we allow they are accidents, differ from each other in value;   account that wise men should desire them, not the soul for them. Let us therefore be well assured,   to their dictates; since for this we have the example of GOD Himself, who is completely happy,   Thus much by way of introduction; for I could not but just touch upon this subject, though I could   life of virtue, accompanied with those enjoyments which virtue usually procures. If there are any   different: but this also is evident; for whosoever supposes that riches will make a person happy,   consideration, one of which is, whether it is the most eligible life to be a member   on the pleasures and tranquillity of life. Others hold the quite contrary opinion, and think that a   to conquer and govern. It is evident, both from the laws of the Lacedaemonians and Cretans, as   also a law in Macedonia, that a man who had not himself killed an enemy should be obliged to wear   this sort prevail, some of them established by law, others by custom. Probably it may seem too   whether it is the business of a legislator to be able to point out by what means a state may   either to the politician or legislator which is unlawful? for that cannot be lawful which is done   Now a city which is well governed might be very happy in itself while it enjoyed a good system of   legislator to examine carefully into his state; and the nature of the people, and how they may   or what good offices he shall show them. But what should be the final end of the best governments   supreme power over others, without they were by nature as superior to them as a man to a woman,   what was introductory to this subject, and considered at large the nature of other states,   is necessary. Many things therefore ought to be forethought of as desirable, but none of them such   certain good order: but too large a multitude are incapable of this, unless under the government of   if they are neither too little nor too big, have their proper powers; but when they have not their   furlongs length, but when it is of a fit size; for either from its smallness or from its largeness it   bounds; but what is its proper limit experience will easily show, and this experience is to be   then, that the best boundary for a city is that wherein the numbers are the greatest possible,   a different system of government is disserviceable to the state, as well by impeding the laws as by   not too far off, but are surrounded by walls and such-like fortifications, it is evident,   as we now see happens to some states, as in Heraclea, where they man many triremes,   We now proceed to point out what natural disposition the members of the community ought   of all others the most celebrated, and also the other different nations of this habitable world.   understanding and the arts: therefore they are very tenacious of their liberty; but,   for that is the faculty of the soul which we most admire: as a proof of this, our resentment   the objects of the senses as in those which are inquired into by the understanding only.  or unequally, as, for instance, food, land, or the like; but when one thing is for the benefit of one   city must of necessity inhere in it: and this we shall plainly understand, if we know the number of   instruments are necessary in life: thirdly, arms, for it is necessary that the community should have   who might refuse obedience to it, and also to defend it from those who might attempt to attack   Having determined thus far, it remains that we consider whether all these different employments   artificers, judges, or counsellors; or shall we appoint different persons to each of those   and others of course common to all? but this does not take place in every state,   for in democracies the whole community partakes of everything, but in oligarchies it is different. happiness without virtue; it follows, that in the best-governed states, where the citizens are   or shall the same person execute both? This question, too, is easily answered:   evident, that it is impossible to oblige those who have arms in their hands, and can insist on   for it is necessary that the citizens should be rich, and these are the men proper for citizens;   those who are in years. We have now shown what is necessary to the existence of a city, and of what   one party neglects the inroads of the enemy on the borders, the other makes it a matter of too   of the individual belong to that individual, and those who are to cultivate the public territory   sea and the continent as much as possible. There are these four things which we should   and rivers near at hand: but if those cannot be found, very large cisterns must be prepared to   to be attended to is, that the city should have a good situation and a good position; the second is,   it; and this influence is what the air and water naturally have: for which reason in all wise   good, and if there is not a plenty of necessary water, that which is to drink should be separated   proposed to besiege them. A city therefore should have both these sorts of buildings,   facts. It is indeed disreputable for those who are equal, or nearly so, to the enemy, to endeavour to   if it had or as if it had not; but where it has not they cannot do this. If this is true, it is   As the citizens in general are to eat at public tables in certain companies, and it is   and the hall for the public tables of the chief magistrates, they ought to be built   or some public way, I mean the square where things are bought and sold; for I intended   have directed here should be observed also in the country; for there also their magistrates such as   perfection of everything depend, one of these is, that the object and end proposed should be proper;   means in our power, but the end may be bad, and sometimes we may mistake in both; as in the art   but do not rightly apply them. Since we propose to inquire what government is best, namely, that   is good and fair in itself: of the first sort are just punishments, and restraints in a just cause;   treatise on Morals, that he is a man of worth who considers what is good because it is virtuous as   should be ready at hand and others procured by the legislator; for which reason in founding a   for then it would follow, that what might be done by one might be done by all. Men are worthy and   custom; but man lives according to reason also, which he alone is endowed with; wherefore he ought   others by hearing them. CHAPTER 14  laying down the selfsame thing when she has made some young, others old: the first of whom it   adopt the division I have already given; for the inferior is always for the sake of the superior;   nature ought always to be chosen by those who have it in their power; for that is always most   therefore, who composes a body of laws ought to extend his views to everything;   appear not to have framed their polity with a view to the best end, or to every virtue,   the Lacedaemonian state, show they approve of the intention of the legislator in making war   argument, and has already been proved by facts (but as the generality of men desire to have an   like a sword, they lose their brightness: the fault of which lies in the legislator,   not differ from others in their opinion concerning the supreme good, but in imagining this good   acquired is now to be considered. We have already assigned three causes on which it will depend;   intelligence spring up as they grow to maturity. The body, therefore, necessarily demands our care   that the bodies of the children are as perfect as possible, his first attention ought to be given   his equal in age, and also from the disputes it occasions in the economy of the family. But,   and moreover with respect to the succession of the children, if they have them at the time which may   slightly mention a few particulars. Now, there is no occasion that any one should have the habit of   that their diet is not too sparing, and that they use sufficient exercise; which it will be easy for   or four or five more, the children may be equally perfect; but when the parents are   a thing after the marriage is consummated, let his infamy be as great as his guilt deserves.  natural to their age are very serviceable; and to prevent any of their limbs from being crooked,   may not be distorted. It is also useful to enure them to the cold when they are very little;   but to do it by degrees: besides, boys have naturally a habit of loving the cold, on account   the next age to this continues till the child is five years old; during which time it is best to   quarrels, for they contribute to increase their growth—as they are a sort of exercise to the body:   which happens to boys in their disputes. The preceptors also ought to have an eye upon   should be educated at home. It is also very proper to banish, both from their hearing and sight,   common meals, let him be punished by disgrace and stripes; but if a person above that age does so,   bad, more particularly whatsoever is loose and offensive to good manners. When five years are   for every art and every instruction is intended to complete what nature has left defective: we   which is the general practice in most cities; in the third place, what it ought to be. where it is neglected it is hurtful to the city, for every state ought to be governed according to   for there are doubts concerning the business of it, as all people do not agree in those things   CHAPTER 3 There are four things which it is usual   learning and this instruction centres in their acquisition: but the learning and instruction   for instance, to learn to read, but also as the means of acquiring other different sorts   bodies and teach them their exercises. CHAPTER 4  others in Asia, some of whom are as bad, others worse than these, who indeed live by tyranny,   those painful labours, and were superior to all others (though now they are inferior to many,   but rather a good man. So that those who permit boys to engage too earnestly in these exercises,   as reason evinces, good for nothing. Nor should we form our judgments from past events, but from   it proper to permit boys at their age to enjoy perfect leisure; for to cease to improve is by   play, and being shown its beauties by them; for of necessity those must be better skilled therein   account themselves learn it, and not reap every advantage of regulating the passions or forming   professors of these arts as mean people, and say that no one would practise them but a drunkard or   justly admitted into every company and every happy life, as having the power of inspiring   but serve also as relaxations; and, as men are but rarely in the attainment of that final end,   persons who make play and amusement their end, and probably that end has some pleasure annexed to it,   any one may easily perceive. That music should be pursued, not on this account only, but also   strongly agitates the disposition. Besides, all those who hear any imitations sympathise   it is evident that the sight of the original from whence it was taken would also be pleasing;   some act more violently, others more liberally. From what has been said it is evident what an   would qualify any one in any art, for the person himself to learn the practical part of it; for   to prevent their breaking those things which are about the house; for at their age they   age, or to answer the objections which some make to this employment as mean and low. In the first   should be instructed in this art, and what music and what rhythms they should be acquainted with;   all animals feel, and also slaves and boys, but more. It is therefore plain what instruments they   quite contrary to what education requires; as the player on the flute is prevented from speaking:   importunity); therefore we think the practice of it unfit for freemen; but then it should be   inquiry concerning harmony and rhythm; whether all sorts of these are to be employed in education,   naturally corresponds therewith: and we say that music should not be applied to one purpose only,   present without any explanation, but shall speak more at large of it in my Poetics); and, in the   the mind. It is evident that all harmonies are to be used; but not for all purposes; but the most   and yet we see those persons, by the application of sacred music to soothe their mind, rendered as   for the Phrygian music has the same power in harmony as the flute has amongst the instruments;   and those who are conversant in studies of this sort bring many proofs of it; as, for instance,   that the Doric music is most serious, and fittest to inspire courage: and, as we always commend  

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Stoicism: Aligning Actions with Goals for a Purposeful Life

    Stoicism: Aligning Actions with Goals for a Purposeful Life

    The provided text explores the principles of Stoicism and their application to modern life. It focuses on cultivating inner peace and resilience by managing emotions, expectations, and self-perception. The document emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, purpose, and aligning actions with values to achieve a fulfilling life. It provides practical guidance on overcoming anger, insecurity, and the fear of judgment and promotes practices like mindfulness, goal setting, and embracing discomfort for personal growth.

    Stoicism: A Study Guide

    Quiz

    Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each.

    1. According to Stoicism, where does disappointment originate?
    2. How does anger relate to the ego, according to the source material?
    3. What is the Stoic perspective on forgiveness and its impact on anger?
    4. How does low self-esteem contribute to anger?
    5. Why is living with purpose crucial for managing emotions, according to Stoics?
    6. How can cultivating gratitude help diminish anger?
    7. What is the importance of setting healthy boundaries, and what does it protect?
    8. Why is it essential to separate facts from beliefs, and what can happen if we do not?
    9. Explain how Stoics can develop a healthy self-image that is not reliant on the opinions of others.
    10. Explain the Stoic process described as “Rin” for managing anger, and what each letter stands for.

    Quiz Answer Key

    1. Disappointment does not come from life itself, but from our resistance to accepting life’s unexpected turns and the rigid expectations we impose on it. By relinquishing these expectations, we open ourselves to greater peace and reduce our susceptibility to disappointment.
    2. Anger arises from a wounded ego that feels threatened when disrespected or not valued by others, demanding recognition and defending its image. However, according to Stoics, anger stems from our interpretation of others’ actions and the stories our ego tells us about them.
    3. Forgiveness is seen as an act of self-love that frees us from the mental prison of anger and resentment, allowing us to move forward without reliving past pain. It isn’t about condoning the actions of others, but rather about liberating oneself from the need to continue suffering.
    4. Low self-esteem makes us interpret reality in a distorted way, causing us to perceive others as constantly judging us and any negative comment as a threat. This insecurity triggers anger as a defensive reaction to protect our self-image.
    5. Having a clear purpose in life provides direction and meaning, reducing irritability and reactivity by giving individuals something greater to focus on beyond minor frustrations. When life has purpose, peace becomes a natural state.
    6. Cultivating gratitude allows us to focus on what we already possess, shifting our perspective from what we lack to what we have and what we love, diminishing anger by showing that life is good despite setbacks. The secret to happiness, according to Epicetus, is not in having more but in wanting less.
    7. Setting healthy boundaries is crucial for defining how others treat us and protecting our time, energy, and patience, which prevents frustration and emotional drainage. It’s not about being confrontational or rejecting people, but about valuing yourself enough not to allow disrespect.
    8. Separating facts from beliefs is essential to avoid unnecessary emotional suffering, which arises from interpreting events based on stories and perceptions rather than objective reality. When we fail to make this distinction, we become entangled in unnecessary negative emotions like anger, sadness, and fear.
    9. According to Stoics, developing a healthy self-image involves grounding one’s perception of oneself in self-knowledge and acceptance, rather than relying on external validation. By understanding their strengths, flaws, and values, individuals can define who they are without needing others’ approval.
    10. The RIN process is a method for managing anger effectively and without impulsivity: Recognize that anger is happening, Immerse yourself in the feelings (but do not act), Navigate (investigate) the root of the anger, and Nurture the part of you that needs healing.

    Essay Questions

    1. Discuss the Stoic view on expectations and how relinquishing them can lead to a more fulfilling and peaceful life. Use examples from the text to support your arguments.
    2. Explore the relationship between ego and anger as presented in the source material. How does the Stoic philosophy offer a way to manage anger by addressing the ego?
    3. Analyze the role of forgiveness in Stoicism as a means to overcome anger and achieve inner peace. How does forgiveness benefit the individual, and why is it considered an act of self-love?
    4. Examine the importance of self-esteem in the Stoic approach to managing anger. How does improving self-esteem affect one’s susceptibility to external provocations?
    5. Evaluate the Stoic perspective on living with purpose. How does having a defined purpose contribute to emotional stability, and how can one identify and cultivate their purpose?

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • Acceptance: Acknowledging and embracing reality as it is, without resistance or the demand for it to be different.
    • Anger: An emotion arising from a perceived threat or injustice, often linked to a wounded ego or unmet expectations.
    • Boundaries: Limits set to protect one’s time, energy, and emotional well-being in relationships and interactions with others.
    • Ego: The part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for a sense of self-identity.
    • Expectations: Rigid beliefs or anticipations about how people or events should behave or unfold.
    • Facts vs. Beliefs: Objective truths contrasted with subjective interpretations or stories we create about events.
    • Forgiveness: The act of releasing resentment and anger toward someone who has caused harm, benefiting the forgiver by freeing them from emotional burden.
    • Gratitude: Acknowledging and appreciating the positive aspects of one’s life, focusing on what one has rather than what is lacking.
    • Healthy Self-Image: A positive and realistic perception of oneself, based on self-knowledge and acceptance rather than external validation.
    • Inner Peace: A state of calmness and tranquility within oneself, undisturbed by external events or opinions.
    • Living with Purpose: Having a clear and meaningful direction in life, aligned with one’s values and contributing to a sense of fulfillment.
    • Resentment: A feeling of bitterness or indignation at having been treated unfairly.
    • Self-Esteem: Confidence in one’s own worth or abilities.
    • Stoicism: An ancient philosophy emphasizing virtue, reason, and acceptance of what one cannot control as paths to happiness and inner peace.

    Stoic Principles for a Fulfilling Life

    Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided text excerpts, emphasizing actionable insights and Stoic principles:

    Briefing Document: Stoic Principles for a Fulfilling Life

    Document Goal: To synthesize key Stoic principles from the provided text, offering practical advice for managing emotions, finding purpose, and living a more fulfilling life.

    Main Themes:

    • Managing Expectations and Accepting Reality:
    • The world owes you nothing; focus on your reactions to external events.
    • Resisting reality leads to suffering; acceptance brings peace.
    • Disappointment stems from rigid expectations, not life itself.
    • Stoics understand change is constant, thus avoid being dictated by external factors.
    • Controlling Anger and the Role of the Ego:
    • Anger is a reflection of a wounded ego demanding recognition.
    • Challenge your interpretation of others’ actions; don’t take everything personally.
    • The key to controlling anger is recognizing the ego’s role.
    • True strength lies in not resembling those who hurt you.
    • Inner peace is achieved by controlling your reaction to events, not controlling others.
    • The Power of Forgiveness:
    • Forgiveness frees you from the burden of anger and resentment.
    • Forgiveness is an act of self-love, not a gift to the offender.
    • Holding grudges prolongs the offender’s control over you.
    • The best revenge is not to be like the person who hurt you.
    • Building Self-Esteem and Reducing Reactivity:
    • Anger is often a defense mechanism against insecurity.
    • Low self-esteem distorts reality, making you believe others are constantly judging you.
    • Improve self-esteem to become less reactive and more serene.
    • True strength lies in governing yourself, not imposing your will on others.
    • Living with Purpose:
    • A lack of purpose leads to emptiness, frustration, and irritability.
    • Having a purpose aligned with your values brings peace of mind.
    • Define your own purpose; don’t wait for life to hand it to you.
    • With purpose, obstacles become part of the journey, not sources of anger.
    • The Importance of Gratitude:
    • Cultivating gratitude reduces anger by shifting focus to what you have.
    • Happiness is not about having more but wanting less.
    • Setting Healthy Boundaries:
    • Without boundaries, others will dictate how they treat you.
    • Setting limits is an act of self-respect, not rejection.
    • Saying “no” without guilt is a valuable skill.
    • Protect your peace by setting limits.
    • Focusing Your Attention Wisely:
    • Not everything deserves your attention; filter out the inconsequential.
    • Tranquility comes from ignoring what doesn’t concern you.
    • Don’t be a slave to other people’s opinions.
    • Strength is in choosing which battles are worth fighting.
    • Distinguishing Facts from Beliefs:
    • Suffering often stems from our beliefs about events, not the events themselves.
    • Question your limiting beliefs; they may not be true.
    • Separate facts from interpretations to regain control and clarity.
    • Developing a Healthy Self-Image:
    • Your self-image should not depend on others’ opinions.
    • True strength comes from looking inward and defining yourself.
    • Self-acceptance means recognizing your value without depending on external factors.
    • Avoiding the False Binary of Good and Evil:
    • No one is wholly good or evil; everyone is a blend of qualities.
    • Reducing people to labels blinds you to their humanity.
    • See others as flawed human beings shaped by their experiences.
    • Managing Anger with the RINN Process:
    • Recognize the anger.
    • Immerse but do not act.
    • Navigate/Investigate the root cause.
    • Nurture the part of yourself that needs healing.
    • Transforming Loneliness and Sadness:
    • Loneliness is an opportunity for self-knowledge.
    • Eliminate unrealistic expectations to minimize disappointment.
    • Change your perspective on pain; see it as a teacher.
    • Find peace in simplicity.
    • Embrace the power of gratitude.
    • Focus on what you can control.
    • Breaking Free from External Approval:
    • Measure yourself with actions instead of needing to showcase your worth.
    • Hope in Dark Times:
    • Stoicism isn’t pessimistic, it provides hope during adversity.
    • Unshakeable Inner Freedom:
    • Our mind can govern what happens externally.
    • Accepting the Impermanence of Everything:
    • Everything changes; detach to avoid suffering.
    • Getting Used to Internal Silence:
    • Mastering your mind calms the mental chaos and maintains peace.
    • Developing Active Detachment:
    • Enjoy life without needing what surrounds you for your happiness.
    • Focusing Only on What you Can Control:
    • Direct energy towards your thoughts, actions, and responses.
    • Practicing Tolerating Uncertainty:
    • Trust that you can adapt to whatever comes your way.
    • Being the Guardian of Your Emotions:
    • React to emotions consciously and use them as a shield.
    • Accepting Pain as Part of Growth:
    • It is up to us to use what hurts us to strengthen our character.
    • Challenging Your Fears with Reasoning:
    • Fear does not have to dictate your decisions; we always have the power to choose how to react to adversity.
    • Cultivating a Serene and Impenetrable Mind:
    • With an unbreakable mind, one can find opportunity in every moment.
    • Focus on Yourself to Reduce Distractions:
    • Self-mastery can help you take control of your life.
    • Let Actions Speak for Themselves:
    • Social pressures should not alter progress on tangible and inspirational efforts.
    • Learning to Say No to What Does Not serve You:
    • Protect energy and time by not letting it get exhausted by demands that only take away.
    • Letting Go Opens the Door to New Opportunities:
    • Trust this process to get you to where you want to be.
    • Arrival is Not The End of The Journey:
    • New challenges and constant growth is what should be sought after in all of life’s trials and triumphs.
    • Purpose is The Engine of Life:
    • Without a purpose, one is like a rudderless ship; swayed by all forces.
    • Value Time as a Limited Resource:
    • Prioritize your time in order to focus on meaningful objectives.
    • Build Habits In Line With Your Goals:
    • Consistently work to better yourself in aspects that benefit you.
    • Design Your Destiny in Five Years:
    • Always remember that all actions you take contribute to what will come and all actions have a result.
    • Mentalize Your Growth:
    • Reframing failures as a chance to learn is an opportune way to adapt your mind in times of adversity.
    • Set Clear and Realistic Goals:
    • Having smaller, tangible goals can create motivation and momentum.

    Key Quotes:

    • “We should accept what happens as if we had chosen it because resisting it only generates suffering.”
    • “Anger is nothing more than a reflection of the wounded ego.”
    • “The best revenge is not to resemble the person who has hurt us.”
    • “…true strength lies not in imposing our will on others but in governing ourselves.”
    • “The secret of happiness is not in having more but in wanting less.”
    • “Tranquility comes when we ignore what does not concern us.”
    • “It’s not external events that bother us but our interpretations of them.”
    • “…true strength comes from looking Inward and defining who you are without expecting external validation…”
    • “We should not judge people solely by their actions but recognize that each acts according to their current understanding.”
    • “Tranquility comes when we ignore what does not concern us”
    • “Each step forward proves your determination and effort no words required”
    • “…our ability to keep hope alive can guide us through storms helping us find the inner strength that remains after the rain the sun eventually shines.”
    • “By embracing impermanence you not only become emotionally stronger but also cultivate a deep inner peace free from the fear of loss or future pain.”
    • “…when you focus on what you can control you find a genuine sense of power”
    • “…stoicism teaches that such fear is unnecessary and that we can learn to embrace uncertainty instead of letting the unknown paralyze you trust in your ability to adapt to whatever comes you do not need to know all the details…”
    • “Stoicism teachers that to be human is not to be enslaved by emotions being the guardian of your emotions means recognizing and accepting them without letting them rule you…”
    • “Each time you face pain whether physical or emotional you have the choice to let it weaken you or to use it to strengthen your character this choice is essential for resilience”
    • “The most paralyzing fears are those you haven’t examined. Once identified, break them down, ask what evidence supports this fear what’s the worst case scenario, and How likely is it…”

    Actionable Insights:

    • Practice Daily Reflection: Use journaling or meditation to examine your thoughts and actions.
    • Identify and Challenge Limiting Beliefs: Question negative self-talk and replace it with more realistic and positive affirmations.
    • Set Clear, Value-Driven Goals: Define your purpose and create specific, achievable steps to move towards it.
    • Embrace Discomfort: View challenges as opportunities for growth and self-improvement.
    • Focus on What You Can Control: Release the need to control external events or other people’s behavior.
    • Practice Gratitude: Regularly acknowledge the good things in your life to counter negativity.
    • Set Boundaries: Protect your time and energy by saying “no” to commitments that don’t align with your values.
    • Forgive Others (and Yourself): Let go of resentment and anger to free yourself from their burden.

    Conclusion:

    These Stoic principles offer a practical roadmap for cultivating inner peace, resilience, and purpose. By focusing on what you can control – your thoughts, actions, and reactions – and accepting what you cannot, you can live a more meaningful and fulfilling life, even in the face of adversity. The excerpt provides a compelling framework for moving beyond reactivity and embracing a more intentional and virtuous existence.

    Stoic Strategies: Managing Anger, Expectations, and Self-Esteem

    FAQ

    1. What is the Stoic view on expectations, and how can managing them lead to greater peace of mind?

    Stoicism emphasizes that the world owes us nothing and we can only control our reactions, not external events or others’ behavior. By accepting that people can fail us and life doesn’t always follow a predictable path, we reduce stress and frustration. Accepting reality doesn’t mean abandoning goals, but being prepared for any outcome, striving without clinging to rigid expectations. Disappointment stems from resisting life’s unexpected turns. Peace is found in flexibility and accepting what comes without resistance.

    2. How does the concept of the “wounded ego” relate to anger, and how can we diminish anger’s power over us?

    Anger is a reflection of a threatened ego, arising from our interpretation of others’ actions, not the actions themselves. Our ego demands recognition, takes offense, and defends its image, leading to anger when it feels disrespected or devalued. To diminish anger, we must reduce the ego’s influence by not taking things so personally and understanding that others’ behavior is their burden, not ours. By improving self-esteem and detaching from others’ opinions, we become immune to provocations and react intelligently rather than emotionally.

    3. What does forgiveness mean in a Stoic context, and why is it important for inner peace?

    Forgiveness, in Stoicism, is not about justifying or forgetting harmful actions, but about freeing ourselves from the need to continue suffering. It’s an act of self-love, essential for recovering peace of mind. Clinging to anger traps us in a mental prison, reliving the pain. Forgiveness opens the cell, allowing us to move forward. By forgiving, we cease to give power to those who hurt us and reclaim control over our emotions.

    4. How does low self-esteem contribute to anger, and what can we do to improve our self-image and reduce reactive anger?

    Low self-esteem creates a perception of vulnerability, making us feel constantly judged and threatened. Any negative comment reinforces this belief, leading to anger as a defense mechanism. To improve self-image, we must recognize that no one has the power to make us feel inferior unless we grant it to them. By building a solid self-image, external opinions lose their power. Anger signals unresolved internal issues; we can use these moments to identify areas for improvement.

    5. What is the importance of living with purpose, and how does a defined purpose contribute to peace of mind?

    A clear purpose gives life meaning and direction, motivating us beyond routine. Without purpose, life feels empty and chaotic, leading to frustration and reactivity. Stoics understood that having a purpose aligned with our values is key to peace of mind. With a purpose, minor irritations lose importance as our energy is focused on something greater. We define, not find, our purpose, taking action to create something that makes us feel alive.

    6. According to Stoicism, how does focusing on gratitude and love help to manage anger?

    Anger often arises from focusing on injustice, what we lack, or what upsets us. Stoicism suggests shifting our focus to what we have, what we love, and what we are grateful for. Cultivating gratitude helps us realize we already have enough, reducing the need to react angrily to setbacks. While we can’t control external events, we can choose which emotions to feed our minds, and love and gratitude leave no space for anger to grow.

    7. What is the Stoic perspective on setting healthy boundaries, and why is it essential for emotional well-being?

    Setting boundaries defines how far our patience, time, and energy can go, preventing others from deciding how to treat us. Lack of boundaries sends the message that disrespect is acceptable, breeding frustration and anger. Setting limits is not about rejection but self-respect. When a line is crossed and we do nothing, we reinforce that behavior. Calmly and firmly communicating our boundaries sends a clear message that we value ourselves. Learning to say no without guilt is a valuable skill that protects our peace.

    8. What are the key steps in the “Ritten Process” for managing anger, as outlined in the sources?

    The Ritten Process for managing anger involves:

    • Recognize: Acknowledge the feeling of anger without denial.
    • Immerse: Allow anger to be present without acting on it, creating separation between you and the emotion.
    • Navigate: Investigate the root of the anger to understand its true source, which is often fear, insecurity, or unmet expectations.
    • Nurture: Nurture the part of yourself that needs healing instead of punishing yourself, practicing self-compassion and addressing underlying issues.

    Stoic Philosophy: The Destructive Nature of Anger

    The destructive nature of anger is a central theme within Stoic philosophy. Here’s a breakdown of why anger is considered destructive:

    • Harms the individual Anger corrodes from within, weakening the mind and leading to regrettable decisions. It can cloud mental clarity, harm relationships, and negatively impact well-being. Science has confirmed that anger raises blood pressure, weakens the immune system, and can trigger cardiovascular problems.
    • Impairs Rationality When anger takes control, rationality diminishes and people become slaves to their impulses.
    • Damages Relationships Outbursts of anger and impulsive comments can destroy relationships that took years to build, leaving lasting wounds.
    • Disproportionate Reactions Angry reactions are often disproportionate and lack logic. In the heat of the moment, harsh words may seem necessary, but with hindsight, a wiser approach is often evident.
    • Internal Enemy Anger is described as an internal enemy that can consume a person if not tamed.
    • Weakness Experiencing anger is not a sign of strength, but proof of lost self-control.
    • Cycle of Resentment Instead of seeking solutions, anger can lead to seeking revenge, which only feeds a cycle of resentment and pain.
    • Momentary Delirium Anger is like a momentary delirium, a state in which one loses control of words and actions.
    • Reflection of Wounded Ego Anger arises from the interpretation of others’ actions and a threatened sense of identity. The ego demands recognition and takes offense when it doesn’t receive the treatment it believes it deserves.
    • Prevents Moving Forward Clinging to anger locks a person in a mental prison and prevents them from moving forward.
    • Loss of Control When acting in anger, one is not in control of their own actions.
    • Drains Energy Anger consumes and wears a person down, leading to a loss of control.
    • A Habit Anger is a habit that grows stronger if fed.
    • Rooted in Insecurity Anger often reflects insecurity; when someone is not at peace with themselves, any challenge to their self-image can trigger anger.
    • Hindrance to Purpose When life lacks a clear purpose, people can become irritable and reactive, with any inconvenience feeling significant.

    The Root of Negative Emotions: Managing Expectations and Reality

    Negative emotions such as frustration, anger, sadness, and resentment share a common root in the difference between reality and expectations. People often believe the world should behave in a certain way, and when it doesn’t, they feel let down.

    Key points on unfulfilled expectations:

    • Source of suffering The frustration doesn’t come from the event itself, but from the clash between what was wanted and what really happened. Seneca stated that suffering occurs more in imagination than in reality because what hurts most is the interpretation of events, not the events themselves.
    • Distorted image Negative emotions arise from a distorted image created in the mind, clinging to an illusion.
    • The world owes nothing The key to inner peace involves understanding that the world owes nothing. It is not about resignation but about understanding that we cannot control the behavior of others or external events, only our reaction to them.
    • Acceptance Accepting reality as it is does not mean giving up goals or desires; it means being prepared for any outcome.
    • Unexpected turns Disappointment comes from resistance to accepting life’s unexpected turns. A Stoic understands that everything changes, that nothing is guaranteed, and that is why they do not allow their emotions to be dictated by external factors.
    • Adaptability Peace is found in flexibility and in the ability to accept whatever comes without resistance. Happiness lies not in making everything fit expectations but in learning to flow with reality without letting it rob peace of mind.
    • Learning Instead of getting frustrated when something doesn’t go well, consider what can be learned. Instead of feeling betrayed, understand that people act according to their own nature, not the one imagined for them.
    • Eliminating Rigid Expectations Eliminating rigid expectations stops the demand that the world adapt to beliefs.
    • Expectations about other people If rigid expectations are eliminated, there is no longer a need to expect people to treat you in a certain way. You accept that they can fail you, and life does not follow a predictable order; you eliminate a large part of your stress and frustration.

    Fragile Self-Confidence: Destructive Emotional Responses

    Fragile self-confidence can lead to destructive emotional responses. Here’s how:

    • Defensive Reactions When confidence is fragile, any setback can shake one’s foundation, leading to defensive reactions, including anger, as a defense mechanism.
    • Perception of Vulnerability Insecurity fosters a sense of vulnerability, causing someone to constantly protect their image, fearing judgment and perceiving negative comments as threats.
    • Personal Attacks The mind interprets situations as personal attacks and responds aggressively.
    • External Validation A fragile self-image relies on external validation. Criticism can be devastating, and praise becomes essential for feeling worthy.
    • Distorted Reality Low self-esteem distorts reality, leading someone to believe others are constantly judging them. The problem is not the outside world but the way it’s perceived.
    • Inability to Handle Provocations When self-confidence is weak, there is a need to respond or defend against provocations.
    • Belief in Negative Comments Negative comments can lead to believing negative things about one’s self.
    • Dependence on Approval When perception of self is built on a need for external approval, instability arises. One day praise leads to feeling invincible, and the next day, criticism leads to collapse.
    • Inauthentic Living Living by the world’s expectations creates disconnection from who someone truly is. Decisions are not based on personal desire but on what might win approval.
    • Comparison to Others Leads to dissatisfaction because the reality of others is unknown.
    • Unrealistic Expectations Creates an environment in which someone expects the world to accommodate their desires.

    Living with Purpose: Finding Meaning and Reducing Irritability

    Living with purpose is essential for peace of mind and can change how one perceives challenges. Here’s how:

    • Direction and Meaning When there is a clear purpose, life feels meaningful, providing a reason to get going each day.
    • Reduced Irritability Lack of purpose can lead to frustration and irritability, with inconveniences feeling larger than they are.
    • Values Alignment Purpose should align with one’s values, making existence feel meaningful.
    • Focus With a purpose, irritations lose importance as attention is directed toward something greater.
    • Defined Purpose Purpose is not found, but defined, created through action and seeking what makes one feel alive.
    • Reduced Frustration When you work towards your purpose, frustration decreases because there is less worry about what cannot be controlled.
    • Opportunity Living with purpose transforms life from a series of problems into an opportunity.
    • Internal Satisfaction There is no need for external validation when you know what must be done, leading to feelings of satisfaction.
    • Finding Your Purpose To find your purpose, identify talents, passions, and what truly motivates.
    • Unique Role Everyone has a unique role and something only they can contribute.
    • Constant Growth Purpose helps those who embrace it to focus on constant growth.
    • Foundation Focusing on self-improvement builds a foundation that keeps you grounded when your surroundings get chaotic.
    • Action True virtue lies not in intention but in action.
    • Not a Final Destination Life isn’t about arriving at a final destination, it’s about continually pushing onward, learning, and tackling new challenges.
    • Shield Against Despair Having a purpose can act as a shield against despair.
    • Guide Through Storms Even in the bleakest moments, our ability to keep hope alive can guide us through storms.
    • Constant Reminder Hope becomes your companion, a constant reminder that rebirth and transformation are always possible.

    Stoicism: Facts vs. Beliefs for Peace of Mind

    Separating facts from beliefs is vital for maintaining peace of mind. Stoicism emphasizes that suffering often arises not from what happens, but from interpretations and stories people tell themselves.

    Key aspects of differentiating between facts and beliefs:

    • Trapped in interpretations A failure to distinguish facts from interpretations leads to being caught up in unnecessary emotions like anger, sadness, and fear, reacting to something that may not be real.
    • Objective reality versus perception Without the distinction between objective fact and perception of that fact, people become entangled in unnecessary emotions.
    • Subjective interpretations The human mind excels at creating stories, which are then treated as irrefutable truths, even though they often stem from past experiences, others’ words, or mistakes from which permanent labels are drawn.
    • Challenge limiting beliefs To achieve emotional freedom, it’s essential to recognize that beliefs are not absolute facts. Whenever a limiting belief is sensed, questioning it and replacing it with a more realistic version is essential.
    • Example of criticism If someone is called “useless,” the comment itself doesn’t cause the hurt, but the decision to believe it does.
    • Opportunity for improvement or personal attack Criticism can be interpreted as an opportunity to improve or as a personal attack.
    • Mental self-discipline Mental self-discipline is required to examine thoughts and filter out what deserves attention.
    • Assumptions Many assumptions about the ability to reach a goal or overcome a problem are based on the belief that one cannot adapt, learn, or persevere.
    • The Power of Choice Even though we cannot control external circumstances we can always control our interpretation of them.
    • Reality Check Ask for evidence to determine if a thought is really true or if it has been accepted without proof.
    • Stoic Questioning Ask if you are exaggerating.
    • Release The objective fact is that someone said some words. If we pause to see if it’s true, we can start letting it go.
    HOW TO NEVER GET ANGRY OR BOTHERED WITH ANYONE | 15 LESSONS OF STOICISM

    The Original Text

    imagine living in unshakable peace where nothing and nobody has the power to upset you where criticism insults and problems no longer rob you of your calm it sounds impossible doesn’t it but the stoics achieved it while the world reacted with anger and frustration they remained Serene not because they felt no emotions but because they had learned to control them I am going to reveal to you how you can do the same if you apply these teachings you will never again get angry or annoyed with anyone not because the world changes but because you will have changed before we start go to the comments and write today my best version begins I am a stoic with this you commit to taking control of your mind and living with discipline write it down now and let’s get started issue one the destructive nature of anger anger is one of the most destructive emotions a human being can experience not only does it harm those around us but it also corrodes us from within weakening our minds and dragging us toward decisions we will sooner or later regret the stoics considered it one of the greatest threats to Virtue because when anger takes control we cease to be rational and become slaves to our impulses it is not a sign of strength but of weakness proof that we’ve lost control of ourselves anger is like an uncontrollable fire it starts with a spark perhaps a misinterpreted word an action we consider unfair or an unexpected obstacle if we give it oxygen with ruminating thoughts it quickly grows into a blaze that devastates our mental Clarity our relationships and our well-being Marcus Aurelius warned that the best way to fight anger is to prevent it from arising in the first place if we learn to recognize its first signs we can extinguish it before it consumes us completely the consequences of anger are devastating not only does it cause unnecessary conflict but it also affects our health science confirms what the stoics already knew anger raises blood pressure weakens the immune system and can trigger cardiovascular problems it is not just a momentary emotion it is a poison that if allowed to grow destroys both body and mind epic tetus taught that it is not external circumstances that disturb us but our interpretation of them if someone insults us it is it is not the insult that harms us but the importance we give to it learning to control our perception is the first step to mastering anger when we let ourselves be carried away by anger our actions become irrational at the time it seems justifiable to shout insult or even hit something but when the storm passes we realize that we have only made the situation worse an outburst of anger can destroy relationships that took years to build an impulsive comment can leave wounds that never fully heal senica said that anger is like a momentary delirium a state in which we cease to be in control of our words and actions if we observe ourselves carefully we will see that most of our angry reactions are disproportionate and devoid of logic imagine an argument with a D One In the Heat of the Moment harsh words seem necessary but once everything calms down we realize we could have handled the situation more wisely most problems can be solved with dialogue and patience but anger blinds our ability to reason instead of looking for Solutions we seek revenge and in doing so we only feed a cycle of resentment and pain the stoics teach us that the best way to combat anger is through self-discipline and reflection Marcus Aurelius recommended remembering that life is short and that most of the problems that enrage us are insignificant in the grand scheme of things senica suggested practicing patience and indifference in the face of provocation true strength does not lie in responding with violence but in remaining calm when everything around us seems to be trying to make us lose control anger is an internal enemy a beast that if not tamed can consume us but the good news is that we can train ourselves not to let it drag us down the next time you feel anger Rising stop ask yourself if it’s really worth it remember that no external Force has power over you unless you give it to them peace is not found in the absence of provocations but in the ability to face them with equinity and control number two all negative emotions arise from unfulfilled expectations negative emotions are not born of what happens but of what we expected to happen and did not frustration anger sadness resentment all these feelings share a common root the difference between reality and our expectations we believe the world should behave in a certain way and when it does not we feel let down but in reality the fault lies with us in the distorted image we create in our minds we cling to an illusion and when reality destroys it instead of adapting we react with suffering we get angry because people don’t act the way we want them to because the results are not what we expected because life does not follow the script we wrote in our minds we believe we deserve a certain treatment a certain success a clear path but the world doesn’t play by our rules the frustration doesn’t come from the event itself but from the clash between what we wanted and what really happened senica said that we suffer more in our imagination than in reality because what hurts us most is not what happens but our interpretation of it if we learned to accept events without resistance we could avoid much of the unnecessary pain imagine someone who believes that their partner will never cheat on them because that is how it should be they’ve built up an expectation based on their own view of what is right but if betrayal occurs the anger does not arise from the act itself but from the contrast with the idealized image they had created instead of accepting real ity as it is they fight against it in their mind and that internal conflict becomes suffering another example is the person who expects their friends to always be there for them for traffic to flow smoothly or for their boss to Value their efforts when any of this does not happen they feel disappointment and anger because they assumed the world should follow their rules the stoics teach us that the key ke to Inner Peace is to eliminate unrealistic expectations it is not about resignation but about understanding that the world owes us nothing we cannot control the behavior of others or external events only our reaction to them epic tetus said we should accept what happens as if we had chosen it because resisting it only generates suffering if we stop expecting people to treat us in a certain way if if we accept that they can fail us that life does not follow a predictable order we eliminate a large part of our stress and frustration accepting reality as it is does not mean giving up goals or desires it means being prepared for any outcome we can strive to achieve something but without clinging to the idea that it must happen exactly as we want or else failure will destroy us disappointment does not come from life but from our resistance to accepting its unexpected turns a stoic understands that everything changes that nothing is guaranteed and that is why they do not allow their emotions to be dictated by external factors if we eliminate rigid expectations we stop demanding that the world adapt to our beliefs instead of getting frustrated when something does not go well we ask ourselves what we can learn instead of feeling betrayed we understand that people act according to their own nature not the one we imagine for them peace is found in flexibility and in the ability to accept whatever comes without resistance happiness does not lie in making everything fit our expectations but in learning to flow with reality without letting it Rob us of our peace of mind number three anger is a reflection of the ego anger is nothing more than a reflection of the Wounded ego when we feel that someone disrespects us treats us unfairly or does not recognize our value we react with anger because our sense of identity is threatened we believe we deserve different treatment that others should see us as we see ourselves and when that does not happen we feel that something sacred within us has been violated but the truth is that anger does not arise from what others do it arises from our interpretation of their actions it is our ego that demands recognition that takes offense that needs to defend its image if that ego were not so inflated if we did not take things so personally anger would lose its power over us when someone speaks rudely to us our first reaction is to think we are being attacked but what if that person is simply having a bad day what if their words have nothing to do with us but with their own internal chaos most of the time other people’s actions are not a reflection of us but of themselves however the ego makes us believe that everything revolves around us we tell ourselves he disrespected me he made me look bad he didn’t value me but what would happen if we simply stopped seeing ourselves as the center of every situation if we understood that the behavior of others is their burden not ours we could free ourselves from anger Marcus Aurelius reminded us that it is not what happens that disturbs us but our opinion of it if someone insults us the insult itself has no power until we give it meaning we can choose to ignore it we can see it as a reflection of the other person and move on without letting it affect our peace but the ego wants to fight defend itself prove its right and in that desire to protect our image we fall into the Trap of anger losing control and acting impulsively but if someone’s insult doesn’t change who we are if their attitude doesn’t Define us why allow it to drag us into into a state of chaos a clear example is when we’re in traffic and someone cuts us off the ego tells us it is disrespect that we should react that we cannot allow ourselves to be treated like that but the other driver likely wasn’t even thinking about us they’re simply caught up in their own world however our ego turns the situation into something personal and with that anger takes over our our mind if instead of reacting we simply accept what happened in any context whether work relationships or daily routines our reaction is not caused by events themselves but by the story We Tell ourselves about them the stoics teach us that the key to controlling anger is recognizing the role our ego plays in it if we improve our self-esteem if we stop needing validation from others if we understand our worth does not depend on how we are treated we can be immune to provocations senica said that the best revenge is not to resemble the person who has hurt us if someone treats us badly and we respond with anger we are letting them control us but if we remain calm if we decide not to play their game we show True strength anger reflect CS an ego that has not yet learned to detach from others opinions but when we understand that others do not have the power to Define us that their words and actions speak more about them than about us we free ourselves it is not about allowing abuse or accepting everything in silence but about learning to react intelligently and not from emotion inner peace is not achieved by controlling others but by controlling our reaction to them when the ego is no longer the center of our existence anger loses its Hold On Us number four forgiveness frees us from anger anger is a heavy burden that we often carry without realizing it we cling to resentment because we believe that by doing so we punish those who have hurt us but in reality the only one punished is ourselves anger consumes our peace locks us us in a mental prison and prevents us from moving forward forgiveness on the other hand is the key that opens that cell it does not mean justifying what they did or naively forgetting but freeing ourselves from the need to continue suffering for something that has already happened forgiveness is not a gift for the other person it is an act of self-love an essential step in recovering our peace of mind when we cling to anger we relive the pain over and over again our mind becomes a battlefield where the past is still present where we continue to give power to those who hurt us but why carry that anger around Marcus aelia said that the best punishment for those who have hurt us is not to be like them if someone betrayed offended or hurt us holding a grudge only prolongs their control over us forgiveness on the other hand gives us back our power letting us move on without letting the past Define us resentment is a trap of the ego it makes us believe that if we forgive we are showing weakness but the reality is the opposite strength is in those who have control over their emotions who decide to let go of what hurts them instead of clinging to it senca taught that we should not allow anger to to dictate our actions because when we act in Anger we are not our own masters if someone hurts us and we respond with resentment we give them power over our peace of mind but if we choose to forgive we regain control of our mind and well-being imagine someone betrayed by a close friend the natural reaction is anger disappointment the desire for Revenge but how long can that feeling be sustain stained without becoming a burden resentment doesn’t affect the traitor it affects the person carrying it every time they think of the Betrayal the pain is relived conversely if they decide to forgive accepting that what happened cannot be changed and that the past should not Define their present they find Freedom it does not mean trusting the traitor again but stopping their action from continuing to cause pain forgiveness is a conscious Choice it does not happen overnight and is not always easy but it is the path to Inner Peace epicus reminded us that we have no control over what others do only over our reaction if someone offends us it is not the offense that harms us but the importance we give it by forgiving we stop feeding that importance we understand that each person acts from their own level of Consciousness reflecting their inner world not ours it does not mean allowing abuse or tolerating Injustice but letting go of the resentment that prevents us from living peacefully when we forgive we do not free the other person we free ourselves we stop carrying an unnecessary burden we stop wasting energy on a conflict that only exists in our mind true revenge is not causing harm but showing that the harm has not changed us that we move on without being consumed by anger peace is not found in waiting for others to repent but in deciding that our happiness does not depend on their behavior to forgive is to release the poison of anger and embrace the freedom that comes with Serenity number five practice non-reaction when something irrit Ates us when we feel provoked or attacked our first reaction is often impulsive and emotionally charged we want to respond immediately defend ourselves prove that we are right but at that moment our mind is not operating from reason but from Instinct and that is where we make mistakes where we say things we later regret where we make situations worse instead of solving them the practice of non-reaction allows us to avoid this it gives us control over our responses and protects us from the emotional exhaustion impulsive reactions generate when we take a moment before responding when we resist the impulse to act immediately we gain power over ourselves it is not about being indifferent or repressing our emotions but about training ourselves not to be slaves to them Marcus Aurelius said that the best way to defend yourself from an offense is not to resemble the person who offended you if someone insults you or criticizes you harshly reacting with anger is to play their game it is to allow them to have power over you but if you remain calm if you choose not to respond at that moment you show that you are in control that your peace does not depend on others attitudes in everyday life there are countless opportunities to practice non-reaction a hurtful comment from a co-worker an aggressive driver in traffic a family member looking for an argument in each of these moments the decision is in your hands you can react immediately and feed the conflict or you can pause observe the situation from a distance and respond intelligently epic tetus taught that it is not what happens that affects us but the way we interpret it if someone criticizes you in a meeting and you take it as a personal attack you get angry and react defensively but if you pause breathe and analyze whether it is worth responding at all you can act calmly and professionally without emotion controlling your behavior not reacting is a sign of strength most people act on impulse enslaved by their emotions when someone irritates them they react without thinking allowing anger to take control but true power lies in those who resist that first reaction who know they don’t need to prove anything who choose when and how to act senica reminded us that time is a great filter for emotions what today seems like an unforgivable offense will lose importance in a few days what irritates us deeply now will seem insignificant in a few hours therefore not reacting immediately allows us to gain perspective and see the situation clearly before deciding what to do practicing non-reaction does not mean passively accepting everything or letting others walk all over us it means acting from Reason Not emotion if something really deserves a response the best response is the one given when our mind is is calm instead of responding to fire with more fire we respond with intelligence and equinity not because we are weak but because our peace is worth more than a pointless argument whenever you feel the impulse to react remember you can choose not to let the emotion pass observe it without letting it drag you in when you do you’ll notice something incredible conflicts diminish an anxiety is reduced and people who used to provoke you lose their power not reacting is the doorway to True Freedom the ability to decide how and when to respond without being a slave to external stimuli issue six the relationship between low self-esteem and anger anger is often nothing more than a reflection of insecurity when we are not at peace with ourselves any comment any look any situation that challenges our self-image irritates us it is not the situation itself that infuriates us but what it awakens in us if someone criticizes us and that makes us angry the problem is not the criticism but the importance we attach to it if we were secure in who we are if our self-esteem were strong we wouldn’t need to respond with anger we would simply ignore it but when our confidence is fragile any blow shakes our foundation and we react with anger as a defense mechanism in security creates a perception of vulnerability we feel we must constantly protect our image that others are judging us that any negative comment is a threat the Mind interprets these situations as personal attacks and responds aggressively but the reality is that no one has the power to make us feel inferior unless we Grant it to them epicus said it is not what others say about us that affects us but the opinion we have of those words if we believe we are weak or not good enough any criticism will reinforce that belief and anger will be our immediate reaction on the other hand if our self-image is solid nothing external can disturb us there was a time when I had gained weight and every comment about my appearance would make me react angrily I told myself it was because of others lack of respect but the truth was that I was not angry with them I was angry with myself I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror and any external remark confirmed it the anger did not come from them it came from the insecurity I felt over time I understood that the problem wasn’t people but my lack of control over myself instead of wasting energy reacting angrily I decided to take action I worked on my health discipline and mentality and when I did the same comments that used to anger me no longer affected me not because they had changed but because I had changed low self-esteem makes us interpret reality in a distorted Way We Believe others are constantly judging us but often they are not the problem is not the outside world but the way we perceive it Marcus aelius reminded us that if something external disturbs us the problem lies not in the thing itself but in our Judgment of it if someone says something that offends you ask yourself why does this affect me is it because deep down I fear it might be true is it because I have doubts about myself most of the time the answer is yes anger is a defensive reaction to insecurity when we improve our self-esteem anger loses its power we become less reactive more Serene more focused on what really matters we no longer need to prove anything to anyone because we know who we are other people’s opinions cease to be a threat because our worth does not depend on their op approval the stoics teach us that true strength lies not in imposing our will on others but in governing ourselves anger signals something unresolved within us instead of reacting impulsively we can use those moments as indications of what we still need to work on every time you feel anger at a comment or a situation pause ask yourself if it is truly the comment that bothers you or if there is something deeper behind it use anger as a mirror to see which aspects of yourself still need work when you improve your self-esteem and take responsibility for your life anger is no longer necessary there is no insecurity to protect no fear to hide only the calm of someone who knows and accepts themselves who does not need to react to what does not defy find them number seven the importance of living with purpose when you don’t have a clear purpose life feels empty chaotic and directionless you wake up every day with no real reason to get going with nothing to motivate you beyond routine and that emptiness breathes frustration lack of purpose can turn people into irritable reactive beings always on the defensive any inconvenience or obstacle feels bigger than it is because there is nothing more important to focus on the stoics understood that the key to peace of mind is having a purpose aligned with our values something that makes us feel our existence has meaning when you live without a defined purpose everything becomes a distraction traffic annoys you someone’s rude words irritate you and you feel life is unfair but when you have a purpose those same irritations lose importance not because they stop existing but because your attention is on something greater Marcus Aurelius said we should all ask ourselves what am I here for what really matters to you in life once you have Clarity in that answer minor frustrations stop controlling you you don’t waste time reacting to every provocation because your energy is focused on something meaningful there was a time when I had no direction I felt trapped in a meaningless routine doing things that didn’t fulfill me and the result was constant irritability anything annoyed me any problem seemed huge because I had no real reason to wake up each morning I was living on autopilot letting circumstances dictate my mood but when I found my purpose every everything changed I decided to focus on creating content on sharing ideas that could help others on building something that made sense to me and when I did I realized that the problems that had previously seemed unbearable were now just part of the journey I was no longer irritated by small setbacks because I had a bigger Vision anger was no longer a constant reaction because there was something more valuable to focus on the stoics teach us that purpose is not something you find it is something you define you don’t have to wait for life to hand it to you you have to create it yourself epic tetus said each person must decide who they want to become what they want to contribute to the world it is not about waiting for inspiration it is about taking action and seeking what truly makes us feel alive when you discover your purpose and work toward it your mind changes frustration decreases because you no longer worry so much about what you cannot control you don’t need external validation or to prove anything to anyone you simply do what you know you must do and that fills you with satisfaction when you live with purpose life stops feeling like a series of problems and starts to feel like an opportunity you no longer react with anger to every obstacle because you understand that challenges are part of the journey every day has meaning every action contributes to something bigger and when that happens peace becomes a natural state not because everything is perfect but because you have chosen where to focus your energy there’s no room for anger when you are busy building something that really matters if you feel frustrated with life if you realize you get angry too easily ask yourself whether you really have a clear purpose ask whether you are devoting your time to something that fulfills you or if you’re just going through the days without Direction the difference between a life full of frustration and a life full of meaning lies in that answer find what motivates you what makes you get up every morning wanting to move forward forward and you will see how anger loses its power because when you have a purpose everything else becomes background noise number eight use neuroplasticity to reprogram your emotional response the brain is not fixed in a single pattern of reacting thanks to neuroplasticity we can train it to respond differently to situations that previously provoked anger or frustration the idea that we are just this way and cannot change is a lie we tell ourselves the brain is malleable and like a muscle it can be strengthened in certain areas depending on how we train it if every time something irritates us we respond with anger we reinforce that neuronal connection turning anger into an automatic response but if instead we learn to respond calmly over time that becomes our brain’s new programming when we Face a situation that would normally set us off an insult an unmet expectation or a perceived disrespect our instinct is to follow the old pattern but here’s the key if we consciously force ourselves to respond differently we create a new neural pathway initially it feels forced uncomfortable even fake but with repetition the brain starts accepting that response as normal and eventually calm becomes our automatic reaction I recall a time when my dog destroyed something I cared about my usual reaction would have been anger raising my voice feeling that internal explosion of frustration but I chose a different approach instead of giving into anger I forced myself to take a deep breath and and pet my dog it felt strange at first as if I were repressing my emotion but in reality I was teaching my brain that not everything requires an angry response over and over each time my dog did something that used to irritate me I repeated this eventually I noticed my natural response had changed I no longer felt tension in my chest I no longer had to hold back my brain had learned that those situations were not a threat and did not require anger neuroplasticity shows that we are not doomed to be prisoners of our emotions we can redirect our impulses and make calm our new normal every time we choose not to react with anger we strengthen the neural Pathways of patience and equinity the more we practice the more natural it becomes Marcus aelius said we cannot control what happens but we can control our response and this is not just philosophy it is a scientific reality the brain changes based on what we practice and if we practice Serenity it will eventually become our default response this process takes time at first the mind will try returning to Old patterns because they are familiar but if we persist if every time we feel anger Rising we stop breathe and respond differently we will see real change one day we will realize that situations which once made us explode now seem insignificant not because we are repressing anger but because our brain has learned there is no reason to feel it anger is a habit just as calm is if we feed anger it grows and becomes stronger but but if we starve it and cultivate Serenity it weakens and fades it is not about pretending but about training our mind to work in a way that benefits us rather than harms us if we want to be calmer and more balanced we must practice daily over time calm is no longer an effort it becomes who we are number nine love and gratitude overcome anger anger consumes and wears us down making us lose control of our own minds but there are two forces that can dispel it love and gratitude when we are trapped in Anger our attention is fixed on the negative on what upsets us on what we believe is wrong we focus on lack frustration and Injustice but if instead we direct our mind toward what we love and what we are grateful for anger loses is its power not because problems vanish but because we stop giving them the energy they need to keep affecting us love connects us with what really matters if we are angry with someone we can ask ourselves do I prefer to win this argument or do I prefer to maintain the relationship when you love someone The Need to Be Right becomes secondary anger is selfish it seeks revenge it SE seeks to prove a point love seeks to understand to build to unite too often we allow anger to take over in Trivial situations hurting the people we love most but if in those moments we remember how we feel about them if we connect with love instead of anger our response changes gratitude is another powerful antidote when we are grateful there is no room for anger we cannot feel resentment and gratitude at the same time if something bothers us we can pause and do a simple exercise think of three things we’re grateful for right now our health a special person an opportunity to learn from this situation this shifts our thoughts away from the reactive State returning control to us Marcus Aurelius wrote in his meditations about the importance of remembering the trans ience of life if today were the last day with someone you love would you really waste time being angry at them gratitude reminds us that every moment is precious and that anger is a waste of time and energy at one point I did a small experiment with myself each time I felt anger or frustration instead of reacting as usual I forced myself to think of something I was grateful for in that instant it felt forced at first as if I were ignoring reality but over time my mind started doing it automatically one day someone spoke to me rudely and instead of feeling irritated the first thing I thought was I am grateful for my health today that thought allowed me to respond calmly without fueling the conflict not because the other person deserved it but because I deserved to keep my peace the stoic understood that our emotions are not produced by what happens outside but by what we decide to think about it if we focus on Injustice on what we lack on what upsets us anger grows if on the other hand we focus on what we have on what we love on what we are grateful for anger fades it is not a mental trick but a way to train our mind to see reality from a higher perspective epic tetus said the secret of happiness is not in having more but in wanting less when we cultivate gratitude we realize we already have enough that we don’t need to react angrily because despite small setbacks life remains good we cannot avoid moments of tension or control how others act but we can decide with which emotions to feed our mind if we choose love and gratitud ude anger will not find Space to grow when we love we understand when we are grateful we let go in this daily practice little by little we become more Serene more centered and less prone to anger not because the world changes but because we learn to see it differently number 10 setting healthy boundaries is if you do not set boundaries you allow others to decide how to treat you it is not about being confrontational or rejecting people but about defining how far your patience time and energy can go when you lack clear boundaries you send the message that it is acceptable to disrespect you to interrupt you constantly to devalue your time this in turn breeds frustration and anger eventually draining you emot Ally but the responsibility for setting those boundaries is yours and yours alone only you can decide what you will and will not allow often we let certain behaviors slide for fear of appearing selfish or unpleasant we struggle to say no because we are afraid of offending or being rejected the real problem though is not saying no but not saying it when it’s necessary if someone constantly interrupts you at work if a friend only comes around when they need something or if a family member criticizes you unfairly do you really need to put up with that senica said we cannot control others actions but we can control how we position ourselves in relation to them if you let someone treat you badly without objection you are effectively giving them permission to continue when a line is crossed and we do nothing we reinforce that behavior if someone criticizes you unfairly and you stay silent that person assumes it is normal to treat you that way but if you calmly and firmly communicate that you do not accept that kind of treatment you send a clear message you value yourself enough not to allow disrespect you do not need to be aggressive or argumentative you simply need to be clear I am not going going to tolerate comments like that my time is valuable please respect it I do not feel comfortable with this such simple phrases can completely transform a relationship’s Dynamic I recall a time when I allowed myself to be constantly interrupted it did not matter what I was doing if someone wanted my attention I would drop everything and respond right away at first I thought this may made me a good person but over time I realized I was letting others prioritize their needs above mine I felt frustrated and drained but it was not entirely their fault I had never set a limit one day I decided to change this if someone interrupted me I would kindly say I’m busy right now let’s talk later it was difficult at first but over time people understood that my time is also important surprisingly I did not lose any relationships instead I felt more respected the stoics understood that setting limits is not an act of rejection but of self-respect Epic tetus taught that we must determine which things are under our control and which are not we cannot stop someone from trying to overstep our boundaries but we can decide how to react silent ly tolerating abuse is not virtuous it is abandoning our responsibility to protect our well-being saying no is an act of Courage not because it is easy but because it shows self- knowledge and self-respect setting boundaries is not about pushing people away on the contrary it Fosters healthier relationships where both sides know what is acceptable often people do not realize they are crossing a line until someone points it out you cannot expect them to guess what bothers you you must communicate it if even after that they do not respect your boundary you have to question whether you really want that person in your life each time you decide not to set a boundary out of fear of conflict you choose internal conflict over external conflict you choose your discomfort to avoid a difficult ult conversation but avoiding the problem does not Solve IT learning to say no without guilt is one of the most valuable skills you can develop it makes you stronger not by dominating others but by maintaining your own dignity setting limits is not about controlling other people it’s about protecting your peace and living with self-respect Issue 11 not everything deserv deserves your attention not everything deserves your attention every day we Face provocations unnecessary comments and minor problems that try to drag us into chaos but the truth is that most of these things are not really important we deplete ourselves emotionally by reacting to trivialities that will be irrelevant tomorrow we live in a world where everyone has an opinion where criticis m is constant and where small issues can appear huge if we do not learn to filter out the inconsequential the key to maintaining peace of mind is to understand that not everything that happens around us is truly important each time something bothers you pause and ask will this matter in a month a year will I even remember it most often the answer is no however we get carried away by the emotion of the moment feeling the need to respond or defend ourselves if we look at it from the broader perspective of Life many things are just noise Marcus aelius said that Tranquility comes when we ignore what does not concern us if a stranger on social media criticizes you does it really affect your life if someone insults you on the street does it change who you are bar giving energy to every small provocation only distances you from what really matters imagine someone makes a rude comment about you the immediate impulse is to respond to defend yourself to prove your point but what do you gain from it is it worth investing your energy in that conflict a comment does not define your value if every time someone says something negative about you you react you are handing your peace of mind to anyone who decides to provoke you epic tetus taught us not to be slaves to other people’s opinions if something doesn’t contribute to your growth or change the course of your life then it does not deserve your attention most of our worries are not even ours we stress about what others think about problems we cannot solve about expectations that are not ours to meet we spend too much time worrying about external approval and situations beyond our control when you understand that your energy is limited you become more selective about what truly deserves your attention this does not mean you become indifferent it means learning to differentiate what really matters from what is just noise I recall a time when any criticism would affect me if someone questioned what I was doing I felt felt the need to justify myself but gradually I realized it was a waste of energy I learned to observe before reacting to ask whether it was truly worth it and most of the time the best response was silence not because I had nothing to say but because it simply was not necessary not everything requires an answer not everything deserves conflict and not everything deserves our attention ition every time you choose to ignore what is not relevant you protect your peace of mind you train your mind to focus on what truly matters what genuinely transforms the stoics did not seek to control the world only their response to it if someone acts maliciously or tries to provoke you remember you have the option of not responding strength is not in winning every battle but in choosing which battles are worth fighting when you filter out what really matters you find many worries dissolve the energy you use to spend on pointless arguments can now be used for building learning and improving you cannot stop people from criticizing you nor control what they say or do but you can decide whether it’s worth letting that affect your State of Mind true freedom is not doing whatever you want but not being dominated by what doesn’t matter number 12 the importance of separating facts from beliefs we often suffer not because of what really happens but because of what we believe it means we live trapped in interpretations in Stories We Tell ourselves and others but most of these stories are not facts they are beliefs we have never questioned these beliefs can be the greatest obstacle to our Peace of Mind stoicism teaches us that the key to Tranquility is learning to differentiate what is a fact from what is merely our perception of that fact without this distinction we become entangled in unnecessary emotions anger sadness fear reacting to something that may not be real if someone calls us useless it is not the comment in itself that hurts us but our decision to believe it the objective fact is that someone said some words our mind turns those words into an absolute truth maybe he’s right maybe I am useless suddenly a simple opinion becomes a burden we carry for years we never pause to see if it’s true epicus warned that it’s not external events that bother us but our interpretations of them if someone criticizes us we can interpret it as an opportunity to improve or a personal attack the difference is not in the facts but in our beliefs the human mind is skilled at creating Stories We Tell ourselves we are not good enough not deserving of certain things or that we will never be able to change and we believe these stories as if they were irrefutable truths but often they stem from past experiences someone else’s words or mistakes from which we drew permanent labels if we fail at something once we conclude we are a failure if someone rejects us we believe we are Unworthy of love yet these thoughts are not facts just interpretations we have chosen to accept I recall a time when I believed I was not smart enough to accomplish certain things there was no actual proof of this just an experience in my past that made me feel that way and I had decided to accept it as truth every time I faced a challenge that belief returned you can’t do it but one day I questioned it what evidence do I really have I had learned many things overcome difficulties I realized the belief was not a fact it was just a story I told myself once I understood that I started letting it go the stoics practiced mental self-discipline the ability to examine their own thoughts and filter out what truly deserved attention Marcus Aurelius would ask himself whether the negative thought was really true or if he was exaggerating most of the time the answer was no we are not as limited as we think we are not the labels others assign us we do not need to be slaves to beliefs that hold us back to free ourselves we must recognize that these beliefs are not absolute facts every time you sense a limiting belief about yourself question it ask if it is really true or if you have accepted it without proof if you can replace it with a more realistic version you have taken a huge step toward emotional Freedom separating facts from beliefs is how we stop being prisoners of our own mind it’s how we regain control how we stop reacting automatically and start living with Clarity when we learn to view reality without the distortions of our beliefs we uncover the peace that was always there waiting to be found number 13 developing a healthy self-image your self-image cannot depend on others opinions if you live by the world’s eyes you become a prisoner of its approval one day it Praises you and you feel Invincible the next day it criticizes you and you collapse this instability arises from building your worth on external foundations on what you cannot control when your perception of yourself is grounded in self- knowledge and acceptance no one can take away away your peace the stoics taught that true strength comes from looking Inward and defining who you are without expecting external validation only when you stop depending on others praise can you begin to live with true Freedom the issue arises when our self-image is formed by imposed beliefs from a young age we absorb opinions labels and judgments without questioning them if someone calls us shy we accept it if they call us failures we believe it but how much of that is true how much of our identity is built upon unexamined ideas Marcus aelius reminded us that we must ask whether what we believe about ourselves is true or just a story we keep telling ourselves the key is self- knowledge observing ourselves without filters or Illusions a acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses honestly accepting both doesn’t mean complacency but Clarity when someone criticizes you the automatic response is to feel hurt or to prove them wrong but what if instead you paused and asked is this true does this criticism reflect reality if yes there’s room to improve if no the criticism has no weight and you can release it epicus taught that we should not concern ourselves with what others say only with whether it is true it is not the criticism that hurts us but our belief in it if your self-image is strong their words lose their power for years I cared too much about what others thought I did what I believed others expected becoming disconnected from who I truly was I did not make decisions based on personal desire but rather on what might an approval it was never enough someone always had a different opinion there was always something to change to please someone else when I realized I could never control others perceptions everything changed I stopped trying to fit in and asked who am I really what do I want for myself the need for validation faded self-acceptance does not mean settling it means recognizing your value without depending on external factors when you accept yourself strengths flaws successes mistakes you free yourself from the fear of judgment you don’t need to prove anything you don’t need to demonstrate your worth because you already have it when you stop seeking approval you become more authentic people who matter will respect you for who you are not for who you pretend to be true emotional Freedom arises when you stop living for others and begin living for yourself it does not mean ignoring all external input but learning to filter what merits attention if you know who you are your values your purpose criticism is not a threat this Clarity helps you face life confidently without the need to impress anyone not because you’re perfect but because you no longer require the world to validate Your Existence in that state of clarity you find peace that has always been within you number 14 The False binary of Good and Evil no person is wholly good or wholly evil we are all a blend of good and bad choices moments of clarity and moments of weakness yet the human Mind simplifies by labeling others as good or bad based on limited experience or convenience this approach is a fallacy that keeps us from understanding the complexity of people when we see someone through a single label we fail to see their depth someone can be generous in one context and cruel in another they can display compassion at times and selfishness at others reducing someone to a single category blinds us to their Humanity Marcus Aurelius reminded us to see others as they truly are flawed human beings shaped by their histories fears and experiences no one is entirely defined by their best or worst moments when we understand this we free ourselves from rigid judgment and the emotional burden that follows it when someone treats us badly we label them as bad we imagine them as cruel or worthy of punishment but do we ever ask what led them to act that way not to justify it but to see that no one is born evil that we all products of our experiences epic tetus taught that we should not judge people solely by their actions but recognize that each acts according to their current understanding in a society people react based on their environment and circumstances a person can be kind to their family and ruthless in business they can be generous to friends and cold to strangers contradiction is part of Being Human we have all done things we are not proud of if we judge others harshly we must judge ourselves harshly as well if we wish for understanding when we air why not extend that same courtesy to others releasing the idea that people are purely good or evil improves our relationships we react less harshly to others mistakes understanding they are on their own learning path we become more patient and balanced this doesn’t mean tolerating abuse or Injustice but responding with wisdom rather than anger Marcus Aurelius said that when someone acts badly we should ask if we truly expected better from them people do the best they can with what they know if we demand perfection we will always be disappointed freeing ourselves from this mentality helps us find inner peace we no longer feel the need to punish or divide the world into good and evil we become more objective Karma and better able to handle conflict with Clarity true strength is not in judging harshly but in understanding we are all on a shared Journey we’re at different stages but we share the same goal learning and improving when you see this you are not constantly worn down by others behaviors you focus on the one thing you can control your own growth number 15 the ritten process for managing anger anger is powerful but it doesn’t have to control you it can feel like an uncontrollable fire but if you learn to manage it intelligently it becomes a tool for growth rather than destruction the Rin process helps you do this effectively without suppressing anger or acting impulsively it is based on mindfulness and self-reflection something the stoics practice daily under different names R recognize acknowledge that anger is happening don’t deny it or repress it real iiz it is there often anger makes us react without thinking as if on autopilot simply pausing and saying I’m feeling angry right now create separation between you and the emotion I immerse but do not act allow anger to be present without acting on it most fail here because the immediate impulse is to react defensively or aggressively but anger itself is not the problem rather it’s what we do with it the stoics taught that we need not deny emotions but learn to live with them without letting them take over if you feel anger observe it you don’t need to do anything yet breathe as senica said the first impact of anger is inevitable but what happens next is a choice n navigate investigate investigate the root of the anger instead of staying on the surface ask yourself where it really comes from often anger is simply the symptom of something deeper fear insecurity unmet expectations or past wounds epicus taught that external events do not bother us our interpretations do if you’re angry because someone interrupted you maybe it’s not the interruption but a deeper belief that you are not valued or respected after recognizing and allowing anger without reacting question it understanding the real root reduces anger’s intensity because you see it has more to do with yourself than with the external event nurture finally nurture the part of you that needs healing instead of punishing yourself for feeling anger practice self-compassion recognize that a part of you needs attention maybe you’ve repressed emotions or cling to a limiting belief Marcus Aurelius taught us to treat ourselves with the same patience we would offer someone we love you can’t eliminate anger entirely but you can learn to respond wisely instead of impulsively as we continue how to deal with loneliness and sadness great philosophers like Marcus Aurelius senica and epicus left us Timeless teachings that have helped thousands overcome emotional challenges find purpose and live more serenely but there is something special about the last lesson an idea that could radically change how you perceive your emotions and your connection to the world stay until the end because what you learn here can help not only you but those you love before continuing please like and share this video so it can reach more people if you don’t want to miss future videos subscribe and activate the Bell lesson one loneliness is an opportunity to know yourself better loneliness is often viewed as an unwanted State something to avoid however the stoics invite us to rethink this perception for them loneliness is a door to personal growth and invaluable tool for introspection instead of fearing it or viewing it as punishment we should learn to embrace it why because Solitude provides the space and calm needed to reconnect with your essence values and deepest desires those often drowned out by external noise in daily life we are bombarded by distractions work social media others expect ations all of this disconnects us from our inner being from the source of our true strength the stoics understood that real peace and strength are found not outside but within Solitude is where we can find Clarity that often eludes us when you face Solitude you face yourself sometimes this is uncomfortable because it forces you to confront your vulnerabilities and fears but it is also liberating you can ask who am I really what do I want from life without the world’s distractions you can truly listen to yourself understand yourself and work on yourself far from being negative Solitude is where you cultivate self- knowledge and build the Inner Strength needed to face adversity it is the place where you discover true freedom to be yourself without external in influences that limit you lesson two eliminate unrealistic expectations many of our disappointments come from expectations we created ourselves we expect others to behave in certain ways or situations to unfold exactly how we imagined but life rarely follows a script stoicism teaches us to eliminate unrealistic expectations that trap us in frustration in instead of projecting how things should be it invites us to accept reality as it is without decorating it with unfounded desires or assumptions when we build expectations about how someone should behave or how a problem should be solved we add unnecessary weight to our lives when reality doesn’t match our projections frustration and sadness soon follow the stoics see this as suffering we can avoid if we adjust our mindset the key is to accept we cannot control other people or their actions but we can control our response releasing expectations does not mean abandoning hope or ambition it means adjusting your focus to what you can truly manage your thoughts emotions and actions letting go of the idea that the world must accommodate our desires leads to Greater serenity as we accept each situation as it is free from the extra burden of disappointment this mindset makes you more resilient instead of lamenting that things did not go as planned you concentrate on what matters personal growth and your ability to Face Reality with strength and equinity lesson three change your perspective on pain pain is a constant in life something we all inevitably face but what sets resilient people apart is how they interpret that pain for the stoics pain is not an enemy to avoid but a teacher to heed they knew that suffering approached with the right mindset can serve as an opportunity to grow and become stronger the key is to stop viewing pain as unjust or undesirable and start seeing it as a test that once overcome leaves you stronger each time you suffer and choose to face it instead of running away you take a step toward a more powerful version of yourself if you constantly avoid pain you also miss the Deep lessons it can teach pain has the power to reveal who you really are it is in sufferings hardest moments that you discover how to persevere and find Solutions you once saw as impossible possible changing your perspective on pain means seeing every difficulty as a test of character proving to yourself that you can overcome any obstacle if you see pain not as a threat but as a catalyst for growth your relationship with it changes drastically instead of feeling defeated you feel each challenge has the potential to refine your mind and spirit making you invincible because no matter how great the pain you emerge merge stronger Lesson Four find peace in Simplicity in a world urging us to want more more possessions more success more recognition it is easy to forget what truly matters the stoics teach that genuine peace is found not in accumulation but in Simplicity a simple life stripped of the Superfluous frees up space in both Mind and Spirit the endless desire for more often creates anxiety we stress over what we lack or what others have and the idea that accumulating things will make us happy the stoics knew this Quest was a trap the more you depend on external things for fulfillment the more vulnerable you become to losing them conversely when you choose Simplicity you discover Clarity and calm you stop chasing what doesn’t matter and focus on what is essential Simplicity does not mean giving up everything but focusing on what truly matters to you what do you really need for a fulfilling life by cutting excess be it material things commitments or expectations you realize that Tranquility lies in the little things you free yourself from the pressure to keep achieving more and start appreciate what you already have living with less can help you appreciate each moment more Tranquility comes from recognizing you do not need to compete or fulfill anyone else’s expectations you only need to be true to what’s essential for you in this way the peace that comes from a simple life is incomparable a source of lasting authentic happiness lesson five persevere in difficult times life is a constant series of challenges often the hardest moments can feel insurmountable but for the stoics adversity is not an enemy to avoid but an opportunity to refine character and grow in strength obstacles do not stop you they allow you to show what you are truly made of to persevere is not just to endure pain or suff suffering it is to face them with a resilient mindset knowing each test you pass makes you stronger the stoics knew that difficulties teach us patience and fortitude every time you choose to move forward despite adverse circumstances you build a more resilient version of yourself true strength is not in avoiding problems but in facing them with courage and determination when times come and they will remember they are not permanent everything passes even the darkest moments what remains is who you become by going through them perseverance is not just about resisting it’s about growing through pain learning from failure and using every stumble as a springboard to rise higher perseverance is the seed of success results may not be immediate but each small step consistently taken moves you closer to your goals looking back you’ll see the obstacles that once seemed insurmountable have actually forged your character and strengthened your resolve adversity shapes who we are and perseverance is the key to Turning challenges into your greatest source of growth lesson six accept imperfection in yourself and other others striving for Perfection is a path that leads to frustration and suffering stoic lessons remind us that Perfection is unattainable we are all human inherently flawed accepting both your own imperfections and those of others is crucial for attaining inner peace and nurturing healthy relationships when you demand Perfection of yourself you block your capacity to learn and grow every mistake you make is actually a learning opportunity each failure grants you a chance to reflect correct course and improve by recognizing you are not perfect you allow yourself to be vulnerable and genuine this authenticity liberates you from the pressure to pretend you have all the answers likewise by accepting imperfections in others you free yourself from judgment and unrealistic expectations no one is perfect no one is born knowing everything by embracing this truth you become more compassionate and understanding relationships flourish when you abandon harsh judgment and view others as beings in constant Evolution accepting imperfection does not mean giving up or settling for mediocrity rather it reflects a deep understanding of human nature when you allow yourself to be imperfect and allow others to be as they are you open the door to a more fulfilling life free from unnecessary emotional burdens you find inner peace letting growth and self-improvement emerge more naturally and realistically lesson seven don’t compare yourself to others in an age of social media and the constant flood of images of success it’s easy to fall into the Trap of comparing yourself to others this comparison often becomes a source of dissatisfaction and sadness because what you see about others may not reflect their reality everyone has their own Journey with unique challenges and triumphs comparing lives can distort your sense of self-worth the stoics teach that wisdom lies in focusing on your own path direct your energy toward your growth and development instead of wasting it on external comp comp arons the only real competition is with yourself ask how can I be better today than I was yesterday this mindset lets you celebrate your progress without being distracted by what others achieve when you stop comparing you learn to appreciate what you have and who you are gratitude for your own life experiences and accomplishments becomes a powerful motivator you realize everyone has a different path just as valuable as your own you learn to admire others not with Envy but with inspiration allowing their examples to motivate your own efforts by freeing yourself from external pressure and others expectations you discover satisfaction in your personal progress each stage becomes a victory precisely because it reflects your effort not some one else’s standards this approach Fosters a growth mindset where every day is a new chance to become your best self free from distractions and insecurities lesson 8 let your actions speak for you in a world full of empty promises and unfulfilled words the stoics emphasize that actions are more powerful than speech talking about plans and goals has no real effect unless backed by a tangible commitment to carry them out instead of telling others what you plan to do the real test is taking action and allowing the results to speak for themselves this shift in perspective transforms your approach to life true virtue lies not in intention but in action every step you take is a reflection of your values and determination by focusing on tangible results alts you

    eliminate the need for excuses or boasting instead you let your achievements showcase your discipline and persistence focusing on action frees you from the anxiety of living up to others expectations social pressure can make you feel compelled to validate your goals verbally but stoicism points out that true strength is measured by progress and personal growth each small step step forward proves your determination and effort no words required by letting actions speak you cultivate a sense of authenticity people know you by what you do not just what you say you will do this not only empowers you but also inspires those around you to adopt the same mindset eventually this creates a cycle of action and accomplishment on the stoic path it is tangible effort that counts and personal transformation arises from acting with integrity and determination lesson N9 keep hope alive in Dark Times stoicism is not a pessimistic philosophy it is a Beacon of Hope in the midst of adversity the stoics recognize that even the darkest seasons of Life are temporary and that light can always rise from the depths during times of pain loss or confusion it’s easy to feel that there is no way out but it is vital to remember that everything is transient cultivating hope does not mean ignoring reality but recognizing that although the present may be difficult the future can bring unexpected opportunities and change hope becomes your companion on life’s journey a constant reminder that rebirth and transformation are always possible when facing challenges deliberately nurture Hope just as you would care for a plant that needs sunlight and water hope isn’t a mere illusion it’s an inner light we all carry it may seem hidden in dark moments but it is always there this light can manifest in small gestures a comforting talk with a friend a walk in nature or an introspective moment maintaining hope arms you with the result resilience to keep moving forward compelling you to look for new Solutions in short stoicism teaches that even in the bleakest moments our ability to keep hope alive can guide us through storms helping us find the inner strength that remains after the rain the sun eventually shines lesson 10 never lose sight of your inner freedom in a world brimming with uncertainties and challenges it is crucial to remember one of stoicism’s most profound teachings your inner freedom is unshakable no matter what happens externally you always have the ability to govern your mind this freedom is not just a concept it is a powerful reality that can change how you live the stoics taught that even though we cannot control external circumstances we can always control our interpretation of them each situation you face presents a choice in how you respond that Power of Choice resides within you Untouchable by anyone else and forms the basis of your true strength understanding that your response dictates your well-being allows you to let go of external approval and the influence of others instead of letting people’s opinions or Unfortunate Events dictate your emot tional State you focus on directing your own thoughts this is resilience not avoiding pain or suffering but choosing how to face them never underestimate the power of your mind always remember that in adversity you can choose to find meaning and growth in the experience doing so preserves your inner Freedom fueling your personal Evolution as we continue how to develop an unshakable mind and become someone emotionally insensitive to external problems one embrace the impermanence of everything the first step in becoming emotionally numb is to accept the impermanence of all things the stoics emphasize that nothing in life is permanent neither success nor failure neither happiness nor suffering everything we experience good or bad inevitably changes over time this realization is not just Comfort but a powerful tool to free us from the emotional attachments that bind us when you cling desperately to something be it a relationship a possession or even an emotion you become vulnerable because your well-being hinges on something that will eventually change or disappear this generates anxiety and suffering ing accepting that everything is transitory allows you to detach from that dependence and gain a broader more balanced perspective if something upsets you or causes pain ask will this last forever the answer is always no even the most intense suffering passes eventually similarly if you feel Joy or Triumph remember it is also temporary this does not mean avoiding ing the good but enjoying it with the awareness that it will not last forever this mindset helps you maintain emotional distance from life’s swings and avoid overreacting train your mind to see each situation as part of a natural cycle of Change by embracing impermanence you not only become emotionally stronger but also cultivate a deep inner peace free from the fear of loss or future pain two Define your own internal value one of stoicism’s most powerful teachings is that your true value does not depend on what others think of you in a world that places great weight on external validation likes comments and the opinions of friends or strangers if your worth depends on others you become a slave to their judgments every compliment lifts you every criticism crushes you but what happen happens if you decide that only you define your worth You Free Yourself the stoics teach us to look inward to build such a solid internal conviction that nothing external can shake it value your actions thoughts and decisions based on your own principles this is the key to being emotionally impenetrable if you choose what you believe is right and others criticize it why care if you are convinced it aligns with your values others opinions become irrelevant when you have a firm moral compass guiding you defining your own internal value Wards off the Trap Of Constant approval seeking when you decide your worth is in your hands criticism won’t destabilize you and praise won’t inflate you you remain centered calm and crucially in command of your emotion [Music] remember if you let others Define your worth you give them power over your well-being defining your own value is reclaiming that power live with unwavering confidence that who you are does not depend on external def factors three get used to internal silence mental noise is a major obstacle to Inner Peace worries repetitive thoughts and outof control emotions can feel like storms that push you off course for the stoics mastering the mind is essential to staying calm under any adversity cultivating internal silence means learning to quiet that mental chaos and observe your thoughts without automatically reacting to them this is not easy but can be transformative when mental noise rains your emotions flare up you become anxious or over whelmed by problems that may not be as serious as they appear stoicism encourages us to pause breathe deeply and create a mental space to watch our thoughts like clouds passing by you don’t have to engage with them or let them take over regular practice whether through meditation journaling or simple self-observation is key to achieving this inner silence it may feel uncomfortable initially because we’re used to reacting to every thought but with persistence it becomes a refuge when you succeed in achieving moments of Silence external emotional turmoil loses its grip on you you become less reactive more Serene and more capable of making rational decisions preventing your emotions from hijacking you this calm Center is your real strength four develop active Detachment Detachment is one of stoicism’s most profound lessons it does not mean becoming cold or indifferent but loving and valuing people and things without obsessively clinging to them everything you have material possessions relationships can be lost at any moment the stoics remind us that life is uncertain you cannot control that but you can control how you respond emotionally to potential losses active Detachment means you can enjoy what you have without depending on it for your happiness it’s not about distancing yourself or refusing to love it’s about loving in a healthier way this form of Detachment gives you great emotional freedom because you let go of the constant fear of losing what you have relationships jobs possessions may come and go but you can remain at Peace by accepting reality as it is when you stop relying on external things for fulfillment you find true peace within active Detachment does not make you insensitive it makes you more aware you can love enjoy and live fully knowing nothing is truly yours forever accepting this truth immunizes you against the ups and downs of loss practice active detachment to become strong inside immune to Life’s external changes and capable of preserving a Serene mind Five Focus only on what you can control one of stoicism’s most transformative lessons is learning to distinguish between what you can and cannot control this simple distinction is the key to achieving emotional balance and strength we often waste emotional energy trying to control things beyond our reach other people’s opinions choices made by others past events or even the future the stoics invite us to release these burdens and redirect our energy only to what we can truly manage our thoughts our actions and our responses imagine how much frustration you could avoid if you stopped trying to control the uncontrollable by accepting that you cannot change how others think or behave nor alter external circumstances you free yourself from a huge source of stress this practice renders you emotionally invulnerable because you no longer spend your energy battling the inevitable instead you focus on what really matters your own behavior your choices and your reactions when you focus on what you can control you find a genuine sense of power it’s not that external circumstances are irrelevant but they no longer dominate your emotional state frustration helplessness and anger lose their impact because you realize you can only govern what is in your hands practicing this daily brings balance and emotional strength by stopping the fight against the unchangeable you discover peace amidst the chaos six practice tolerating uncertainty uncertainty is a constant we never know what will happen tomorrow next week or even in the next hour but if you cling to the need for control you may find uncertainty terrifying stoicism teaches that such fear is unnecessary and that we can learn to embrace uncertainty instead of letting the unknown paralyze you trust in your ability to adapt to whatever comes you do not need to know all the details it is more important to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally stoicism invites you to develop the trust that no matter what happens you are capable of responding to the challenge living with a need for absolute certainty is exhausting and unrealistic because none of us truly know what’s coming accepting that uncertainty is part of life frees you from resisting what cannot be changed and allows you to flow with life’s changing this is not resignation but wisdom it sets you up for reality which is inherently unpredictable by befriending the unknown you stop fearing it you find peace in accepting that you do not need complete foresight to live calmly gradually uncertainty becomes less of a threat and more of a chance to grow and adapt true emotional strength arises when you can face the unexpected without losing your Center confident you can handle any challenge seven be the guardian of your emotions in daily life emotions can be intense and overwhelming but stoicism teaches that to be human is not to be enslaved by emotions being the guardian of your emotions means recognizing and accepting them without letting them rule you it’s not about repressing what you feel but observing and managing emotional reactions with wisdom when someone provokes you or a situation upsets you your first impulse might be to react instantly Guided by anger or frustration the stoic suggest a deliberate pause breathe deeply and take a moment to reflect before you respond this conscious pause lets you choose your action rather than merely react by becoming your emotions Guardian you cultivate self-control a robust Shield against external influences this practice brings Clarity and perspective over time you realize your emotions are responses to external stimuli but they do not define you maintaining control of your emotional responses makes you less susceptible to life fluctuations turning you into someone calm and stable cultivating emotional vigilance also reduces daily stress life can be unpredictable and demanding but if you guard your emotions you become more Adept at weathering storms without losing yourself ultimately this practice frees you to live authentically and purposefully choosing reason over immediate emotional impulses eight accept pain as part of growth pain is one of the most universal human experiences but it is also one of the most feared the stoics teach that while pain is inevitable suffering is optional instead of avoiding or hiding from pain we should accept it as a fundamental part of our journey doing so transforms pain into a valuable teacher for mental and emotional development this shift in perspective is crucial rather than seeing pain as an obstacle view it as a catalyst for growth each time you face pain whether physical or emotional you have the choice to let it weaken you or to use it to strengthen your character this choice is essential for resilience by accepting pain you train yourself to respond more effectively and consciously you learn to deal with discomfort and adversity turning them into stepping stones for personal development each lesson gained from Pain forges greater inner strength and a clearer understanding of yourself and the world recognizing that pain is a normal part of Human Experience not only empowers you but equips you to face adversity with calm determination pain ceases to be an enemy and becomes an ally on the path of growth and self-awareness nine challenge your fears with reasoning fear and anxiety are common companions in life often fueled by irrational thoughts that distort reality the stoics teach that we can free ourselves from these emotional traps by challenging them logically by questioning your fears you’ll discover many are baseless first acknowledge your fears identify what is actually holding you back often the most paralyzing fears are those you haven’t examined once identified break them down ask what evidence supports this fear what’s the worst case scenario and How likely is it this logical questioning dismantles the catastrophic scenarios your mind creates when you address fears rationally you realize many are exact exaggerated constructs by practicing this technique you become skilled at identifying and refuting irrational thoughts this not only frees you from the emotional burden of fear but empowers you to act in situations you once deemed threatening challenging your fears cultivates a resilient mindset showing you that fear doesn’t have to dictate your decisions you always have the power to choose how to respond to ad Verity over time consistent practice reduces anxiety and brings Clarity and emotional strength allowing you to move forward with confidence and resolve 10 cultivate a serenely impenetrable mind achieving a Serene and impenetrable mind is the Pinnacle of stoic philosophy in a chaotic world full of constant distractions and provocations reaching a state where nothing external disturbs your inner peace is a profound challenge yet the stoics remind us it is both possible and worthwhile the key is integrating all the lessons above and practicing self-control and serenity every day cultivating an impenetrable mind demands discipline and commitment it begins with mastering the ability to observe and understand your emotions without letting them dominate you this this means recognizing that your reactions are choices by making this distinction you learn to respond rather than react practicing Detachment and recognizing impermanence contribute to mental strength when you accept that circumstances are temporary and outside your control you become resilient in the face of adversity daily meditation or reflection can also help maintain calm by regularly disconnecting from the outside noise you recharge your emotional energy preparing to face the world with balance tolerance of uncertainty is equally vital by accepting the unknown you reduce anxiety and broaden your capacity to adapt as your mind becomes more Serene and disciplined life ceases to be a battlefield and becomes a field of opportunity an impenetrable mind lets you navigate life’s storms with Grace serving as a beacon of calm in the chaos ultimately this state of mind not only benefits you but inspires others to seek inner peace as well as we continue how to stop wasting time and direct your energy to what truly matters one focus on yourself to reduce distractions focusing on yourself is the key key to reducing external distractions and taking control of your life in stoicism where you direct your attention defines your reality if you let your mind drift to what you cannot control you become a slave to circumstances and others opinions by focusing on your personal growth you regain Clarity and self-mastery begin by dedicating time to self-care in the days constant noise finding moments for reflection is crucial simple practices like meditation journaling or reading inspiring texts help strengthen the mind and keep you aligned with your goals Marcus aelius for instance journaled every morning reflecting on his principles and preparing to face daily challenges with wisdom and composure working on personal development also involves identifying areas for Improvement requiring honesty and humility whether you need more discipline better relationships or stronger emotional management it’s about small consistent steps the stoics taught that significant changes Take Time Each small Improvement is a victory over distractions that once prevented you from realizing your purpose when you focus on yourself you free your mind from others influence criticism judgment and external expectations lose power because your attention is on what you can control this doesn’t mean isolation or indifference instead it’s learning to filter what truly matters your decisions are Guided by what is right for you not by a craving for approval this mental Clarity boosts your problemsolving abilities letting you act effective itively in various situations the resilience you gain is remarkable you become able to face adversity calmly and decisively problems that once seemed insurmountable now appear as challenges you can overcome this is Central to stoicism life will never be free of complications but you can always decide how to respond by focusing on self-improvement you build a foundation that keeps you grounded when your surroundings get chaotic ultimately focusing on yourself enriches both your relationship with yourself and with others when you invest in personal growth you become a better friend partner and leader you inspire not through words but through consistent action your composure and results testify to your commitment to yourself prioritizing personal development is not selfish it’s the only way to truly benefit the world when you master your mind in life you can make an authentic meaningful impact on those around you two focusing on yourself is a necessity not selfishness we live in a world filled with distractions where social networks and external opinions constantly viy for our attention stoicism teaches us that we risk drifting from our Essence when we rely on these external validations finding Clarity and meaning requires looking inward no one else can tell us who we truly are depending on external validation is a losing game if your self-esteem and identity hinge on others approval you relinquish control over your life the comparisons you make against others lead to feelings of inferiority and there’s always someone better no matter how successful you are stoicism emphasizes that such comparisons are pointless and detrimental pulling you away from real progress the solution is a change of perspective stop looking outward and turn inward epic tetus said we shouldn’t worry about what lies beyond our control our duty is to perfect what we can handle our thought thoughts actions and character remember you have unique abilities and challenges comparing yourself to others is unproductive as their circumstances talents and obstacles differ from yours by focusing on yourself you unleash your full potential you use the energy previously wasted on distractions to invest in your personal growth you discover or develop talents and harness them to accomplish your goals although the change isn’t immediate consistency yields profound results commit to your development and find true satisfaction an inner sense of fulfillment that doesn’t depend on material Goods or external praise true happiness arises from living authentically consistent with your values this approach influences not only yourself but the world around you by being more centered you become a positive example inspiring others toward self-improvement you realize it’s not about competing but collaborating focusing on yourself does not mean disconnecting from society it means contributing from a place of strength and authenticity in the end focusing on yourself is not selfish it’s Essential by rejecting external validation and committing to to personal growth you become the architect of your life the external world will continue its noise but your life will be guided by a steady internal Compass stoicism teaches that a life Guided by personal values not external whims yields true peace and fulfillment three avoid comparisons with others social media has drastically altered how we perceive people’s lives online we see only the highlights the biggest accomplishments the brightest Smiles the dream vacations but these are curated glimpses not an unfiltered reality we do not see the stress doubts doubts or hidden insecurities each person carries when we compare our complete reality to someone else’s showreal we inevitably feel behind or inadequate stoicism warns us that these comparisons are not just unfair but futile as they draw Focus away from our own progress by measuring ourselves against others we nurture insecurity we forget we do not know their struggles or sacrifices only what they choose to display this mental habit of comparison traps Us in cycles of Envy or discontent moreover comparing your life with others disconnects you from your own objectives and values you might begin to chase standards that don’t resonate with you only to fit an image of success promoted by someone else instead of embracing your uniqueness you measure your worth by someone else’s Journey the solution is to set your own standards aligned with your core principles recognize that we each have distinct sets of talents circumstances and challenges stop idealizing people and start understanding them for who they really are fellow humans full of contradictions Joys and Sorrows freeing yourself from comparisons not only brings peace of mind but also Fosters resilience to external opinions and judgments you become less dependent on others approval because you understand your self-worth is defined by your consistent effort not by meeting some external Benchmark when you focus on your path you realize you aren’t in a race with anyone else you stop competing and start learning from others without undermining your own sense of worth in the end stoicism reminds us we can’t control others actions or achievements we can only control our response to them you can feel admiration instead of envy you can be happy for someone’s progress without diminishing your own by avoiding comparisons you break free from needless burdens and embrace a path of self-discovery and personal growth true contentment lies not in being better than others but in becoming the best version of yourself four let go of what no longer serves you throughout life certain Rel relationships habits or goals May once have served a clear purpose they helped you grow overcome obstacles or find direction yet sometimes these same things stop serving your development stoicism warns that clinging to what no longer fits who you are becoming is not only pointless it also hinders your progress when you hold on to the Past you carry an unnecessary burden stifling potential for opportunities the problem arises when fear or Nostalgia keeps you from Letting Go you assume that losing something means failure but in reality insisting on maintaining what should be released drains your energy and stalls you relationships that no longer nurture you habits that harm rather than help or goals misaligned with your values are weighty anchors by not letting go you block the new experiences or relationships that might be waiting for you fear of change is often the biggest obstacle however stoicism teaches that fearing the uncontrollable is a waste the solution is conscious Detachment recognizing whether something still benefits your life this doesn’t mean casting everything aside impulsively but being honest in assessing what truly adds value now by releasing what no longer serves you you open space for the new trust this process Letting Go may be uncomfortable at first but it’s vital for growth this Liberation not only removes unproductive burdens but also better equips you for life’s uncertainties you accept that change is constant by embracing the cyclic nature of life you realize every ending is also a beginning Letting Go creates space for improvement allowing you to move forward more lightly unencumbered by the past stoicism reminds us to be grateful for past experiences but not bound by them Embrace change as part of life’s flow and Free Yourself for new possibilities aligned with who you are today five arrival is not the end of the journey reaching a goal is a moment many and anticipate representing commitment and effort but here lies a subtle Pitfall complacency stoicism emphasizes that life is not about arriving at a final destination but continually pushing onward learning and tackling new challenges if you treat each achievement as the end you risk stagnating that moment of Triumph can quickly morph into a starting point for decline if you stop seeking ways to grow viewing arrival as a final Point limits your potential you may allow routine and Habit to overshadow the effort that brought you success worse complacency renders you vulnerable to change because life doesn’t stand still even if you do the stoics taught that reality is in constant motion if you’re not moving forward you risk slipping backward avoiding stagnation means seeking new challenges Marcus Aurelius often reflected on how personal progress is never complete each Victory should be a stepping stone not a peak it’s not about Perpetual dissatisfaction but recognizing there’s always more to learn more to become by setting new goals aligned with your values you maintain motivation and constant growth small goals approached consistently can refresh your perspective and keep you progressing in the end the most important realization is that success is not a permanent state it is maintained by ongoing development if you stand still what you’ve achieved May fade stoicism frames life as an unending journey toward virtue no matter how many Milestones you pass there is always more to discover this perspective guards you from complacency and inspires continuous self Improvement life isn’t defined by reaching a fixed goal but by the continuous process of becoming a better person at every step six purpose as the engine of life purpose gives life Direction and meaning it motivates you to rise each day with clarity about what and why you are doing something if you lack purpose it’s easy to be pulled by the noise of the world living by others expectations or ceaselessly chasing external validation stoicism teaches that existing without a firm sense of purpose is akin to captaining a ship with no Rudder a drift and easily swayed by currents you can’t control without a defined purpose distractions multiply you worry more about what others are achieving or you question whether you’re doing enough this un un certainty can make you feel lost as though your efforts have no real impact and when you look for meaning in the recognition of others you depend on forces beyond your control often leading to frustration and anxiety the solution begins with honest introspection identify your talents passions and what truly motivates you the stoics taught that everyone has a unique role in life something only they can contribute it’s not about finding a perfect or grandiose Mission but about aligning your actions with what you truly value ask what makes me feel fulfilled how can I serve others a purpose that benefits both you and the world is especially powerful when it is well defined each action gains significance transforming random activity into steps toward a bigger goal a life Guided by purpose does not mean everything comes easily but obstacles become part of the journey not insurmountable crises every new challenge is a chance to reaffirm your commitment learning and growing along the way equally external distractions lose their sway you stop living for others opinions because you know that you’re goal is aligned with something deeper your values and sense of contribution in the end purpose bestows daily life with depth you need not rely on external validation you find gratification in simply advancing along your path purpose-driven achievements don’t hinge on superficial benchmarks but on the real difference they make in your life and others the resulting motivation Springs from within fuel in resilience against adversity embracing purpose is an act of Courage that anchors you to what truly matters it protects you from aimlessness and keeps you focused on What’s significant day in and day out seven value time as a limited resource time is our most precious resource yet also the one we squander most every second lost is irretrievable money can be regained but time time spent is gone forever stoicism instructs us to handle time as a valuable commodity worthy of careful attention but we often spend it carelessly on trivial distractions procrastination or obligations that yield little real value recognizing life’s brevity is crucial because every wasted moment is an opportunity missed we often waste time unknowingly letting fleeting crises or others demands govern our schedule stoicism urges us to take control by focusing only on the essential senica asserted that we do not have too little time we simply waste too much distracted by non-essential Pursuits we lose sight of genuine goals when the day ends we wonder why we made no progress on what truly matters the REM is to learn to prioritize not everything that seems urgent is vital you must identify tasks and commitments that significantly impact your long-term aims and values placing them above short-term Pleasures or trivial errands this requires discipline because it is easy to chase quick wins or immediate satisfactions but letting ephemeral desires govern your schedule leaves you flat wering being mindful of the present moment is another vital aspect life occurs Here and Now yet we often ruminate on the past or project into the future missing the fullness of each day stoics practiced being present avoiding useless regrets or fears Marcus Aurelius wrote act as if each day were your last a powerful reminder that we should invest our energy meaningfully and find satisfaction in each fleeting moment additionally valuing time involves learning to say no to commitments misaligned with your goals to relationships that sap your energy and to habits offering no growth refusing unproductive demands is an act of self-respect affirming your time’s importance this boundary setting both preserves energy and clarifies what you intend to accomplish recognizing time’s limits shouldn’t provoke anxiety but determination each day presents a fresh chance to become who you want to be to grow and to positively shape the world around you when you recognize how fleeting life is you become more deliberate devoting your hours to what truly resonates with your purpose by embracing stoic wisdom you stop viewing life as endless and start seeing every moment as precious each Act becomes intentional and the result is a more focused fulfilling life eight build habits in line with your goals habits form the Bedrock of any significant transformation according to stoicism your character is shaped not by isolated grand gestures but by daily actions repeated consistent instantly each habit positive or negative builds the structure of your life if your habits align with your aspirations you move a little closer to the reality you envision each day if not you drift away from your objectives without realizing it setting out to construct robust habits starts with defining clear goals know where you want to go so you can identify the actions needed in your routine without Clarity it’s easy to get lost in life’s business decide on your priority if you aim to improve your health create Habits Like balanced eating regular exercise and sufficient rest if your goal is professional growth dedicate time daily to enhance your skills or knowledge next begin with small steps the stoics valued gradual Improvement senica said that nothing sign ific happens overnight but through steady consistent effort aim for tiny changes you can maintain easily if you want to read more commit to five pages a day if you plan to meditate start with just 2 minutes these modest steps build momentum and encourage persistence track these steps whether via an app or a simple notebook to measure progress and stay accountable effective habits res result in profound transformation not only externally but internally gradually your identity reshapes itself if you routinely meditate you adopt the self-image of a calm person if you consistently exercise you identify as someone who values Health this shift in identity strengthens your resolve facilitating more changes over time habits aren’t just tasks they Define who you are becoming stoicism teaches focusing on what you can control your daily actions you cannot foresee every future twist but you can create a lifestyle that supports your objectives by choosing habits in sync with your goals your actions become deliberate Guided by your values the cumulative effect of these small daily choices is considerable each day you lay Another Brick In the foundation of the life you desire nine design your destiny in 5 years you will be in a different place from where you are now the key question is will that new place be the result of conscious decisions or sheer inertia for the stoics the future is not something that simply arrives but something you build day by day each choice no matter how trivial plays a part in shaping your life’s direction if you don’t design your destiny circumstances others expectations or your own fears will do it for you and when you live aimlessly you usually end up somewhere you never intended to be take a hard look at the road you’re on and project where it’s leading if you continue on the same track where will you be in 5 years people often find themselves in an happy future because they never pause to reflect on their trajectory Marcus Aurelius and other stoics advocated constant self-examination ensuring your life is Guided by your values rather than random external forces negligence is the greatest Hazard to a worthwhile Destiny avoiding responsibility procrastinating important tasks or seeking Comfort over effort can unravel your life’s structure this decline not only sabotages your external achievements but also harms self-esteem knowing you aren’t doing your best can lead to demotivation and dissatisfaction stoicism’s remedy is to act with discipline even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient purposeful action guards against carelessness forming the basis for a consciously crafted future this means accepting total responsibility even though not everything changes instantly don’t seek miraculous Transformations focus on consistent Daily Progress senica taught not to wait for the future to Grant your wishes but to build them in the present each day you choose action over procrastination you invest in a better tomorrow stoicism also reminds us there are no valid excuses to avoid starting the future will come and your decisions today dictate whether you face it with pride or regret if you let excuses lack of time not feeling ready or being too late paralyze you you yield your power to fear and inertia but if you seize control deciding where you want to go you become the architect of your fate this doesn’t mean everything will be perfect some external Force remain uncontrollable but you’ll be ready to respond designing your destiny isn’t about predicting every detail of what lies ahead it’s about choosing how you’ll act by working on yourself cultivating constructive habits and aligning each step with your goals you lay a resilient Foundation the future might be unpredictable but your character and preparation let you adapt and thrive D in 5 years you’ll be the sum of decisions you make now will you shape your life intentionally or let chance and negligence Define it the choice is yours and the time to act is now 10 mentalize your growth a growth mindset propels development in every aspect of life stoicism stresses that what truly matters isn’t what happens to you but how you interpret and respond to it a growth mindset reframes successes and failures as opportunities to learn and progress when you adopt this view every experience even painful or disappointing ones can push you toward becoming a stronger version of yourself challenges are inevitable whether through triumphs or disappointments but it’s how you use them that shapes your path if you celebrate an achievement as a final destination you risk complacency stoicism reminds us that success shouldn’t be a stopping point but a marker on an ongoing Journey if you fail don’t view it as the end but as a chance to re-evaluate and emerge wiser each obstacle can catalyze A New Path so long as you hold on to the proper perspective maintaining a growth mindset demands living in the present and seeing each day as a fresh opportunity to improve dwelling on what you’ve already done can lead to arrogance fixating on past mistakes can result in guilt or stagnation Marcus aelius advised focusing on what you can do now to become better this approach preserves humility amid success and resilience amid failure it is also crucial to realize that if your personal growth doesn’t keep Pace with any external gains like wealth or status those gains will eventually recede the mindset and skills that brought you to one level aren’t guaranteed to sustain you for the next continuous adaptation is necessary to keep evolving and remain strong in an Ever Changing World finally stoicism shows us that real growth is an inside job it’s not about Gathering possessions or accolades but cultivating discipline wisdom and virtue within when you concentrate on internal development external success becomes a byproduct instead of the main goal this perspective Fosters stability and purpose even in unpredictable circumstances success or failure doesn’t Define you rather your capacity for Learning and adapting at each stage of life does by keeping a growth mindset you free yourself from limiting beliefs every step forward however small fuels your motivation proving to yourself you can continually improve over time these small steps amass into radical transformation reshaping your external outcomes and how you see life ultimately the growth mindset reveals the genuine success lies not in a fixed destination but in a life lived in continuous Evolution always learning always striving to be better 11th set clear and realistic goals defining clear and realistic goals is among the most valuable steps to steering your life effectively when you have specific goals your focus intensifies and your energy channels toward what truly matters stoicism in encourages us not to squander time and effort on meaningless Pursuits well-defined goals lend structure and Direction allowing each action to feel purposeful and Progressive vague goals like saying I want to improve or I want to be a better person lack Direction they do not provide any tangible method or timeline for Action such imprecision leads to frustration or feeling stuck stoicism underscores acting with intention and building up steadily instead of ambiguous plans specify what you want to achieve for instance I will write 500 Words a day or I will practice a new language skill daily for 15 minutes concrete steps clarify your path and keep you accountable a vital stoic principle is that significant achievements materialized through small consistent efforts senica and Marcus aelius emphasized patience and methodical progress understanding that growth occurs one step at a time break your larger goals into smaller tasks that you can tackle daily or weekly each time you achieve one of these smaller Milestones you build confidence and forward momentum fueling the motivation to pursue bigger goals when you translate your Ambitions into practical steps you eliminate excuses for procrastination you know exactly what to do each day which prevents drifting aimlessly by focusing on achievable tasks you reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed as you regularly hit these smaller targets you see measurable progress this positive feedback loop strengthens perseverance setting goals is a powerful exercise in self-direction transforming what could be random activity into deliberate action the stoics remind us that genuine progress is not measured solely at the finish line but throughout the journey it does not matter how slow the pace is as long as you move consistently in the right direction converting goals into actionable steps provides a road map ensuring every M contributes to a future of growth and fulfillment over time these small steady achievements shape your life’s narrative aligned with your values and your vision of who you want to be setting goals is a powerful exercise in self-direction transforming what could be random activity into deliberate action the stoics remind us that genuine progress is not measured solely at the finish line but through throughout the journey it does not matter how slow the pace is as long as you move consistently in the right direction converting goals into actionable steps provides a road map ensuring every moment contributes to a future of growth and fulfillment over time these small steady achievements shape your life’s narrative aligned with your values and your vision of who you want to be when we reflect on the stoic teachings about perseverance we begin to see that every aspect of our day becomes an opportunity for Progress rather than a random sequence of events by deciding what we want from life we set the trajectory that will carry us through challenges with a sense of calm determination each morning we can remind ourselves of what we aim to accomplish and why it matters this practice of self-remembrance keeps our priority is sharp preventing us from being lured Off Track by distractions or fleeting whims a clear path forward does not suggest perfection in fact the stoics often emphasize that errors are inevitable they viewed mistakes not as final verdicts on our ability but as lessons to guide us when you have a specific goal such as learning a new skill developing a healthier lifestyle or cultivating a more patient mindset mistakes become valuable data they reveal areas to improve and sharpen our methods instead of letting errors fuel discouragement the stoic approach is to accept them as part of the journey you adjust refine your strategy and continue onward this continual refinement brings a sense of humility that tempers any inflated Pride if a small success tempts you to relax your goals remain there as reminders of the bigger picture victories are not end points they are Milestones that give you a boost of confidence and clarify your capability with each success no matter how minor you realize you can indeed make progress and that recognition feeds your next Endeavor confidence gradually replaces self-doubt not because you are free from mistake but because you see that each misstep can be redeemed through persistence yet it is not merely about ticking boxes on a list the stoics always called attention to the inner transformation that parallels outer achievement if you were striving to build self-discipline for instance the daily challenge might involve Rising early to exercise reading instead of browsing social media or learning to say no to commit ments that do not serve your purpose these outward behaviors slowly shape your character teaching you to govern impulses and maintain a sense of direction over time the external discipline becomes internal strength you no longer rely on sheer willpower for each decision you begin to embody the virtues you once had to force yourself to practice this is the deeper significance of aligning action with goals you cultivate a mind that recognizes the difference between short-term pleasure and long-term fulfillment the stoics understood that chasing temporary desires without any guiding principle leads to chaos but a life anchored by purpose and guided by tangible goals Fosters Serenity you become more resilient when external events do not match your plans because your sense of progress is not reli on immediate gratification you measure your life by how steadfastly you align with your values and objectives not by how smoothly everything unfolds that calm resilience is one of the greatest Gifts of stoic thought when life inevitably presents obstacles illness financial troubles conflicts in relationships you have a reference point that keeps you steady your goals might need revising or your path might pivot but the practice of focusing on what genuinely matters endures instead of succumbing to frustration or despair you adapt you remind yourself that setbacks are part of the natural order and what matters most is how you choose to respond even if you must take a detour your underlying intention Remains the Same to grow in wisdom and character make making continuous effort towards something meaningful yet a pitfall arises if we interpret goal setting too rigidly the stoics did not Advocate stubborn attachment to specific outcomes rather they encouraged us to concentrate on our internal commitment and the actions under our control if you become so fixated on a particular result that you cannot adapt to changing realities you risk unnecessary frustration flexibility is crucial you do all you can putting your best effort into the tasks that lead toward your aim while understanding that external factors can shift a project May Fail or an opportunity may vanish but your growth does not vanish with it you can always respond to new conditions with the same integrity and purpose that guided you initially this balance between dedication and Detachment can feel paradoxical on one hand you are fully invested in your goal giving your utmost energy on the other hand you remain ready to adapt if fate intervenes the stoics resolve this Paradox by focusing on what they could control their will attitude and actions outcomes though often influenced by our efforts can never be be fully guaranteed recognizing this teaches us to embrace diligent work without tying our self-worth exclusively to the final result it allows an element of mental peace amid uncertainty for you know your efforts are rooted in virtue rather than conditional on external success when adversity arrives this mindset becomes a shield against despair you might lose a job face rejection or struggle with with illness if you have trained yourself through smaller challenges it becomes second nature to navigate larger ones with a degree of composure you will be disappointed yes but not paralyzed you have practiced seeing obstacles as part of life’s flow not as personal injustices this perspective frees up emotional energy that might otherwise be lost to anger or resentment it transforms crisis moments into tests of your resolve and Clarity we often Overlook how much mental energy is wasted on unproductive emotional turmoil it is natural to feel the sting of a setback but the stoics remind us that we do not have to feed that Sting with endless rumination instead once we acknowledge the pain we can pivot toward problem solving or acceptance to remain in lamentation is to surrender Ender time and emotional balance by choosing to take a constructive step no matter how small we shift our Focus toward regaining control of our thoughts and actions this practice does not suppress emotion but channels it into purposeful movement forward an integral part of this process is self-awareness something Marcus aelius exemplified in his meditations he constantly examined his own judgments asking if they were rooted in truth or if they stemmed from bias or fear in the same way we can scrutinize our assumptions about our ability to reach a goal or overcome a problem often the limitation is not in the goal itself but in our own belief that we cannot adapt learn or persevere by challenging these beliefs we create space for growth each time we prove to ourselves that we can handle more than we suspected our concept of our own potential expands self-awareness also helps us monitor the alignment between our declared aims and our daily conduct it is easy to say we want something like a healthier body a more flourishing career or deeper relationships but then act contrary to that desire if we repeatedly skip the gym avoid crucial work or neglect quality time with loved ones we are acting in opposition to our stated goals such inconsistencies create internal conflict we sense we are betraying our own intentions which erod self-trust bringing awareness to these behaviors allows us to correct course we do not have to wallow in guilt we simply acknowledge the discrepancy identify the reasons behind it and gradually realign our actions the stoics were realists about human nature they did not expect Flawless consistency at all times instead they recognized we have moments of weakness doubts and lapses in discipline the key in their view was not to demand Perfection but to maintain a steady trajectory toward Improvement this approach is forgiving but also firm you do not berate yourself endlessly for a slip up nor do you adopt a LAX attitude that excuses every failing rather you gently but persistently nudge yourself back on track reaffirming the goals you have chosen and the rationale behind them that rationale or why behind each goal is essential without a compelling reason our enthusiasm Fades when difficulties arise but if the aim is tied to our deepest values such as the desire to be kinder to leave a positive impact on our community or to elevate our own mental and physical health then even hardships feel purposeful we can withstand challenges because our motivation is not superficial it comes from a profound internal alignment with every step forward we sense that we are inhabiting our principles more fully and that sensation sustains us through discomfort goals that spring from genuine values also Safeguard us from chasing Illusions sometimes we set objectives based on external pressure social comparisons or fleeting fantasies the stoics would caution that these aims lack substance they may bring temporary excitement but they do not fulfill Us in any enduring sense by repeatedly checking your intentions asking whether a particular goal resonates with your core beliefs you protect yourself from devoting time to Pursuits that ultimately mean little to you this honest inquiry requires courage because it may lead to confronting the gap between what we say we want and what actually matters to us such an internal audit might reveal that some of our Ambitions are distract fractions in Disguise perhaps we chase a certain status symbol because we think it will earn respect but in reality we care more about authentic relationships and meaningful work by discarding the false goal we free up energy to invest in what truly enriches us this process can be uncomfortable as it often involves challenging L held assumptions yet the reward is a clearer more more purposeful life purpose and goal setting do not exist in a vacuum they intersect with every area of our daily experience for instance if your purpose includes fostering stronger relationships each day becomes a chance to practice active listening empathy and patience you do not wait for grand gestures to demonstrate your commitment the small consistent acts like making time for a loved one offering help or withholding judgment in a heated moment accumulate into profound personal growth similarly if you aim to cultivate greater self-reliance each moment of mild discomfort or problem solving is an exercise ground you learn that you can handle more than you anticipated and do not need external crutches to navigate life stoicism with its practical orientation encourages such micr level action rather than ruminating endlessly on lofty ideals the stoic approach is to test ideas in the real world through your daily routines and interactions if for example you decide to become less reactive under stress you practice pausing before responding when minor irritations arise over time these small experiments add up forging a new habit of composure you might still lose your temper occasionally but the frequency diminishes as you train the mind to handle pressure differently observing that progress Fosters confidence that larger changes are also possible in this sense the stoic journey is never finished even seasoned practitioners acknowledged they were Works in progress each day is an opportunity to refine your approach the humility in inent in that stance prevents stagnation you remain open to new insights and willing to adjust your methods such adaptability is vital for long-term success because life itself is fluid goals that made sense a year ago might need recalibration now situations shift opportunities emerge or fade and personal priorities evolve embrace faing this dynamism means you are never rigidly attached to any one path but you never lose sight of your overarching purpose this harmony between stability and change lies at the heart of stoic wisdom stability comes from your core values the intangible principles that anchor your sense of self change arises from the external world and your evolving understanding of what steps best serve those core values by keeping values constant while remaining flexible in methods you navigate complex realities without losing your internal Compass you can shift strategies quickly without feeling you have betrayed yourself because your deeper motivation Remains the Same as you continue along this path of purposeful living a notable transformation occurs in your relationship with time instead of feeling that Time Slips away aimlessly you begin to experience each day as a canvas on which you paint your chosen priorities you understand that every hour allocated to trivial Pursuits is an hour not invested in what genuinely matters this recognition brings urgency but also a sense of gratitude for the opportunities the present moment offers you see that your life is shaped Moment by moment Choice by choice and that you you have more influence over it than you previously realized you also become more Discerning about what you allow into your mental space if a conversation or activity does not align with your values or goals you are more inclined to limit or avoid it this is not selfishness it is self-respect you realize that your life is finite and you alone are responsible for how you use it whether that means limiting your time on social media being selective about entertainment or politely declining certain social invitations the key is to remain mindful of how each choice impacts your broader Mission people around you might notice changes in your behavior or mindset some may admire your discipline or Clarity While others might misunder understand or criticize it the stoics would remind us that we cannot control others reactions only our own adherence to what we believe is right criticism Might Sting but if your intentions are solid and your conscience is clear you can bear it without letting it derail your progress on the contrary feedback positive or negative can be sifted for any useful Insight then incorporated or discarded as needed living in this manner Fosters a sense sense of Integrity that resonates through all facets of life you start to develop self trust because you consistently act in alignment with your chosen Direction This self trust is not arrogance it is the quiet confidence that you can rely on yourself to do what needs doing when confronted with significant challenges like a major career shift family crisis or personal setback you enter the situation armed with a track record of smaller victories you know you can adapt persist and Find meaning in struggle that knowledge does not eliminate fear but it places fear in perspective preventing it from dominating your decisions this approach to life also subtly shifts your definition of success the stoic perspective is that success is not about Applause or material gain but about living honorably growing in virtue and contributing positively to the world around you if you adopt that Outlook then even if your external circumstances are modest you can still feel a deep sense of satisfaction you know you have been consistent with your values you have developed resilience and you have given your best to each Endeavor this inner sense of accomplishment cannot be taken away by changing Fortune unes paradoxically when you focus Less on conventional success and more on steady personal growth you may find that external achievements follow more naturally your diligence reliability and clear sense of purpose become evident to those around you opportunities might arise because people sense you are someone who can be counted on yet even then you remain wary of letting praise or recognition become your new source of self-worth you appreciate the positive feedback but keep your eyes on the real prize the ongoing development of your character and the meaningful contributions you can offer over time this Clarity of purpose and consistent effort can Elevate not just your own life but the lives of those in your orbit you become a source of stability someone who can offer perspective and guidance when others are lost in confusion or anxiety through empathetic listening and well-considered advice you might help colleagues friends or family to see past short-term chaos and realign with what truly matters to them stoicism is inherently social in this regard while it emphasizes personal responsibility it also acknowledges our interdependence as human beings each day thus becomes an act of service to yourself in nurturing your potential and to others in exemplifying a thoughtful purposeful existence this service does not require grand gestures it can manifest in small acts of kindness responsible work habits respectful communication or simply maintaining a positive attitude intense situations the Ripple effects of these behaviors can be profound setting a tone for how people around you relate to each other in a world fraught with anxiety and distraction your steady presence can act as a reminder that another way of living is possible yet it is important to remember that no one is immune to setbacks no matter how committed they are to their goals you may face days or even Seasons where you lose motivation where the tasks ahead feel too daunting or tedious and where your faith in your ability to succeed waivers during these times it helps to recall your initial reasons for setting the goals the progress you have already made and the knowledge that perseverance often triumphs where sheer Talent does not the stoics placed great value on the virtue of perseverance because it is accessible to everyone no matter your natural gifts or external resources you can always choose to persist if motivation remains elusive consider adjusting your goals to more manageable segments or seeking support from someone who understands your journey the stoics never suggested that self-reliance equated to isolation mentors peers or friends can offer perspective and encouragement the act of voicing your struggles to someone you trust can help clarify the inter internal obstacles you are facing in discussing them you might discover that your challenge is a universal part of growth rather than a personal failing such realizations can rekindle your willingness to press on in the broader tapestry of life these moments of self-doubt can become catalysts for deeper self- understanding they force you to ask why you’re on this path and whether your commitment remains genuine if the answer is still Yes you find renewed Vigor to continue if the answer changes you may need to Pivot your direction either outcome represents progress because it Springs from conscious reflection rather than passive acceptance the stoic view is that life’s value emerges from living with awareness intention and adaptability the consistent thread weaving through all of this is the idea of of deliberate Choice from the moment you awake you make choices that either align with your goals or undermine them stoics like epicus constantly reminded their pupils that our greatest power lies in our faculty of

    choice we cannot dictate external events but we can shape our reactions and decisions the more we exercise this faculty consciously the more freedom we experience it becomes a joyous realization that while you cannot control the world you can control how you engage with it this sense of agency often leads to a deeper gratitude for life itself even challenging circumstances reveal themselves as arenas for the practice of Virtues like courage patience and compassion you come to see that a Smooth Life devoid of problems might not cultivate these strengths at all adversity teaches us lessons that Comfort cannot thus each day whether difficult or easy becomes precious carrying within it the seeds of further growth in appreciating each moment’s potential you naturally reduce the habit of complaining or longing for a different set of conditions when you start living this way you might notice a softening in how you view others recognizing your own struggles to improve you get gain empathy for the struggles of others rather than immediately condemning someone’s failings you might see a reflection of your own Journey this empathy does not negate accountability or standards rather it informs a more constructive approach to dealing with conflict or disappointment you can maintain a Firm Stance on what is Right without dehumanizing those who Heir such a balanced Outlook often diffuses tension and paves the way for more effective communication in parallel you likely develop a more nuanced appreciation for Success both yours and that of others seeing how much work perseverance and introspection are involved in reaching any worthy goal you do not reduce another’s Triumph to Mere luck you understand the discipline behind it and that Fosters respect rather than Envy similarly when you attain a goal you do not dismiss it lightly or attribute it solely to Natural Talent you know the road you walked and that awareness keeps you grounded in gratitude and humility as your goals evolve you keep the stoic perspective that the journey itself is an ongoing practice you celebrate Milestones but you never fully arrive at a final state of perfection each achievement reveals new possibilities new questions and new areas to refine you become comfortable with this endless nature of growth realizing that it is part of the human condition the pursuit of wisdom and virtue is by Design never ending that understanding does not lead to fatigue but rather to acceptance that life is a series of chapters each with lessons to impart in times of rest or celebration you can reflect on how far you have come stoicism does not deny the pleasure of well-earned respite however you balance enjoyment with mindfulness rather than indulging blindly you Savor rewards while aware of their transient nature this approach prevents overindulgence and the emotional hangover that can follow you can fully appreciate the moment without clinging to it secure in the knowledge that life’s EB and flow will continue you this awareness of impermanence further underscores the urgency of living intentionally because you recognize that all states good or bad will change you are encouraged to use the present moment wisely whether that means tackling a challenging project engaging in a meaningful conversation or simply resting productively your choice is fueled by the knowledge that every moment counts there is no room for complacency but also no need for panic because you trust the process of consistent value driven effort thus returning to the theme of goal setting it becomes clear that while external objectives shape your path the true Harvest is internal development each purposeful action trains your mind and fortifies your character you become someone who can handle disappointment without collapsing who can manage success without becoming conceited and who can interact with others from a place of genuine respect and empathy the mundane tasks of daily life become a spiritual exercise in discipline patience and Clarity stoicism’s practicality emerges in everyday routines whether it is how you manage your finances your nutrition your work habits or your relationships you strive for coh between what you do and what you claim to Value you neither wallow in fear of Errors nor assume everything will magically work out you simply do your best in each task remain open to learning and trust that consistent effort yields growth when setbacks happen and they will you treat them as part of The Grand Design of self-improvement not as signals of defeat eventually you begin to observe a shift in how you perceive challenges they no longer feel like disruptions in otherwise idilic life but rather essential elements of the journey itself each challenge is an invitation to test and enhance your virtues this does not mean you welcome pain but it does mean you see pain as an inevitable and instructive aspect of human existence as your mindset evolves you might find that what once appeared daunting now seems manageable even if still difficult confidence comes not from a naive belief in your invincibility but from experience in overcoming adversity shaped by stoic principles an added benefit of all this internal work is a growing sense of contentment or at least equilibrium you may still have goals Ambitions and Passions but you are not perpetually agitated or desperate rather you act from a state of relative calm secure in the knowledge that your progress is underpinned by reasoned choices outside events can still unsettle you temporarily but your underlying stability is not easily shaken this kind of contentment is quite different from complacency as it coexists with a drive for further growth it is an acceptance of life’s vicissitudes grounded in the confidence that you are prepared to meet them over time as your focus and discipline grow you might realize that you have far more potential than you initially assumed the small changes in your routine or mindset compounded over months or years produce significant results this cumulative effect might even surprise you revealing capacities you never guessed you possessed such Revelations are often humbling as they highlight how easily we underestimate ourselves when not Guided by a coherent philosophy of self-improvement in line with stoic thought it is also beneficial to periodically revisit the ultimate purpose behind your goals are they still serving your highest values have your circumstances changed in a way that necessitates new priorities this periodic reflection ensures that you do not stray into mechanical pursuit of a once relevant objective that no longer suits your present reality life is fluid and your focus should adapt as you evolve however throughout these shifts the underlying stoic virtues wisdom courage self-control Justice Remain the Bedrock if you maintain this practice you will likely notice that your own transformation in influences those around you perhaps friends begin asking for your perspective on handling stress or colleagues seek advice on discipline and time management in such moments you can share not just superficial tips but the deeper philosophical framework that undergirds your actions you can illustrate how clear goals Guided by deeper values lead to a fulfilling life one resilient in the face of hardship and measured not just by outcomes but by Integrity that sense of contribution to others well-being further validates your efforts stoicism encourages Harmony between self-improvement and communal well-being by being an example of calm determination you implicitly show others that a different way of living is possible you do not need to preach or impose your views your conduct speaks volumes it is in small consistent gestures like handling conflict with Grace demonstrating kindness in tense situations or openly admitting mistakes that the stoic Spirit reveals its real world power eventually you may find that you have woven a life that while not free of adversity is profoundly purposeful and rich in meaning each day presents an unfolding narrative that you actively co-author with with your choices you can look back on past struggles with gratitude understanding how they honed your character you can face the future without debilitating worry secure in your capability to respond well to whatever arises the sense of direction provided by your goals merges with the adaptability championed by stoic wisdom resulting in a balanced Humane and enduring way of living if at any point you falter recall that stoicism does not expect robotic constancy instead it offers a toolkit for returning to your Center a moment of reflection a written meditation or even a brief pause in the midst of chaos can realign you with your core values each time you regain that alignment you reinforce the neural and emotional Pathways that keep you grounded repetition forms habit and habit shap Apes your destiny as you proceed in this manner you might look upon everyday life with fresh eyes ordinary chores social interactions and professional tasks become fields of training for stoic discipline whether you are washing dishes writing reports or negotiating difficult conversations you see an opportunity to practice presence patience and purposeful action over time these moments accumulate into a substantial store of inner strength you develop not just the ability to survive life storms but to face them with a measured confidence and even at times a sense of Peace in a culture where impatience distraction and superficial Pursuits abound your steady commitment to stoic inspired goals sets you apart you become a quiet outlier who does not Chase every whim your contentment does not hinge on Trends or the latest gadget and your mental equilibrium does not crumble at every inconvenience this difference may make you seem unusual but it also Fosters a deep respect from those ATT tuned to recognize authentic steadiness you offer a living Counterpoint to the frenetic pace of Modern Life suggesting that there is indeed an alternative a life Guided by introspection virtue and deliberate goals such a life does not isolate you from others rather it connects you more deeply and honestly you listen with genuine attention speak with more careful consideration and respond with empathy rather than quick judgment by understanding your own struggles to maintain discipline and Clarity you understand the struggles of others this Common Ground allows compassion to flourish it also o enables you to hold others accountable without contempt recognizing that we all Wrestle with the same fundamental Tendencies toward distraction ego and fear naturally challenges will remain human relationships are complex and external pressures can surge unexpectedly but your grounding in stoic principles and consistent practice of setting and pursuing meaningful goals give you a framework to handle crises without losing yourself this does not mean you will never feel stressed or upset rather you recover faster because you have a point of reference you know how to check in with your values recalibrate your plans and continue with renewed Clarity each time you do so you strengthen a self- reinforcing cycle adversity strikes you apply stoic practices you emerge emge stronger and thus the next adversity feels more approachable in the grand scheme the stoic path is not about achieving a perfect emotional state but about nurturing a resilient spirit and a purposeful mind this Spirit can withstand the inevitable disappointments and heartbreaks that accompany being alive it does not seek to avoid pain at all costs but to endure it wisely finding lessons within it does not Chase pleasure as the highest good but welcomes pleasure as a natural byproduct of living in harmony with virtue and reason the equilibrium that emerges from this balance lends a sense of quiet fulfillment a type of happiness that is not Tethered to external highs reflecting on your own progress you see how each carefully chosen goal each small daily effort contributed to this overarching sense of wholeness goals were never just items on a checklist they were catalysts for internal transformation you realize that the discipline you use to dread has become second nature that the patience you once struggled to maintain is now easier to summon and that the distractions that once pulled you astray have lost much of their power you still have work to do everyone does but you carry a calm assurance that Improvement is always within your reach you might also find that the benefits of this way of life reverberate beyond your immediate circle by interacting with others from a place of grounded calm and purpose you may Inspire them to question their own assumptions or to adopt more thoughtful habits without preaching or judging your own example can become a spark that lights a similar process of self reflection in those around you though you cannot force anyone to change you can embody an alternative mode of being that some might find worth exploring this is how stoic teachings combined with clear realistic goals shape not only individual Destinies but communities each person who Embraces these ideas and practices them sincerely contributes to a shared atmosphere of reason empathy and focused effort over time the cumulative effect of multiple individuals living this way can lead to more harmonious environments be they in families workplaces or social Gatherings conflict still arises but it is managed with clearer heads and calmer Hearts projects and collaborations proceed with mutual respect as people learn to appreciate the discipline and dedication in one another in your personal Journey you come to appreciate that every decision every hour every moment of reflection is an investment in a future you are co-creating instead of fearing the unknown you meet it with a blend of curiosity and preparedness each new day can be welcomed with a sense of gratitude as it offers fresh possibilities to refine your character and serve a purpose greater than than yourself this approach neither idolizes the future nor clings to the past but finds a compelling reason to engage with the present wholeheartedly ultimately the path of stoic inspired goal Pursuit unites introspection with action humility with ambition and patience with persistence in so doing it transcends the simplistic notion of success as purely EX external achievements a genuinely successful life as viewed through the stoic lens is one where your actions consistently reflect your deeper values your mind remains poised even in turbulence and your heart remains open to empathy and connection the tangible goals you set are instruments for chiseling your character into its best form and every step you take on this path is its own reward rich in lessons and quietly potent in its transformative power through consistent application of stoic philosophy through the daily pursuit of goals aligned with your core principles you gradually converge with the person you aspire to become this is not a flashy dramatic process it is subtle layered and deeply personal Others May notice glimpses a greater composure under stress a a warmer presence in relationships a steady determination that does not waver with circumstances yet the most profound shifts happen within you in the silent dialogues between your reason and your will in the private moments where you choose discipline over indulgence or reflection over distraction and so the process continues day after day Moment by moment you make a plan you Define it through practice you learn from your shortfalls and you celebrate your advancements each time you remember that the stoics in all their wisdom never claimed to have all the answers but rather invited us to test these Concepts in the laboratory of our own lives in doing so you deepen your own understanding of what it means to live well you see that the Synergy between clear goals and stoic tenants offers an evolving blueprint one that adapts to your changing circumstances and knowledge yet remains rooted in an ethos of Integrity resilience and meaningful engagement with life embracing this path you come to realize that every moment even the seemingly trivial carries the potential for growth you recognize that genuine fulfillment does not spring from a single Grand achievement but from the ongoing cultivation of a balanced purposeful existence while your specific goals May transform over time shifting as you gain new insights or as life demands fresh responses the underlying Spirit of striving to be the best version of yourself remains unaltered it is this spirit this enduring commitment that grants you a sense of peace and purpose in a world that often appears chaotic and aimless you stand at the Confluence of possibility and choice aware that the future is shaped by your present actions the stoic philosophy offers not a rigid formula but guiding principles that illuminate each step you may sometimes wander off track but these principles remain a North star patiently beckoning you back to the path of self-realization in the final analysis it is less about the external accolades you accumulate and more about the internal Harmony you cultivate it is about living a life so deliberate and sincere that whether Fortune Smiles or frowns you stand ready to greet each day with a steady mind and an open heart this in essence is the stoic promise that by clarifying our intentions diligently working toward our goals and staying true to virtuous principles we Forge a life of deep resonance and authenticity in such a life frustrations become teachable moments successes become reasons for gratitude rather than vanity and relationships flourish through mutual respect and understanding what begins as a personal quest for self-improvement ultimately radiates outward affecting others in ways you may never fully comprehend yet that Ripple of positive influence subtle as it might be is part of the silent Legacy you build when you decide to live with unwavering purpose when you look back on your life with this perspective you will see a mosaic of challenges and triumphs heartbreaks and joys each piece contributing to the overall Tableau of growth you will recognize that your consistent effort grounded in stoic insights wo these disperate elements into cohesive Narrative of meaning this realization instills a sense of gratitude for you did not merely float through existence passively absorbing whatever fate brought instead you engaged with life’s unfolding drama as a conscious participant learning to shape both your inner world and your external actions with wisdom and intention and so each day as you revisit visit your plans and your progress remember that you are part of a Timeless tradition that includes some of the greatest thinkers in history men and women who wrestled with the same human dilemas they left behind not rigid Dogma but a living breathing philosophy meant to be adapted and employed Every Act of discipline or courage you undertake every moment of reflection or Temperance is a modern echo of ancient wisdom by living in this Spirit you keep that wisdom alive not just for yourself but for all who observe your example thus what begins as an effort to direct your energy more purposefully to stop wasting time or to Achieve Personal Milestones evolves into a lifelong journey of character development in this journey the seemingly ordinary merges with the sublime the individual merges with the universal and practical methods fuse with Transcendent ideals the stoics teach that our time here is fleeting yet brimming with potential for significance it falls to each of us to decide how we will use that precious resource whether we will Fritter it away or harness it for continuous growth and the betterment of the world around us in your own life continue to articulate what matters most to refine your actions in harmony with those values and to greet each fresh challenge as a chance to evolve let your daily steps however small reflect the larger story you wish to tell about who you are and what you stand for do this consistently and over time you will discover that you have stopped merely existing and started truly living you will sense a profound alignment between your internal convictions and your external choices and in that alignment lies the essence of what it means to live well according to the stoic tradition even if the world around you remains chaotic you become the calm within the storm the individual who does not Bend to every shifting wind but navigates with a sense of purpose and inner steadiness whether Fortune brings Triumph or adversity your core remains steady for you have taken the time to cultivate it when you reflect upon your journey you can do so with quiet Pride knowing that your life was not left to chance but shaped by deliberate will Guided by reason and tempered by self-awareness and in those reflective moments you realize you have become precisely what you once aspired to be someone who embodies the stoic path in each daily act and in The overarching Narrative of a life aimed at truth and virtue even as you reflect on how far you have come you begin to notice that the real Treasures of this path are often subtle and internal moments of clarity sudden insights into your own behavior gradual easing of mental turmoil and a growing acceptance of life’s transience you might find yourself pausing in the midst of a previously frustrating situation and remembering all you have studied and practiced there is a brief silence in your mind before a more mindful response arises in that space you see tangible evidence that you have changed this realization Spurs you onward providing hope that greater Harmony is possible not only within yourself but also in the larger tapestry of Human Relationships there is also the widening perspective that comes with ongoing reflection as you cultivate a deeper sense of purpose you may feel a kind of serene Detachment from the trivial or fleeting this does not mean you avoid life’s ordinary Pleasures or day-to-day tasks but rather that you engage with them more consciously recognizing how short-lived everything is instead of lamenting that impermanent you embrace it when shared laughter with a friend dissolves into quiet or when a beautiful sunset Fades into dusk you feel gratitude that you were there to witness it the stoic lens helps you see that every moment carries significance precisely because it is impermanent this perspective invites you to invest more compassion in your daily interactions knowing that we are all subject to loss and change you soften your stance in conflicts you grow more curious about people’s stories and more patient with their flaws when someone is rude or distant you can pause and consider the complexities that might shape their behavior rather than immediately taking offense your empathy expands not because you are obligated to be nice but because you see the common Humanity that ties us all together such empathy does not mean tolerating harmful conduct but it does allow you to engage others from a place of strength and understanding rather than reflexive hostility or fear over time you may find that certain concerns that once devoured your energy now have a diminished hold on you status for example may become less relevant if you see that external accolades while Pleasant do not equate to genuine peace of mind you do not condemn achievement but you no longer place your self-worth in the hands of people’s opinions or institutional titles the quality of your character becomes more valuable to you than the quality of your resume this shift can be both liberating and surprising especially if you once believed that success in society’s eyes was your primary measure of fulfillment likewise your relationship with material possessions can transform while you may still appreciate comfort and Beauty you grow aware that No Object however luxurious can guarantee lasting peace you begin to measure worth in terms of utility meaning or the value it brings to your life’s Mission if something does not serve a constructive purpose or bring genuine Beauty and gratitude to your experience you may feel less attached to it this doesn’t manifest as asceticism for its own sake but rather as a preference for Simplicity where Simplicity supports your deeper aspirations with fewer unnecessary possessions cluttering your physical and mental space you move through life more freely it is also possible that you come to terms with certain regrets or painful memories in a more profound way the stoic perspective teaches you not to deny sorrow or heartbreak these are undeniable parts of the human Journey but to see them as events that can be understood integrated and eventually transmuted into wisdom rather than being haunted by what once went wrong you decide to learn what you can from it perhaps the event taught you the value of resilience or it deepened your ability to empathize with others in similar Straits you may not label the pain as gift but you recognize that pain can carry Insight if you are willing to examine it this acceptance gradually dissolves the bitterness that often accompanies unhealed wounds emotional maturity also flourishes as a result of consistent self-examination in relationships for instance you learn to communicate feelings Without accusing or condemning the stoic approach to emotions ackn is that while you cannot always control how you initially feel you have significant influence over your subsequent thoughts and actions if anger flares you do not ignore it or lash out instead you give yourself a moment to observe the anger breathe and respond constructively this might mean stating your boundaries calmly asking for clarification in a dispute or if necessary stepping away to regain composure such responses reduce the destructive Fallout that unbridled anger can create thereby preserving meaningful connections or at least preventing further damage similarly you come to understand that sadness and loneliness common human emotions can be invitations to reconnect with what is Meaningful instead of feeling trapped by melancholic moods you dig deeper into to their causes you ask whether something in your life is out of alignment maybe you have neglected important relationships or drifted from a creative Pursuit that once nourished you sadness may be signaling a real need for change by investigating that need you transform the emotion from a debilitating Force into a catalyst for growth stoicism teaches neither the suppression of emotion nor Indulgence in it but rather a mindful channeling of emotional energy toward insights that can spark positive shifts as you continue to refine this practice you may notice a growing sense of coherence or Unity within yourself actions words and beliefs begin to align more consistently the internal contradictions that once plagued you perhaps saying one thing while doing another or espousing certain virtues yet acting contrary to them gradually diminish this alignment Fosters self-trust when you realize you can rely on yourself to honor your word and uphold your own principles you walk through life with an understated but palpable confidence this sense of coherence also makes it easier to navigate moral dilemmas or complex decisions because you have a stable internal Compass external achievements may still play a role in your life you might reach certain professional Milestones or realize personal dreams the difference is that your relationship with those achievements is transformed you enjoy them and appreciate their value without letting them become the sole determinant of your worth if they are lost due to unforeseen circumstances the blow is softened by the knowledge that your true word is internal and independent of external conditions you grieve the loss if necessary but it does not annihilate your sense of self this resilience is what the stoics hope to instill an ability to remain upright in the face of life’s vicissitudes maintaining inner stability no matter how Fortune’s wheel may turn concurrently you become more intentional about how you handle time you realize there is is no guarantee of Tomorrow this realization used to provoke anxiety but now it can awaken gratitude and urgency in equal measure you feel motivated to ensure that your day reflects your deeper convictions perhaps you start each morning with a brief reflection reminding yourself of the values you wish to embody or reviewing specific goals that anchor you this ritual need not be elaborate its power lies in reinforcing the awareness that today is an Irreplaceable fragment of your lifespan with that perspective procrastination loses much of its Allure you may also refine the art of saying no when it protects your priorities recognizing that time is precious leads you to be more selective about commitments instead of scattering your efforts in fear of missing out you focus on a few meaningful projects or relationships that genuinely align with your purpose this selectivity does not make you selfish on the contrary it allows you to give your best where it truly matters half-hearted commitments serve neither you nor those who depend on you by practicing mindful discernment you can invest energy in Pursuits that resonate with your core values leading to deeper satisfaction and more effective contributions to the world another transformation might be a gradual release of the fear of judgment where you once tailored your words and actions to match others expectations you now feel Freer to express yourself genuinely this authenticity does not mean disregarding politeness or kindness it simply means you are not contorting yourself to gain approval people’s opinions both good and bad become less controlling constructive feedback is welcome but you no longer hinge your identity on external praise or criticism this self-possession is attractive to others as well often earning genuine respect where mere people pleasing would have earned only fleeting nods in times of quiet Solitude you might contemplate the Paradox that while this path demands deliberate effort it often results in a less forceful more organic engagement with life you take discipline action daily cultivating habits reflecting on your behavior setting new goals but these efforts actually ease much of the friction you used to experience by clarifying your intentions you no longer waste time in internal battles about what to do or whether you are on the right track the narrower bandwidth of conflict frees you to immerse yourself more wholeheartedly in each experience the discipline therefore becomes a catalyst for greater Freedom a concept that once seemed contradictory the freedom you discover includes the capacity to remain open to Life’s Beauty even as you strive to improve yourself you begin to notice Small Wonders in your environment a tree swaying in the wind the laughter of children the warmth of a conversation these moments previously overshadowed by mental clutter or constant worry now feel like Treasures that deepen your sense of being alive a Hallmark of stoic maturity is precisely this balanced stance actively shaping your destiny while still marveling at the wonders of existence you see Order and Chaos coexisting and you realize your own Consciousness is a bridge between the two eventually the practice also clarifies your stance on service whether you are a leader in an organization a team member a parent or a friend you start to see that genuine leadership grows from self-mastery and empathy you hold yourself accountable to a standard of fairness and integrity inspiring others not by force or manipulation but by a stable presence that demonstrates possibility you may also find new ways to engage in your community Guided by a sense of social responsibility that stoics like Marcus Aurelius often emphasized you do not try to fix the world single-handedly but you do what is within your capacity no matter how modest to improve the lives of those around you conversations gain depth when you bring a stoic lens to them rather than rushing to voice your own Viewpoint you listen more carefully your curiosity extends to the thought processes behind others opinions and you may find your own ideas subtly shaped by their perspectives the stoic approach to conversation is not to conquer the discussion but to Foster Mutual understanding even when disagreements arise the aim is to learn or to offer Insight rather than to dominate this approach can diffuse tensions and encourage cooperation a skill that benefits all areas of life from personal relationships to professional collaborations your internal dialogue too becomes more skillful where once you might have criticized yourself harshly or indulged in self-defeating scripts you now practice more constructive self-talk this is not about blind positivity or ignoring flaws it is about recognizing that growth requires supportive inner language if you stumble you address the lapse factually what went wrong why it happened and how to avoid it next time without layering on unnecessary shame the Newfound kindness toward yourself parallels the empathy you extend to others forming a cohesive attitude that Fosters progress instead of stagnation day by day as these shifts accumulate you sense that the line between practice and life begins to blur your mindset once a discrete module of training starts to be the default setting from which you operate this does not imply an absence of challenges or negative emotions but it does indicate a sturdier platform from which to meet them you handle setbacks with greater composure handle successes with deeper gratitude and handle routine moments with more awareness what was once an effort to live by stoic principles is gradually absorbed into your natural way of being yet humility remains you are aware that this process is never truly finished Pride or complacency can creep in at any time the stoics taught that vigilance must be constant because human nature is prone to drift toward easier paths especially when it feels comfortable or when it external pressures Mount however the sense of purpose you have cultivated helps you stay alert to these pitfalls when you notice yourself drifting you can realign before you stray too far it is much like steering a ship small Corrections applied consistently keep you on course rather than waiting until you are hopelessly lost when you reach moments of reflection perhaps at the end of a difficult week or year what stands out is not a list of accomplishments but the character you have formed you see evidence of Greater patience under provocation resilience after failures and compassion for both your own and others weaknesses these qualities you realize cannot be purchased or simply willed into existence they are the fruit of lived experiences each one handled with increasing awareness and they pave the way for a life that is Meaningful not because it was free of struggle but because it met struggle with dignity and an open heart you also begin to see the reciprocity between your growth and your capacity to nurture growth in others friends might ask for your perspective on managing stress colleagues might notice your calm intense situations and loved ones may find comfort in your presence without intending to you become a quiet Mentor someone whose example illustrates that steady self-improvement is both possible and worthwhile but you do not take on arrogance about this role if anything it deepens your commitment to keep learning because you see how your choices indirectly affect those who look to you for inspiration or support as the months and years progress you may encounter entirely new types of challenges aging shifts in relationships career Transformations or even Global crisis each stage calls for new applications of the same underlying principles adaptability becomes the skill that weaves everything together you grow Adept at transferring your stoic mindset into novel domains whether that means coping with physical limitations as you grow older or pivoting in your career when an industry changes this adaptability Is Not Mere flexibility it is a resilience grounded in knowing that external forms May shift but your internal Compass remains constant at some point you might reflect on the essence of Freedom Early in your journey you might have seen Freedom as the absence of constraints the ability to do what you pleased now you likely see it differently you see Freedom as the power to choose your response to maintain Integrity regardless of circumstance and to shape your inner experience even if the outside world constrains you this is freedom in its purest sense an inviable Refuge that no external condition can strip away you might be physically limited financially underst strain or socially at odds but you retain sovereignty over your perspective and actions this understanding of Freedom Fosters both courage and serenity courage arises because you are no longer Paralyzed by what others might think or by the possibility of failure you recognize those as transient factors compared to the enduring importance of living in alignment with your values Serenity accompanies this courage because the demands of the world while important do not Define your peace you can engage wholeheartedly with life’s challenge without letting them erode your inner calm this Union of courage and serenity is one of the sublime Gifts of stoic practice an abiding strength tempered by gentleness sometimes you notice that you increasingly appreciate the simplest forms of Joy a moment of silence in the early morning a cup of tea with a friend a fleeting glimpse of Natural Beauty on your commute these small Joys might once have been overlooked but now they are recognized as essential to your well-being they remind you that while striving is crucial so is the capacity to pause and Savor this capacity is itself a discipline learning not to raise past life’s gentle offerings in pursuit of grander things by practicing presence you integrate the stoic virtues into every every day living discovering richness in places you once deemed mundane on the other hand even as you become more at peace you remain aware of the many injustices sorrows and conflicts that plague The Human Condition stoicism does not promote naive optimism or complacency in the face of suffering it does however encourage you to address hardships where you can grounded in the understanding that your sphere of control is limited but still meaningful you intervene in ways that reflect your values be it through volunteering activism mentorship or simple acts of kindness rather than succumbing to despair or cynicism you use your skills and resources to be a positive force even if modestly so in a world that can feel overwhelming this balanced Outlook often grants you a more nuanced interpretation of moral responsibility you recognize that you cannot solve every problem but you can act with Integrity within your sphere of influence you cannot ensure Universal outcomes but you can ensure the quality of your efforts the peace that emerges from this perspective has a profound stability it is not the Peace of denying suffering but the piece of accepting your role and fulfilling it to the best of your your ability without being crushed by the weight of All That Remains beyond your reach as the years pass you might find your sense of identity shifting to something less rigid you stop clinging to an image of who you should be based on external standards and instead focus on who you are becoming in each present moment this fluid identity can be liberating as you are no longer chasing labels or pinned down by an overly restrictive self-de instead you see yourself as an evolving entity shaped by ongoing learning and reflection always carrying the potential to unfold New Dimensions of ability and understanding occasionally you pause and Marvel at how a once seemingly daunting philosophy has integrated so seamlessly into your life what began as reading a few lines from senica or epicus or as an attempt to curb anger or anxiety has blossomed into a sustained lifestyle it has informed your relationships your work ethic your emotional range and your broader sense of purpose in many respects it has given you back to yourself a self more aligned less fragmented more resilient you see that this journey while deeply personal resonates with universal human aspirations for meaning stability and self-realization the practice of reflection the stoics might call it journaling or nightly review or morning meditation becomes a treasured Habit in those quiet sessions you evaluate the day that has passed or the day ahead you note where you fell short and where you succeeded you plan how to refine your approach sometimes you revisit key stoic tenants reminding yourself that anxiety stems from projecting into the future or that anger often arises from unmet expectations you recall that you can transform these emotions by examining your assumptions each reaffirmation helps you internalize these lessons more deeply giving them a living place in your Consciousness in that ongoing dialogue with yourself it’s not unusual to feel a palpable sense of awe at the human capacity for self-transformation you realize that much of what once seemed fixed your temperament your reactions your habits has shifted through consistent practice it Dawns on you that your mind once filled with chatter and impulses has been shaped into a more disciplined Ally still capable of wandering but more easily guided back to the path this metamorphosis inspires gratitude both for the wisdom passed down through ancient texts and for your own effort in applying it at times you share your thoughts with close companions or mentors who appreciate your journey these conversations can illuminate angles you had not considered deepening your Insight they also reinforce a sense of community reminding you that you are not alone in this Quest historically stoics would gather to discuss philosophy critique each other’s reasoning and encourage each other’s growth you may form a modern equivalent of such a community small but dedicated Bound by mutual respect and shared curiosity in that environment honest feedback replaces shallow praise and genuine support replaces competitiveness eventually you may discover that teaching or guiding others about these principles accelerates your own growth whether through formal mentoring occasional workshops or simple casual exchanges articulating what you have learned forces you to clarify your own understanding you see your blind spots more clearly refine your explanations and remain Vigilant about hypocrisy knowing that nothing undermines credibility like preaching ideals you do not practice this Dynamic of teaching and learning forms a virtuous circle where your own commitment deepens in tandem with your ability to illuminate the path for someone else if you ever face a major crisis be it the loss of a loved one a sudden personal illness or a large-scale social upheaval you discover How Deeply your stoic training has been integrated the initial wave of shock or grief may be intense but beyond it lies a foundation of steadiness you find that you have the tools to process your emotions to seek solace in the knowledge that you can control only your own responses and to Anchor yourself in whatever deeper meanings you hold dear the crisis becomes a Proving Ground revealing that your daily efforts were not in vain they built a structure of resilience that stands strong when the storm hits hardest such experiences might also expand your empathy further having faced profound challenges yourself you understand the vulnerable moments of others you refrain from offering Hollow platitudes recognizing the complexity of suffering instead you offer presence and sincerity perhaps sharing the tools that helped you remain composed in doing so you become a pillar for others not through dramatic heroics but through the genuine embodiment of the stoic values you have painstakingly cultivated these moments reaffirm your sense of purpose that personal growth is never just about you but about the collective tapestry of lives your example touches over the course of this journey the fundamental stoic Insight that much of our distress comes from mistaken judgments rather than raw events becomes a guiding principle you witness repeatedly how rethinking a situation can change your emotional landscape a predicament that initially seemed devastating appears solvable or less threatening after a mindful pause you learn not to accept your first interpretation as gospel truth this skill gives you a psychological agility that can keep you from spiraling into despair or anxiety iy you remain aware that nothing out there in the external world has the power to Define your inner State unless you grant it such power likewise you refine your sense of gratitude not a forced optimism but an Earnest recognition of life’s gifts however small in the hustle of modern existence gratitude can easily be overshadowed by complaints and desires for more but if you integrate gratitude as a daily practice perhaps by recalling three things you are thankful for at the end of each day you shift your mental focus toward abundance rather than lack this is not to deny what you lack or the legitimate struggles you face but to balance them with an awareness of blessings over time this shift in perspective Fosters a kind of humble Joy a feeling that even a trials life offers innumerable moments of Grace This Joy also manifests in your approach to challenges where once an arduous task felt oppressive you now see it as an arena to test your capacity and refine your skills whether it’s tackling a demanding work project or learning a new discipline you embrace the difficulty you recognize that pushing through discomfort can yield both external results and internal fortitude the line between Challenge and reward blurs because the very Act of wrestling with adversity becomes rewarding in itself it shapes you into someone more capable and confident sometimes you will fail you will encounter undertakings that outstrip your abilities or you will miscalculate a situation you will disappoint yourself or others yet the stoic practice of resilience teaches you to see failure as a teacher you ask what can I learn from this instead of wallowing indefinitely in guilt or shame you Channel your disappointment into a refined strategy or a deeper self-awareness you might identify a skill Gap you can fill a misconception you held or a flaw in your approach by reframing failure this way you convert what could have been a final defeat into a stepping stone for new growth

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Mangione’s Whirlwind Day: New Charges and Federal Prison CNN Report – Study Notes

    Mangione’s Whirlwind Day: New Charges and Federal Prison CNN Report – Study Notes

    Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the murder of a healthcare CEO, had a dramatic day involving multiple court appearances across two states. New federal charges were filed against him, adding to existing state charges, based on evidence from a notebook expressing hostility toward the insurance industry and detailing plans to harm a CEO. His transfer to a notorious federal prison in New York concluded a day that included a helicopter ride and a highly publicized perp walk. Legal challenges to the multiple charges are expected, raising concerns about double jeopardy.

    Luigi Mangione Case Study Guide

    Short Answer Quiz

    1. What were the initial charges against Luigi Mangione in Pennsylvania, and how did they relate to his arrest?
    2. Describe the significant change in Mangione’s demeanor from his initial arrest to his court appearances in Pennsylvania.
    3. Explain the purpose of Mangione’s “perp walk” and its departure from typical federal suspect processing.
    4. What is the primary reason cited by authorities for the heavy security surrounding Mangione’s transfer to New York?
    5. Summarize the key details revealed in the federal complaint regarding the notebook allegedly found in Mangione’s possession.
    6. What is the potential maximum penalty that Mangione could face in the federal case, and who must approve that penalty?
    7. Why was the simultaneous state and federal prosecution of Mangione deemed unusual by his defense attorney?
    8. Describe the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) and why its conditions might be concerning for Mangione.
    9. What does the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York believe was Mangione’s motivation for shooting Brian Thompson?
    10. Detail the locations Mangione travelled to and the means of transportation used on his eventful Thursday.

    Short Answer Quiz – Answer Key

    1. The initial charges in Pennsylvania were for forgery and firearms violations. These charges stemmed from a 3D-printed firearm and false ID allegedly found in his possession when he was arrested at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
    2. Initially, Mangione was seen yelling a message to the media when being escorted by police. However, during his Pennsylvania court appearances, he appeared calm, answering questions with “yes” or “no”, and even smiled at times, in contrast to his previous outburst.
    3. The “perp walk” was a public display of Mangione, surrounded by armed officers, as he was transferred from the helicopter to a vehicle. It was seen as a way for law enforcement to show they had “got their guy,” and it was a departure from normal processing to show the symbolism of the arrest.
    4. The heavy security around Mangione was due to public support and security concerns, not just because authorities feared an attack on Mangione, but they worried about attempts to free him from law enforcement.
    5. The federal complaint detailed a notebook that expressed hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives, with a specific reference to wanting to “wack” an insurance CEO. This notebook contained entries referencing planning and research done.
    6. Mangione could face the death penalty if found guilty on the federal murder charge. The decision to seek the death penalty would ultimately need to be approved by the U.S. Attorney General.
    7. Mangione’s attorney deemed the simultaneous state and federal prosecution unusual and raised constitutional and statutory double jeopardy concerns, suggesting the federal charges were “piled on” to an already substantial state case.
    8. The Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) is a federal jail in Brooklyn notorious for its poor living conditions, making its selection concerning for Mangione since other well known defendants have been held there.
    9. The acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York believes Mangione’s actions were driven by a “misguided attempt to broadcast his views” and not for the purposes of starting a debate, but rather murder.
    10. On Thursday Mangione traveled from jail in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, to Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to the Altoona-Blair County Airport, to Islip, New York, to the Wall Street heliport, and finally to a federal prison in Brooklyn. He traveled by police vehicle, plane, helicopter, and black van.

    Essay Questions

    1. Analyze the factors that contributed to Luigi Mangione becoming a “quasi-folk hero” online, considering both his actions and the social context surrounding the case.
    2. Discuss the legal and ethical implications of the “perp walk” in Mangione’s case, considering its impact on due process and public perception.
    3. Evaluate the significance of the notebook found in Mangione’s possession as evidence in the federal case, and how it may shape the understanding of his motives.
    4. Compare and contrast the prosecution strategies of the state and federal governments in the Mangione case, exploring the potential advantages and disadvantages of pursuing parallel trials.
    5. Critically examine the portrayal of the Mangione case in the media, analyzing how the narrative has been framed and the potential impact on public opinion and the legal proceedings.

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • Extradition: The legal process by which one jurisdiction (such as a state or country) surrenders an individual accused or convicted of a crime to another jurisdiction.
    • Double Jeopardy: A legal principle that prohibits an individual from being tried twice for the same crime in the same jurisdiction.
    • Perp Walk: A public display of a suspect being escorted by law enforcement, often for media consumption, which can be seen as prejudicial.
    • Federal Charges: Crimes that are prosecuted under United States federal law, as opposed to state or local law.
    • State Charges: Crimes prosecuted under the laws of an individual U.S. state.
    • First-Degree Murder: The most severe form of homicide, usually defined as premeditated, intentional killing with malice aforethought.
    • Indicted: Formally accused of a crime by a grand jury, usually after an investigation has taken place.
    • Stalking: The repeated harassment or following of another person that is often considered threatening.
    • MDC: Metropolitan Detention Center, the name of the federal prison in Brooklyn holding Mangione.
    • Terrorism: The use of violence or threats to create fear, often for political or ideological purposes.
    • Wack: Slang term, in this context, means to kill someone.

    The Luigi Mangione Case: Arrest, Charges, and Public Reaction

    Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document summarizing the key themes and information from the provided text about Luigi Mangione:

    Briefing Document: Luigi Mangione Case

    Date: October 27, 2023 (Based on the text’s recency)

    Subject: Review of Luigi Mangione Case: Arrest, Charges, and Public Reaction

    Summary: This briefing document outlines the events surrounding the arrest and subsequent legal proceedings of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. It highlights the extraordinary day of court appearances and transfers, the charges he faces, and the public reaction, including unusual expressions of support. The document also covers the key evidence presented in court and the unique legal and public relations challenges facing the prosecution.

    Key Themes & Ideas:

    1. The Whirlwind Day: The narrative focuses heavily on the logistical and theatrical nature of Mangione’s transfer from Pennsylvania to New York. The day involved:
    • Multiple court hearings in two states.
    • Transportation via car, plane, and helicopter.
    • A heavily escorted “perp walk” in Manhattan, complete with a conspicuous police presence and the participation of NYC Mayor Eric Adams.
    • This extensive and public handling of Mangione’s transfer is presented as unusual for federal cases, suggesting an effort to project an image of justice being served and possibly responding to public support for the suspect.
    1. Multiple Charges & Jurisdiction: Mangione faces a complex legal battle involving both state and federal charges:
    • New York State: First-degree murder as an act of terrorism, among 11 total charges.
    • Pennsylvania: Forgery and firearms charges related to his arrest.
    • Federal: Four new charges, including stalking, murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense, potentially carrying the death penalty.
    • The state and federal cases will proceed in parallel, creating potential legal complexities concerning double jeopardy.
    1. Motive and Ideology: Investigative findings suggest a motive driven by anger against the health insurance industry and “corporate greed.”
    • A NYPD intelligence report indicated that Mangione was driven by anger against the health insurance industry
    • A notebook in his possession contained “several handwritten pages that express hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives in particular.”
    • An entry in his notebook on Oct 22 referred to an upcoming investors conference as “a true windfall” and described the intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company at the conference.
    1. Public Reaction & “Folk Hero” Status:
    • Despite the serious charges, Mangione has gained a surprising degree of online support, even achieving a “quasi-folk hero status” from some. This appears rooted in public frustration with the health insurance system and possibly his striking physical appearance.
    • Evidence of public support was seen outside the court, where people held signs for Mangione and wore green hats like the character from Mario video game.
    • This support is cited as a potential reason for the heavy police presence during his transfer, reflecting security concerns that individuals might try to attack him or try to free him from law enforcement.
    1. The Notebook as Key Evidence: The notebook found in Mangione’s possession is crucial, containing:
    • Hostility towards the health insurance industry and wealthy executives.
    • Planning for the attack.
    • Evidence showing the attack was planned as far back as August.
    • Specific intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company at an investor conference.
    • The entries indicate that Mangione had been doing his research on UnitedHealthcare for sometime and had a specific time frame that he was acting within.
    1. Legal Strategy & Challenges:
    • Mangione’s defense is challenging the simultaneous state and federal charges, raising double jeopardy concerns.
    • Defense attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo described the federal decision to add charges to an already serious state case as “highly unusual.”
    • The defense acknowledges the seriousness of the charges by stating “We are ready to fight these charges in whatever court they are brought.”
    • The spectacle of the “perp walk” is criticized as potentially prejudicial, diverging from standard federal procedure.
    1. Federal Prosecution Perspective: Edward Kim, acting United States Attorney, emphasized that the shooting was “murder” and not a debate. He said that Mangione shot Thompson “in a grossly misguided attempt to broadcast Mangione’s views across the country.” This highlights the prosecution’s aim to counter any narrative that might justify Mangione’s actions.
    2. Custody & Future Proceedings:
    • Mangione is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, a facility known for its poor conditions.
    • Federal prosecutors asked that Mangione be detained, and the defense attorneys did not seek bail but reserved the right to later.

    Key Quotes:

    • “The federal government’s reported decision to pile on top of an already overcharged first-degree murder and state terror case is highly unusual and raises serious constitutional and statutory double jeopardy concerns.” – Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Defense Attorney
    • “It was almost Hannibal Lecter-esque.” – Defense attorney Jeremy Saland, on the heavily escorted transfer of Mangione.
    • “We wanted to personally be here to show the symbolism of leading from the front,” – Mayor Eric Adams, on why he and the police commissioner were at the “perp walk.”
    • “The security around Mangione today is because of what they’ve been seeing in terms of the public support for him and their security worries about somebody not trying to attack him, but to try and free him from law enforcement,” – CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller.
    • “contained several handwritten pages that express hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives in particular.” – Federal complaint description of the notebook.
    • “the details are finally coming together” and that, “I’m glad in a way that I’ve procrastinated” because it allowed time to “learn more” about UnitedHealthcare” – Excerpt from Mangione’s notebook
    • “a true windfall” and described the intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company at the conference – Excerpt from Mangione’s notebook
    • “in a grossly misguided attempt to broadcast Mangione’s views across the country.” – Edward Kim, acting United States Attorney, on the motives of Mangione.
    • “But this wasn’t a debate, it was murder.” – Edward Kim

    Conclusion:

    The Luigi Mangione case is highly complex, involving serious charges, jurisdictional issues, and a striking public response. The prosecution faces the challenge of countering narratives of justification, while the defense is contending with a public spectacle and the weight of evidence from the notebook. The case is likely to attract significant media attention as it progresses through both state and federal courts.

    The Luigi Mangione Case: A Comprehensive Overview

    FAQ on the Luigi Mangione Case

    1. Who is Luigi Mangione, and what is he accused of? Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old former high school valedictorian and Ivy League graduate, is accused of the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan. He is facing 11 charges in New York, including first-degree murder as an act of terrorism, as well as several federal charges related to stalking, murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense. He is also facing charges in Pennsylvania for possession of a 3D-printed firearm and false identification.
    2. What motivated the alleged actions of Luigi Mangione? Investigators believe Mangione was motivated by anger towards the health insurance industry and “corporate greed.” A notebook found in his possession contained entries expressing hostility towards the health insurance industry and wealthy executives. In the notebook he detailed intent to “wack” an insurance CEO at an upcoming investor conference. Some observers also describe the shooting as reflective of the public’s pent-up anger and frustration with health insurance in the USA.
    3. What was the significance of Mangione’s “perp walk” in Manhattan? The “perp walk” of Mangione from the helicopter to a black van in Manhattan was unusual. It was accompanied by a large police presence, including the Mayor and Police Commissioner, and it generated a lot of media attention. This display was seen as symbolic by law enforcement as they sought to demonstrate they had “got their guy.” The spectacle was noted as a substantial departure from typical federal suspect processing which aims to avoid prejudicial displays.
    4. What are the key details of the federal charges against Mangione? The federal charges include two counts of stalking, one count of murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense. If convicted on the federal murder charge, Mangione could face the death penalty. These federal charges arose as a result of the investigation into the alleged murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the notebook found in his possession, revealing premeditation.
    5. What is the significance of the notebook found in Mangione’s possession? The notebook provides crucial insight into Mangione’s motivations and alleged intent. It contains handwritten entries detailing his hostility towards the health insurance industry and wealthy executives. Specifically, it mentions plans to target an insurance CEO at an investor conference. The journal shows premeditation on Mangione’s part.
    6. Why is there both a state and a federal case against Mangione? There are parallel state and federal cases because Mangione is accused of violating both state and federal laws. The state case in New York involves charges of murder as an act of terrorism, while the federal case includes charges of stalking, murder with a firearm, and a firearms offense. Both jurisdictions feel they have grounds to prosecute given the crimes that occurred.
    7. Where is Mangione being held while awaiting trial? Mangione is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn. This federal lockup is known for its poor living conditions and has housed other high-profile defendants.
    8. What has been the public reaction to Mangione’s case? Mangione’s case has generated significant public interest. Some see him as a quasi-folk hero or express sympathy towards him, possibly due to frustration with the health insurance industry. Law enforcement’s concerns about potential public support for Mangione were evident in the heavy security present during his transfer to New York. However, law enforcement emphasized that the case was a murder and not a political debate.

    The Mangione Case: Timeline and Key Players

    Okay, here’s the timeline and cast of characters based on the provided text:

    Timeline of Events

    • Prior to Thursday:Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, is fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk.
    • A manhunt ensues, leading to the arrest of Luigi Mangione at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
    • Mangione is held in a jail in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, for 10 days prior to the events of this timeline.
    • Mangione is indicted on 11 charges in New York, including first-degree murder as an act of terrorism, and faces charges in Pennsylvania related to a 3D-printed firearm and false ID.
    • A notebook allegedly belonging to Mangione is recovered, revealing his hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives.
    • On August 15, a notebook entry indicates “the details are finally coming together” in regards to a plot.
    • On October 22, a notebook entry discusses an investor conference as a “true windfall” and mentions the intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company.
    • Thursday – Early Morning:Sources inform CNN that Mangione is expected to face federal charges related to the CEO’s shooting.
    • Thursday – Morning (Pennsylvania):Luigi Mangione is transported to the Blair County courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.
    • First Hearing: A hearing is held regarding the forgery and firearms charges in Pennsylvania.
    • Second Hearing: Mangione formally waives extradition to New York.
    • Mangione is escorted from the courthouse and driven to Altoona-Blair County Airport.
    • Thursday – Late Morning/Early Afternoon:Mangione boards a jet to Islip, New York.
    • Mangione is transferred to an NYPD helicopter, which flies him to a heliport in Manhattan.
    • A “perp walk” occurs, where Mangione is escorted by numerous armed NYPD officers, with Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch present.
    • Mangione is formally taken into federal custody around 1 PM.
    • Thursday – Midday:Four federal charges against Mangione are unsealed, including two counts of stalking, murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense. The government says the death penalty is possible for the murder charge.
    • Thursday – Afternoon:Mangione meets with his attorneys in a New York federal courthouse.
    • Initial appearance before Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker where he confirms he understands his rights and the federal complaint.
    • Federal prosecutors request Mangione be detained without bail; his attorneys say they will not seek bail “at the moment.”
    • The hearing ends around 3:15 PM.
    • Mangione is escorted out of the courtroom by federal marshals.
    • Mangione is transferred to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
    • After the Hearings:Edward Kim makes a statement that Mangione committed the crime in order to broadcast his views.

    Cast of Characters

    • Luigi Mangione:26-year-old former high school valedictorian and Ivy League graduate.
    • Accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
    • Driven by anger against the health insurance industry and “corporate greed”.
    • Has garnered some public support.
    • Facing 11 state charges in New York, including first-degree murder as an act of terrorism, four federal charges, and charges in Pennsylvania.
    • Brian Thompson:CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
    • Victim of the fatal shooting.
    • Karen Friedman Agnifilo:Luigi Mangione’s attorney.
    • Criticizes the existing state case and the new federal charges, raising concerns about double jeopardy.
    • Represented Sean “Diddy” Combs as well.
    • Thomas Dickey:Luigi Mangione’s attorney in Pennsylvania.
    • Asserts that everything done that day was in Mangione’s best interest.
    • Peter Weeks:
    • Blair County District Attorney.
    • Indicated that he will not push to have Pennsylvania charges heard ahead of Mangione’s New York charges.
    • Eric Adams:Mayor of New York City.
    • Present at the Manhattan heliport during Mangione’s arrival, alongside Commissioner Tisch.
    • Jessica Tisch:NYPD Commissioner.
    • Present at the Manhattan heliport during Mangione’s arrival with Mayor Adams.
    • Jeremy Saland:Defense attorney (not representing Mangione).
    • Describes the “perp walk” as “Hannibal Lecter-esque.”
    • John Miller:CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.
    • Explains that the heavy security around Mangione is due to public support and worries of potential attempts to free him.
    • Evan Pérez:CNN senior justice correspondent
    • Explains that the perp walk is a departure from typical federal suspect processing because of its potential prejudice.
    • Katharine Parker:Magistrate Judge in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse.
    • Oversaw Mangione’s initial federal court appearance.
    • Edward Kim:Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York
    • Said that Mangione shot Thompson in order to broadcast his views.

    I hope this detailed timeline and cast of characters is helpful! Let me know if you have any other questions.

    The Mangione Murder Case

    Luigi Mangione’s arrest followed the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk [1]. The incident sparked a days-long manhunt that ended with Mangione’s arrest at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania [1]. Here’s a breakdown of the key details surrounding his arrest and subsequent legal proceedings:

    • Initial Arrest: Mangione was apprehended in Pennsylvania [1]. At the time of his arrest, he was allegedly in possession of a 3D-printed firearm and a false ID [2]. These charges are being handled in Pennsylvania, but they will not be prioritized over the more serious charges he faces in New York [2].
    • Motivation: According to a New York City Police Department intelligence report, investigators believe that Mangione, a former high school valedictorian and Ivy League graduate, was driven by anger against the health insurance industry and “corporate greed” [3]. His actions have been interpreted by some as a reflection of public frustration with the healthcare system [3].
    • Charges: Mangione has been indicted on 11 charges in New York, including first-degree murder as an act of terrorism [2]. He also faces federal charges including two counts of stalking, a count of murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense [4]. These federal charges were unsealed midday on the same day he was transported to New York [2, 4]. The federal murder charge could carry the death penalty [4].
    • Court Appearances:Mangione participated in three court hearings in Pennsylvania on the day of his transfer to New York [1].
    • He waived extradition to New York during one of the hearings [5].
    • He later appeared before Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker in New York, where he confirmed that he understood his rights and the federal charges against him [6].
    • Transportation to New York: Mangione’s transfer to New York was a spectacle, involving a police vehicle, a plane, and a helicopter [1]. His arrival at the Wall Street heliport was marked by a heavy police presence and a “perp walk” that was described as unusual for federal suspects [7, 8]. The security surrounding Mangione was particularly high because of concerns about public support for him and the possibility of someone trying to free him from law enforcement [9].
    • Notebook Evidence: A notebook found in Mangione’s possession contained handwritten pages expressing hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives [10]. Specific entries included planning to “wack” an insurance company CEO [10].
    • Legal Strategy: Mangione’s attorney criticized the federal government’s decision to add charges on top of existing state charges and raised concerns about double jeopardy [11].
    • Detention: Mangione is currently being held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, known for its poor living conditions [12].

    The state and federal cases against Mangione will proceed in parallel [6].

    Mangione Federal Indictment

    The federal government has filed several charges against Luigi Mangione in addition to the state charges he is facing [1, 2]. Here’s a breakdown of the federal charges, based on the sources:

    • Specific Charges: The federal charges against Mangione include two counts of stalking, a count of murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense [2]. These charges were unsealed midday on the day of Mangione’s transfer to New York [2, 3].
    • Potential Penalty: Mangione could face the death penalty if found guilty of the federal murder charge [2]. However, it is not yet clear whether prosecutors will seek that punishment. The decision would need to be approved by the US Attorney General [2].
    • Timing: The federal charges were unsealed after Mangione had already been facing 11 state charges, including first-degree murder as an act of terrorism [2, 3].
    • Notebook Evidence: The federal complaint included details from a notebook allegedly found in Mangione’s possession [4]. The notebook contained entries expressing hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives, with one entry describing the intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company [4].
    • Legal Concerns: Mangione’s attorney has criticized the federal government’s decision to add these charges, calling it “highly unusual” and raising concerns about potential double jeopardy [1].
    • Court Appearance: Mangione appeared before Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker in New York, where he confirmed that he understood his rights and the federal charges against him [5].
    • Detention: Following the court appearance, Mangione was detained and will be held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center while awaiting trial [6].
    • Parallel Cases: The New York state case against Mangione will proceed in parallel with the federal case [5].

    The federal charges against Mangione significantly increase the potential penalties he faces and add another layer of complexity to the legal proceedings.

    The Mangione Murder: Terrorism, Healthcare, and Public Reaction

    The sources detail the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and its connection to Luigi Mangione, providing insights into the circumstances, motivations, and legal aftermath. Here’s a breakdown of the key details:

    • The Victim: Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk [1]. This targeted killing sparked a days-long manhunt for the suspect [1, 2].
    • The Suspect: Luigi Mangione is accused of the murder of Brian Thompson [1, 3]. Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania after a manhunt [1].
    • Motivation: According to a New York City Police Department intelligence report, Mangione appeared to be driven by anger against the health insurance industry and “corporate greed” [2]. The killing is described by some as reflecting Americans’ pent-up anger and frustration with the nation’s health insurance industry [2].
    • Planning: A notebook allegedly found in Mangione’s possession contained entries detailing his hostility towards the health insurance industry and wealthy executives [4]. One entry mentioned the intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company at an upcoming investor conference [4]. Another entry indicated that the “details are finally coming together” [4].
    • Charges: Mangione has been indicted on 11 charges in New York, including first-degree murder as an act of terrorism [5]. He also faces a federal charge of murder through the use of a firearm, which could carry the death penalty [6].
    • Public Reaction: Mangione’s actions, and his striking physical appearance, have given him a quasi-folk hero status online, with some offering him a sympathetic hearing due to their own healthcare insurance issues [2]. The extensive security around Mangione during his transfer to New York was in part due to concerns about public support for him and the possibility of someone trying to free him from law enforcement [7].
    • Legal Proceedings: The state case against Mangione will proceed in parallel with the federal case [8]. Mangione’s attorney has criticized the federal government for adding charges on top of the existing state charges, calling it “highly unusual” and raising concerns about double jeopardy [9].
    • Aftermath: The acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York stated that Mangione shot Thompson “in a grossly misguided attempt to broadcast Mangione’s views across the country” [10]. He emphasized that it was not a debate but murder [10].

    Mangione Court Hearings: Pennsylvania and New York

    Luigi Mangione has participated in several court hearings across both Pennsylvania and New York, related to his charges in each jurisdiction [1, 2]. Here’s an overview of the court hearings detailed in the sources:

    Pennsylvania Hearings [3]

    • Initial Hearing: Mangione first appeared at the Blair County courthouse in Hollidaysburg, wearing an orange jumpsuit and appearing clean-shaven. This hearing related to the forgery and firearms charges he faces in Pennsylvania, specifically concerning the 3D-printed firearm and false ID allegedly found in his possession at the time of his arrest [3, 4].
    • Extradition Hearing: In a second hearing, Mangione formally waived extradition to New York. He was asked by the judge if he wished to waive extradition, to which he responded affirmatively after consulting with his lawyer [3]. He appeared calm during these proceedings and answered “yes” or “no” to the judge’s questions. He also smiled and chatted with sheriff’s deputies, but mostly kept his head down and examined papers [5].
    • Defense Stance: Mangione’s attorney in Pennsylvania stated that everything done that day was in his client’s best interest, and they are ready to defend against the charges in New York and Pennsylvania [6]. The Pennsylvania District Attorney indicated that he would not push to have those charges heard ahead of Mangione’s much more serious charges in New York [4].

    New York Federal Court Hearing [7]

    • Initial Appearance: Mangione appeared before Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and khaki pants. He confirmed that he understood his rights and had seen the federal complaint against him by answering “yes” twice [7].
    • Federal Charges: The federal charges against Mangione include two counts of stalking, a count of murder through the use of a firearm, and a firearms offense [8]. These charges were unsealed midday on the day of his transfer to New York [7, 8].
    • Detention: Federal prosecutors requested that Mangione be detained, and his attorneys did not seek bail at that time but reserved the right to do so later [9]. When asked if he understood what he was accused of, Mangione responded, “Yes.” [9].
    • Legal Strategy: Mangione’s defense attorney, Karen Agnifilo, raised concerns about the simultaneous state and federal charges against her client, calling it “highly unusual” and expressing potential double jeopardy concerns, but the court stated those issues could be addressed later [9, 10].
    • Brief Hearing: The hearing lasted approximately 15 minutes. Following the hearing, Mangione was escorted out of the courtroom in shackles by two federal marshals [11].

    Key Points

    • Mangione’s court appearances have been marked by his calm demeanor and simple responses to the judges’ questions. [5, 7].
    • The hearings in Pennsylvania were focused on his extradition to New York, whereas the New York hearing focused on the federal charges and detention [3, 7].
    • The state and federal cases against Mangione will proceed in parallel [7].
    • Mangione is currently being held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center [11].

    Mangione’s High-Security Transfer to MDC

    Luigi Mangione’s prison transfer was a significant event, marked by a whirlwind of activity and high security, as detailed in the sources. Here’s a breakdown of the key aspects of his transfer:

    • Start of the Day: Mangione began his day at a jail in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where he had been held for 10 days [1].
    • Courthouse Tour: His day involved a two-state courthouse tour, including three court hearings in Pennsylvania [1, 2].
    • Pennsylvania Hearings: In Pennsylvania, he attended a hearing regarding forgery and firearms charges and then formally waived extradition to New York [3].
    • Transportation: Mangione’s transfer involved a variety of vehicles. He was driven from the Blair County courthouse to the Altoona-Blair County Airport. From there, he boarded a jet to Islip, New York, and then was transferred to an NYPD helicopter for the flight to Manhattan [4].
    • Manhattan Arrival: The helicopter landed at the Wall Street heliport, where Mangione was met by a large number of NYPD officers, creating a “perp walk” as he was moved to a black van [5]. The scene was described as “Hannibal Lecter-esque” due to the heavy security and spectacle [5].
    • High Security Presence: The heavy police presence was noted by CNN correspondent Brynn Gingras [6]. According to CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller, the level of security was due to concerns about public support for Mangione and the possibility of someone attempting to free him [7].
    • Photo Opportunity: The authorities appeared to be using the transfer as a “photo opportunity” to demonstrate that they had captured their suspect [6]. New York Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch were present to show “the symbolism of leading from the front” [5].
    • Federal Custody: After arriving in Manhattan, Mangione was formally taken into federal custody around 1 p.m. [8].
    • Federal Court Appearance: Mangione then attended a hearing at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse, where he acknowledged that he understood his rights and the federal charges against him [9].
    • Detention: Following his hearing, Mangione was transferred to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), the only federal jail in New York City [10]. The MDC is known for its poor living conditions [10].
    • Public View: Due to the fact that cameras are not allowed in federal courtrooms, the helicopter arrival may have been the last time Mangione is seen in public for some time [7].

    In summary, Mangione’s prison transfer was a complex and highly orchestrated event, involving multiple modes of transportation, court appearances, and a high degree of security due to the notoriety of his case and concerns about public support for him [2, 5, 7].

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Inkscape Essentials: Interface, Shapes, Paths, and Beyond

    Inkscape Essentials: Interface, Shapes, Paths, and Beyond

    The provided text is a detailed walkthrough of Inkscape, a free and open-source vector graphics editor. It begins with an overview of the interface, including the welcome dialog, canvas, page, toolbars, and status bar. The discussion then moves to creating and manipulating basic shapes, covering selection, resizing, rotation, coloring (fill and stroke), and stacking order using layers. A significant portion is dedicated to paths, explaining their creation with various tools (calligraphy, pencil, pen), node manipulation, converting objects to paths, and performing Boolean path operations. The text further explores visual aids like guidelines and grids for alignment and concludes with a comprehensive explanation of color management within Inkscape, including the fill and stroke dialog, gradients, patterns, the eyedropper tool, blend modes, blur, and opacity.

    Inkscape 2024 Comprehensive Guide to Vector Design

    Inkscape Deep Dive: A Comprehensive Study Guide

    Quiz

    1. What is the primary purpose of the Welcome dialog in Inkscape? Briefly describe two customizable options available in this dialog.
    2. Explain the key difference between the “canvas” and the “page” in Inkscape. How does the color of the canvas affect your final exported artwork?
    3. Describe the function of the “controls bar” in the Inkscape interface. How does its content change as you select different tools?
    4. What are “layers” in Inkscape, and why are they considered crucial for organizing complex drawings? Briefly explain how to change the stacking order of layers.
    5. Explain the function of the “selector tool” in Inkscape. What happens when you click on an object a second time with this tool selected?
    6. Describe the difference between “copy/paste,” “duplicate,” and “clones” in Inkscape. Provide a brief use case for when you might choose to use clones.
    7. What is the purpose of the “Align and Distribute” dialog? Briefly explain the concept of the “anchor” in the context of alignment.
    8. Name the three primary path creation tools in Inkscape. Briefly describe the main characteristic or best use case for each tool.
    9. What are “nodes” in Inkscape paths? Briefly describe the difference between a “corner” node and a “smooth” node.
    10. Explain the Inkscape process of converting a shape (like a rectangle) into a path. What advantage does this conversion offer for manipulating the object?

    Quiz Answer Key

    1. The Welcome dialog allows users to customize their document settings even before starting to draw, setting the stage for a successful project. Two customizable options include changing the default document size/template and adjusting the canvas appearance (like background color or dark mode).
    2. The canvas is the entire working area in Inkscape, which can be very large, while the page is the defined area that will be exported or printed. The color of the canvas is purely for visual preference during the design process and does not appear in the final exported artwork.
    3. The controls bar is a dynamic panel located at the top of the Inkscape interface that displays options and settings relevant to the currently selected tool. When you select a different tool, the controls bar automatically updates to show parameters specific to that tool.
    4. Layers in Inkscape are like transparent sheets stacked on top of each other, allowing you to organize different elements of your drawing separately. They are crucial for managing complexity by enabling you to work on individual parts without affecting others and easily control stacking order by rearranging the layers in the Layers and Objects dialog.
    5. The selector tool is the primary tool for selecting, moving, scaling, and rotating objects in Inkscape. Clicking a selected object a second time with the selector tool active changes the handles, allowing you to rotate or skew the object instead of just scaling or stretching it.
    6. “Copy/paste” creates an independent copy of an object. “Duplicate” creates a copy directly on top of the original. “Clones” create linked copies, meaning any changes made to the original object are automatically reflected in all its clones. Clones are useful for creating repeating patterns or variations of a design where consistency is desired.
    7. The “Align and Distribute” dialog is used to precisely arrange multiple selected objects relative to each other or the page. The “anchor” refers to the reference point to which other objects are aligned; this can be the first selected object, the last selected, the page, etc.
    8. The three primary path creation tools are the calligraphy tool (for organic, brush-like strokes), the pencil tool (for freehand drawing with optional smoothing), and the pen tool (for precise creation of Bézier curves and straight segments).
    9. Nodes are the anchor points that define the shape of a path in Inkscape. A corner node creates a sharp angle because the control handles on either side move independently, while a smooth node creates a flowing curve because the handles are linked and move symmetrically.
    10. Converting a shape to a path in Inkscape (using Path > Object to Path) transforms the parametric definition of the shape into a series of nodes and Bézier curves. This offers greater control over the object’s form, allowing you to manipulate individual nodes and curves to create custom shapes that go beyond the limitations of basic geometric forms.

    Essay Format Questions

    1. Discuss the importance of effective interface management in Inkscape. Explain how understanding and customizing elements like the Welcome dialog, toolbars, and panels can contribute to a more efficient and personalized workflow.
    2. Compare and contrast the different methods of manipulating objects in Inkscape, including using the selector tool with and without modifier keys, and the role of the Transform panel. Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each approach in various design scenarios.
    3. Explore the concept of non-destructive editing in Inkscape, focusing on the use of layers, clones, and path operations like difference and union. Explain how these techniques allow for flexibility and iteration in the design process.
    4. Analyze the fundamental role of paths in vector graphics software like Inkscape. Discuss the various tools and techniques available for creating and manipulating paths, and explain why understanding paths is essential for advanced design work.
    5. Evaluate the importance of precision and alignment in digital design. Discuss how Inkscape’s features such as guidelines, grids, snapping, and the Align and Distribute dialog contribute to creating accurate and visually harmonious compositions.

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • Vector Graphics: Images created using mathematical equations to define lines, curves, and shapes, allowing for scalability without loss of quality.
    • Open-Source: Software with source code that is freely available and can be modified and distributed by anyone.
    • Canvas: The entire, potentially infinite, drawing area in Inkscape.
    • Page: The defined rectangular area within the canvas that represents the final output for printing or exporting.
    • Welcome Dialog: A window that appears upon launching Inkscape, offering options to customize the document and interface.
    • Toolbar: A strip containing icons representing various tools and functions within the Inkscape interface.
    • Commands Bar: A quick access panel typically located on the right side of the interface, providing shortcuts to common actions like saving and undoing.
    • Controls Bar: A context-sensitive bar located at the top of the interface that displays options specific to the currently selected tool.
    • Color Palette: A strip of colored squares at the bottom of the interface used for quickly applying fills and strokes to objects.
    • Status Bar: A bar at the very bottom of the interface that displays information about the selected object, current tool, and canvas status.
    • Layers: Virtual transparent sheets that allow you to organize and manage different elements of a drawing independently.
    • Toolbox: The vertical bar on the left side of the interface containing tools for creating and manipulating objects.
    • Handles: Small interactive elements that appear around a selected object, used for scaling, rotating, and skewing.
    • Modifier Keys: Keys such as Ctrl, Shift, and Alt that, when held down while performing an action, alter the behavior of the tool.
    • Copy/Paste: Standard functions for creating a new, independent copy of an object.
    • Duplicate: A function that creates a copy of an object directly on top of the original.
    • Clones: Linked copies of an object; any changes made to the original are reflected in all its clones.
    • Align and Distribute: A set of tools used to precisely position and space multiple selected objects relative to each other or the page.
    • Anchor: In the context of alignment, the reference object or point to which other objects are aligned.
    • Snapping: A feature that causes objects to magnetically align with specific points, such as grid lines, guidelines, or other objects.
    • Paths: The fundamental building blocks of vector graphics in Inkscape, defined by nodes and Bézier curves.
    • Calligraphy Tool: A tool for creating brush-like strokes with variable width and style.
    • Pencil Tool: A tool for freehand drawing, creating paths that follow the mouse cursor.
    • Pen Tool (Bézier Tool): A precise tool for creating straight line segments and smooth curves using control handles.
    • Nodes: The anchor points that define the shape of a path.
    • Node Tool: A tool used to select and manipulate the nodes and control handles of a path.
    • Corner Node: A type of node that creates sharp angles in a path.
    • Smooth Node: A type of node that creates flowing curves in a path, with linked control handles.
    • Symmetric Node: A type of smooth node where the control handles are always equidistant from the node, creating balanced curves.
    • Auto-Smooth Node: A type of node where the control handles automatically adjust to create the smoothest possible curve.
    • Object to Path: A command that converts a shape (e.g., rectangle, circle) into a editable path.
    • Path Operations (Boolean Operations): A set of commands in the Path menu that allow you to combine and manipulate paths in various ways (e.g., Union, Difference, Intersection).
    • Union: A path operation that combines two or more paths into a single path, merging overlapping areas.
    • Difference: A path operation that subtracts the shape of the top object from the bottom object.
    • Intersection: A path operation that creates a new path from the overlapping areas of two or more objects.
    • Exclusion: A path operation that creates a new path from the non-overlapping areas of two or more objects.
    • Division: A path operation that cuts overlapping objects into separate paths based on their intersections.
    • Cut Path: A path operation that cuts the stroke of the bottom object where it is overlapped by the top object.
    • Combine: A path operation that groups multiple objects into a single object with multiple subpaths, retaining individual outlines.
    • Break Apart: A path operation that separates a combined object back into its individual subpaths.
    • Split Path: A path operation that separates non-overlapping subpaths within a combined object.
    • Fracture: A path operation that breaks overlapping objects into fragments based on their intersections.
    • Flatten: A path operation that removes overlapping parts of selected objects, leaving only the outermost outlines.
    • Guidelines: User-created visual aids (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines) that can be used for aligning objects.
    • Grids: A system of regularly spaced lines or dots that can help with precise alignment and spacing of objects.
    • Document Properties: A dialog where you can configure various document settings, including page size, units, and grid parameters.
    • Fill and Stroke Dialog: A panel that provides comprehensive control over the fill (interior color) and stroke (outline) of selected objects.
    • Fill: The interior color or pattern of an object.
    • Stroke: The outline or border of an object.
    • Opacity (Alpha): The degree to which an object is transparent or opaque.
    • Gradients: Smooth transitions between two or more colors.
    • Patterns: Repeating designs that can be applied as fills.
    • Eye Dropper Tool: A tool used to sample and apply colors from existing objects on the canvas.
    • Blend Modes: Options that control how the colors of overlapping objects interact with each other.
    • Blur: An effect that softens the edges and details of an object.

    Inkscape Deep Dive Briefing Document

    This document summarizes the main themes and important ideas and facts from the provided source material, which appears to be a transcript of an audio discussion or podcast episode focused on introducing and explaining the fundamentals of Inkscape.

    Main Themes

    • Inkscape as a Versatile and Powerful Open-Source Tool: The source repeatedly emphasizes Inkscape’s capabilities for both beginners and professionals due to its extensive features and flexibility.
    • “yeah that free open- source vector graphics powerhouse it’s kind of a big deal right whether you’re a design Pro or just starting out inkscape is seriously versatile”
    • Understanding the Inkscape Interface: A significant portion of the discussion focuses on demystifying the various parts of the Inkscape interface, including the welcome dialogue, canvas vs. page, toolbars, panels, and the status bar. The aim is to orient new users and highlight the customizable aspects.
    • Fundamental Vector Graphics Concepts: The briefing delves into core vector concepts like shapes, paths (including Bezier curves and node manipulation), and how they are the building blocks of artwork in Inkscape.
    • Object Manipulation: The document covers essential techniques for selecting, moving, resizing, rotating, duplicating, and cloning objects. Modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt) and their specific functions during these operations are highlighted for precise control.
    • Organization and Layer Management: The importance of using layers for organizing complex drawings and controlling stacking order is discussed in detail, including the concept of sub-layers.
    • Precision and Alignment: The source emphasizes the tools and features available for precise alignment and spacing of objects, such as the Align and Distribute panel and Inkscape’s snapping functionality.
    • The Centrality of Paths: The discussion stresses that paths are the fundamental elements in Inkscape, allowing for ultimate control over shapes and curves. Various tools for creating and manipulating paths (Calligraphy, Pencil, Pen, Node tool) are explained.
    • Path Operations (Boolean Operations): A comprehensive overview of Inkscape’s path operations (Union, Difference, Intersection, Exclusion, Division, Cut Path, Combine, Break Apart, Split Path, Fracture, Flatten) and their effects on combining and modifying paths is provided.
    • Guiding Elements (Guidelines and Grids): The briefing covers how to create, manipulate, and use guidelines and grids as visual aids for alignment and organization.
    • Color Management: The discussion extends beyond basic color selection from the palette to the Fill and Stroke dialog, explaining the various options for choosing colors, applying gradients and patterns, and controlling stroke styles. The Eyedropper tool is also highlighted for its utility in color selection.

    Most Important Ideas and Facts

    Welcome Dialogue:

    • Allows customization of the document before starting, including canvas appearance and templates.
    • “you can customize your document even before you start drawing”
    • Provides access to templates for various document types (print, video, social media, icons, etc.).
    • “templates are a lifesaver… all set up with specific dimensions like think about designing a poster or a business card instead of starting from scratch you grab a template that’s already the right size super efficient”
    • Can be re-opened via Preferences (Inkscape menu on Mac, Edit menu on Windows/Linux).

    Canvas vs. Page:

    • The canvas is the entire workspace, which can be much larger than the visible page.
    • “think of it like the the canvas is your whole workspace right it can be huge yeah the page is the part that actually gets exported printed or shared”
    • The page represents the area that will be exported or printed.
    • Canvas and page colors are for visual preference and do not affect the final artwork’s transparency.
    • “the colors of the canvas and page they don’t matter in the end just there for your eyes while you’re working when you export it’s all transparent”
    • Page size and orientation can be changed in File > Document Properties.

    Interface Elements:

    • Toolbox (left): Contains tools for drawing and editing (shapes, pens, text).
    • Commands Bar (right/top): Provides quick access to common actions (new, open, save, undo/redo, copy/paste).
    • Controls Bar (top, context-sensitive): Displays options specific to the currently selected tool.
    • “this one’s smart it changes depending on what tool you’re using”
    • Color Palette (bottom): Allows quick selection of fill and stroke colors (click for fill, Shift+click for stroke).
    • Status Bar (bottom): Displays information about the selected object, layer, zoom level, etc.

    Shapes:

    • Basic shapes (rectangles, ellipses, stars, polygons) are created by clicking and dragging.
    • Handles allow resizing and shape-specific adjustments (e.g., corner rounding for rectangles).
    • The Controls Bar offers precise control over dimensions and properties.
    • Modifier Keys:Ctrl: Constrains proportions (perfect squares/circles), snaps rotation to 15° increments.
    • Shift: Scales/rotates from the center point.
    • Alt: Context-dependent, can also snap rotation angles.

    Coloring:

    • Clicking a color in the palette fills the selected object.
    • Shift-clicking a color in the palette sets the stroke color.
    • The red ‘X’ in the palette makes fill or stroke transparent.

    Stacking Order (Z-Order):

    • Controlled by “Raise to Top,” “Raise,” “Lower,” and “Lower to Bottom” buttons in the Controls Bar when an object is selected with the Selector tool.
    • More complex control is achieved through the Layers and Objects dialog.

    Layers:

    • Organize artwork into separate, transparent sheets.
    • Order in the Layers and Objects dialog determines stacking order (top layer is in front).
    • Layers can be moved, hidden, and locked.
    • Sub-layers (created by dragging one layer onto another) allow for hierarchical organization.

    Object Manipulation (Selector Tool):

    • Click to select, click and drag to move.
    • Shift-click to add to selection.
    • Corner handles for scaling, side handles for stretching.
    • Double-click to activate rotation and skew handles.
    • Rotation Center: Can be moved to change the pivot point for rotation.

    Copying and Duplicating:

    • Copy (Ctrl+C) and Paste (Ctrl+V): Creates an independent copy.
    • Duplicate (Ctrl+D): Creates a copy directly on top of the original.

    Clones:

    • Linked copies; changes to the original are reflected in the clones.
    • “make a change to the original the Clone changes too so if I change the color of the original all the Clones change color too exactly”
    • Link can be broken via Edit > Clone > Unlink Clone.

    Align and Distribute:

    • Accessed via Object > Align and Distribute.
    • Allows for precise alignment (left, center, right, top, middle, bottom) and distribution (horizontal/vertical spacing).
    • Anchor: The reference point for alignment (first selected, last selected, biggest, smallest, page).

    Snapping:

    • Enabled/disabled with the magnet icon.
    • Objects snap to various elements (other objects, guidelines, grid, page edges, nodes).
    • Customizable snap targets via snap controls.

    Paths:

    • Fundamental building blocks of vector graphics in Inkscape.
    • “paths are the building blocks of everything in inkscape no doubt about it paths give you that ultimate level of control”
    • Creation Tools:Calligraphy Tool: For organic, brush-like strokes.
    • Pencil Tool: For freehand drawing with smoothing options.
    • Pen Tool (Bezier curves): For precise curves and straight lines using nodes and handles.
    • Paths can be open or closed. Closed paths can be filled.

    Node Tool:

    • Used to manipulate the nodes (points) that define a path.
    • Different node types (Corner, Smooth, Symmetric, Auto Smooth) control curve behavior.
    • Nodes can be moved, added (double-click on segment, or “Insert new node” button), and removed (Delete key).
    • Node types can be converted using buttons in the Node Tool’s Controls Bar.

    Object to Path:

    • Converts shapes (rectangles, circles) into editable paths, losing shape-specific handles but allowing node-level manipulation.
    • “you select your shape then go to path object to path”
    • Add Corners LP: Tool in the Node Tool Controls Bar to re-introduce and control corner rounding after converting to a path.

    Path Operations (Boolean Operations – Path Menu):

    • Union: Merges selected paths into one.
    • Difference: Subtracts the top object from the bottom object.
    • Intersection: Keeps only the overlapping areas.
    • Exclusion: Keeps everything except the overlapping areas.
    • Division: Cuts the bottom object with the top object, keeping all resulting segments as separate paths.
    • Cut Path: Cuts the stroke of the bottom object where it overlaps the top object.
    • Combine: Creates a single object with multiple sub-paths (retains individual outlines).
    • Break Apart: Separates a combined object into its individual sub-paths (closed sub-paths may fill).
    • Split Path: Separates non-overlapping sub-paths.
    • Fracture: Breaks overlapping objects into fragments.
    • Flatten: Removes overlapping parts, leaving only the outermost outlines.

    Guidelines:

    • Created by dragging from the rulers (View > Show/Hide > Rulers).
    • Horizontal (from top ruler), Vertical (from left ruler), Diagonal (from ruler corners).
    • Can be moved, rotated (Shift+drag, Alt+drag around origin), and locked (Edit menu or lock icon).
    • Double-click to open the Guideline dialog for advanced settings.
    • Deleted by dragging back to the ruler or selecting and pressing Delete.
    • All guidelines can be deleted via Edit > Delete All Guidelines.

    Grids:

    • System of lines for alignment (View > Page Grid to toggle visibility).
    • Customizable in File > Document Properties > Grids (spacing, origin, rotation, axonometric grids).
    • Objects can snap to grid lines (if snapping is enabled).
    • Minor grid lines appear at higher zoom levels.

    Color Management (Fill and Stroke Dialog – Object > Fill and Stroke):

    • Fill Tab: Controls the fill color (solid, gradients, patterns), opacity (alpha). Supports various color models (HSL, RGB, CMYK).
    • Stroke Paint Tab: Controls the stroke color using the same methods as fill.
    • Stroke Style Tab: Controls stroke width, dash patterns, markers, join style, cap style.

    Gradients: Linear, radial, and conical gradients can be applied as fills with control over colors and transitions.

    Patterns: Built-in and custom patterns can be used as fills with adjustable scale, orientation, and offset.

    Eyedropper Tool:

    • Selects colors directly from the canvas (click for fill, Shift+click for stroke).
    • Can drag to get an average color from an area.

    This detailed briefing document captures the core concepts and essential information presented in the provided Inkscape introductory material. It aims to provide a structured overview for anyone looking to understand the fundamentals of this powerful vector graphics editor.

    Frequently Asked Questions About Inkscape

    1. What is Inkscape and why should I use it? Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics editor, making it a powerful and accessible tool for both design professionals and beginners. Its versatility allows you to create a wide range of visuals, from simple shapes to complex illustrations, logos, and diagrams. Being vector-based means your artwork can be scaled to any size without losing quality, making it ideal for both web and print projects.

    2. What is the difference between the canvas and the page in Inkscape? Think of the canvas as your entire workspace in Inkscape – a potentially vast area where you can create and manipulate objects. The page, on the other hand, is the defined rectangular area that represents what will be exported or printed. You can draw anywhere on the canvas, but only the content within the page boundaries will be part of your final artwork. The canvas and page background colors are for your visual preference while working and do not affect the exported image.

    3. How can I customize the Inkscape interface to suit my workflow? Inkscape offers several ways to customize the interface. The welcome dialog allows you to set initial preferences like canvas appearance, icon size, and enable dark mode. You can rearrange toolbars (like the toolbox on the left and the commands bar, often on the right), and panels can be shown or hidden as needed. The controls bar at the top dynamically changes options based on the currently selected tool. While keyboard shortcuts can be customized, it’s generally recommended for new users to stick with the defaults initially to build muscle memory.

    4. How do I create and manipulate basic shapes in Inkscape? Inkscape provides tools for creating common shapes like rectangles, ellipses, stars, and polygons, found in the toolbox. To create a shape, select a tool and click and drag on the canvas. Once a shape is created, you can use the selector tool (the arrow icon) to move, resize (using the square handles), and stretch (using the side handles) it. Double-clicking a selected shape with the selector tool activates rotation and skew handles. Modifier keys like Ctrl (constrains proportions/angles), Shift (operates from the center), and Alt (tool-specific functions) offer additional control during manipulation. Precise dimensions and properties like corner rounding can be adjusted in the controls bar at the top.

    5. What are paths in Inkscape and why are they so important? Paths are the fundamental building blocks of all vector graphics in Inkscape. Unlike shapes, which have inherent properties, paths are defined by a series of anchor points (nodes) connected by line segments or curves (Bézier curves). This structure provides ultimate control over the form and detail of your artwork. Tools like the calligraphy tool (freehand with variable stroke), pencil tool (freehand drawing that can be smoothed), and the pen tool (precise curve creation using Bézier handles) are used to create paths. Converting shapes to paths (Path > Object to Path) allows for more intricate manipulation using the node tool.

    6. How do I edit and refine paths using the Node tool? The Node tool allows you to directly manipulate the nodes and segments of a path. Selecting a path with the Node tool reveals its individual nodes. You can click and drag nodes to reshape the path. The Node tool’s controls bar provides options for changing the type of selected nodes (e.g., corner, smooth, symmetric, auto-smooth), adding new nodes (either between existing nodes or by double-clicking a segment), and deleting nodes. Understanding the different node types and their Bézier handles is crucial for achieving precise curves and shapes.

    7. What are Boolean (path) operations in Inkscape and how can I use them to create complex shapes? Boolean operations, found under the Path menu, allow you to combine and manipulate two or more paths in various ways to create new, complex shapes. Common operations include: * Union: Merges selected paths into a single path. * Difference: Subtracts the top path from the bottom path. * Intersection: Keeps only the overlapping areas of the selected paths. * Exclusion: Keeps the non-overlapping areas of the selected paths. * Division: Cuts the bottom path by the top path, keeping all resulting segments as separate paths. * Cut Path: Cuts the stroke of the bottom path where it overlaps with the top path. * Combine: Creates a single object with multiple sub-paths, retaining individual outlines. * Break Apart: Separates a combined object back into its individual sub-paths. * Split Path: Separates non-overlapping sub-paths. * Fracture: Breaks overlapping objects into fragments based on their overlaps. * Flatten: Removes overlapping parts, leaving only the outermost outlines. These operations are essential for building intricate designs from simpler forms.

    8. How can I use layers, guidelines, and grids to organize my artwork in Inkscape? Layers are like transparent sheets stacked on top of each other, allowing you to organize different elements of your drawing separately. The Layers and Objects dialog (Layer menu) lets you create, delete, reorder, hide, and lock layers. Sub-layers can be created by dragging one layer onto another, enabling hierarchical organization. Guidelines (created by dragging from the rulers) and grids (toggleable via View > Page Grid and customizable in Document Properties) are visual aids for precise alignment and layout. Snapping (toggled with the magnet icon) allows objects to automatically align with guidelines, grid lines, node points, and other elements, ensuring accuracy in your designs.

    Inkscape Basics: Interface, Tools, and Fundamental Operations

    Let’s dive into the basics of Inkscape based on the information provided in the sources.

    When you first open Inkscape, you’re usually greeted by the welcome dialogue. This dialogue is designed to help you set up your document even before you start drawing. You can customize your document settings here, and while you can play with the canvas appearance, such as the background color, it’s important to remember that this is just a visual preference and doesn’t affect your final artwork. The canvas color won’t appear in your exported file. The welcome dialogue also allows you to customize the appearance of icons and switch to dark mode. While you can customize keyboard shortcuts in Inkscape, it’s generally recommended for new users to stick with the defaults initially to build muscle memory. If you accidentally close the welcome dialogue, you can always bring it back through the preferences menu (Inkscape menu on macOS, Edit menu on Windows), where you’ll find a checkbox to show it. The welcome dialogue also offers templates in the “Time to Draw” section. These templates provide pre-set dimensions for common design needs like posters, business cards, social media posts, and even specific screen resolutions such as a YouTube thumbnail. Using templates can save you time by eliminating the need for guessing and resizing later. You can even create and save your own custom templates for ultimate customization.

    Once you’ve closed the welcome dialogue or chosen a template, you’ll see the main Inkscape interface with the canvas, which is your entire workspace, and the page, the white rectangle in the middle. Think of the canvas as a large area where you can work, while the page represents the part that will be exported or printed. You can draw anywhere on the massive canvas, but only what’s within the page boundaries will be in your final product. Like the canvas color, the page color is also for your visual comfort while working and won’t appear in the final exported file. If you need to change the page size or orientation after starting, you can do so by going to File > Document Properties, which acts as the control center for your document, allowing you to change the format, custom dimensions, orientation (portrait or landscape), and the units you’re working in.

    The Inkscape interface is composed of several key elements:

    • On the left is the toolbox, where all your drawing tools reside, such as shape tools, pens, and text tools. You can even resize this toolbox if needed.
    • Usually on the right is the commands bar, providing quick access to common actions like new document, open, save, undo, redo, copy, and paste. You can even move this bar to the top if you prefer a more traditional layout.
    • At the very top is the controls bar, which is context-sensitive and changes depending on the tool you have selected. For example, if you have the rectangle tool selected, the controls bar will display options specific to rectangles, such as width, height, and corner rounding.
    • Below the canvas is the color palette, a long strip of colored squares that allows you to easily change the fill color of a selected object by clicking on a color, and the stroke color by shift-clicking. You can scroll through more colors using the arrows or access a wider range of pre-made palettes through a menu.
    • At the very bottom is the unassuming status bar, which provides a lot of helpful information, including the properties of the selected object, the current layer, zoom level, and even if the canvas is rotated.

    For organizing your artwork, layers are crucial. Think of them as transparent sheets stacked on top of each other. You can manage layers through the Layers and Objects dialogue (under the Layer menu). The order of layers in this dialogue determines the stacking order (or Z-order) of objects on the canvas, with the top layer in the dialogue being in the front of the drawing. You can rearrange layers by dragging them up or down in the dialogue. Within a layer, you can also rearrange individual objects. Layers can be hidden and locked, which is very useful for managing complex projects and preventing accidental edits. Inkscape also supports sub-layers, which are like folders within layers. You can create a sub-layer by dragging one layer onto another. Hiding or locking a parent layer will also affect all its sub-layers.

    Inkscape provides built-in tools for creating basic shapes like rectangles, ellipses, stars, and polygons. You can select a shape tool, click and drag on the canvas to create the shape. Once a shape is selected, it will have handles around it. The square handles are used for resizing, while some shapes have special handles, like the circular handle on a rectangle for rounding its corners. You can achieve greater precision with dimensions and corner rounding by using the controls bar, where you can type in exact values.

    Modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt) are important shortcuts for manipulating objects with more control:

    • Holding Ctrl while creating a rectangle or ellipse will constrain it to a perfect square or circle. During resizing, Ctrl will maintain the original proportions, preventing stretching. When rotating, Ctrl will snap the angle to 15-degree increments.
    • Holding Shift while drawing a shape will make it expand from the center point where you clicked. Similarly, scaling with Shift will scale in opposite directions from the center. For rotation, Shift can make the object rotate around a different point, such as the opposite corner.
    • The Alt key’s function can vary depending on the tool and the action you are performing. For instance, with rotation, it can also snap to angles.

    You can easily add color to shapes by selecting them and clicking a color in the color palette at the bottom (for fill) or shift-clicking (for stroke/outline). To remove the fill or stroke entirely, you can click the small red “X” in the color palette (click for transparent fill, shift-click for transparent stroke). For more advanced control over colors, fills, and strokes, you’ll need to use the Fill and Stroke dialogue (Object > Fill and Stroke).

    When you have multiple overlapping objects, their stacking order (Z-order) determines which ones appear on top. You can control this using the selector tool. With an object selected, the controls bar will have arrow buttons to “raise to top,” “raise,” “lower,” and “lower to bottom”. “Raise” and “lower” move the object one level up or down in the stack, while “to top” and “to bottom” move it to the very front or back. Layers provide a more powerful way to manage stacking order.

    The selector tool is your primary tool for basic manipulations. Click an object to select it, click and drag to move it. You can select multiple objects by clicking and dragging a bounding box around them or by shift-clicking individual objects. To scale an object without constraints, use the corner or side handles. To rotate or skew an object, click on it a second time after selecting it; the handles will change, allowing you to drag to rotate or skew. The rotation center, a small crosshair that appears in the middle of a selected object, is the default pivot point for rotation. You can click and drag this crosshair to a new location, even off the object, to change the point around which it rotates. To reset the rotation center back to the middle, you can shift-click the crosshair.

    Inkscape offers several ways to make copies of objects:

    • Copy and Paste (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V or menu options) creates a completely independent copy that you can move anywhere.
    • Duplicate (Ctrl+D) creates a copy directly on top of the original.
    • Clones are special “linked” copies; if you make a change to the original, all its clones will be updated accordingly. To break the link of a clone, you can select it and go to Edit > Clone > Unlink Clone.

    When working with multiple objects, you’ll often need to align and distribute them precisely. The Align and Distribute dialogue (Object > Align and Distribute) provides various options for aligning objects to their left edges, centers, right edges, top edges, bottom edges, or even to the page itself. The concept of an anchor determines what everything gets aligned to; you can choose to align to the first selected object, the last selected, the biggest, the smallest, or the page. Distribute options allow you to space objects evenly, either horizontally or vertically, based on their edges or centers. For visual alignment directly on the canvas, snapping is invaluable. You can toggle snapping on or off with the magnet icon. When enabled, objects will automatically snap to other objects, guidelines, the grid, and page edges as you move them. You can customize what objects snap to using the snap controls next to the magnet icon, such as bounding boxes, nodes, guidelines, and the grid. There’s also an advanced mode for even more control over snapping.

    At the heart of vector graphics in Inkscape are paths. Paths provide the ultimate level of control over shapes. Inkscape offers three main tools for creating paths:

    • The Calligraphy tool allows for creating brush-like strokes with varying width and style, providing a hand-drawn feel.
    • The Pencil tool is for freehand drawing, creating a path that follows your mouse movements. It also has a smoothing feature to refine shaky lines.
    • The Pen tool is crucial for precision, allowing you to create smooth curves using Bézier curves by clicking to create straight segments and clicking and dragging to create curves with adjustable handles. To close a path created with the pen tool, move the cursor back to the first node and click; to leave it open, right-click or press Enter.

    Paths are made up of nodes, which are points that define the shape of the path. You manipulate these nodes using the Node tool (usually below the selector tool). When you select a path with the node tool, the nodes appear as small squares or diamonds. You can click and drag these nodes to reshape the path, and holding Ctrl often constrains the movement for precise adjustments. There are different types of nodes:

    • Corner nodes (diamond-shaped) create sharp angles because the handles on either side move independently.
    • Smooth nodes (square-shaped) create flowing curves because their handles are linked, so moving one affects the other.
    • Symmetric nodes are a type of smooth node where the handles are always the same distance from the node, resulting in perfectly balanced curves.
    • Auto smooth nodes are self-adjusting to create the smoothest possible curve.

    You can change the type of a node after creating it using the buttons in the node tool controls bar. For example, you can convert a smooth node to a corner node to create a sharp angle. To add more detail to a path, you can add nodes by selecting two existing nodes and clicking the “Insert new node in selected segments” button in the node tool controls bar, or by simply double-clicking on a path segment. To remove nodes, select them with the node tool and press the Delete key. Be cautious when deleting nodes, as it can significantly alter the shape of the path.

    It’s often necessary to convert an existing shape (like a rectangle or circle) to a path to gain more control over its individual nodes and curves. You can do this by selecting the shape and going to Path > Object to Path, or sometimes directly from a button in the node tool controls bar. When you convert a shape to a path, you lose the shape-specific handles (e.g., the corner rounding handles of a rectangle). However, Inkscape provides a workaround with the Add Corners LP tool found in the node tool controls bar (LP stands for Live Preview). This tool allows you to round the corners of a path after it has been converted from a shape, giving you control over the type of corner rounding (fillets, inverse fillets, chamfers).

    Path operations, also known as Boolean operations (found in the Path menu), allow you to combine and manipulate paths in various ways:

    • Union merges two or more paths into a single path, combining overlapping areas and nodes.
    • Difference acts like a cookie cutter; the top object cuts its shape out of the bottom object.
    • Intersection keeps only the areas where the selected objects overlap.
    • Exclusion keeps everything except the overlapping areas.
    • Division cuts the bottom object using the top object and keeps all the resulting separate path segments from the overlap.
    • Cut Path cuts the stroke of the bottom object wherever it’s overlapped by the top object.
    • Combine turns selected objects into a single object with multiple sub-paths, retaining their individual outlines.
    • Break Apart reverses the Combine operation, splitting a combined object back into its individual sub-paths, potentially creating filled areas from closed sub-paths.
    • Split Path separates non-overlapping sub-paths of a combined object into individual objects without filling enclosed areas.
    • Fracture breaks overlapping objects into fragments based on their overlaps.
    • Flatten removes all overlapping parts of selected objects, leaving only the outermost outlines.

    Guidelines and grids are visual aids that help with organization and alignment. To create guidelines, first ensure that the rulers are visible (View > Show/Hide > Rulers). Then, click on the top ruler and drag downwards for a horizontal guideline, or click on the left ruler and drag rightwards for a vertical one. You can even create diagonal guidelines by dragging from the corners of the rulers. Guidelines are magnetic, meaning objects can snap to them if snapping is enabled. To move a guideline, hover over it until the cursor changes to a hand icon, then click and drag. Holding Shift while dragging rotates the guideline, and Alt+drag rotates it around its origin point. Double-clicking a guideline opens the Guideline dialogue, where you can adjust its label, color, origin, angle, and lock it. You can lock all guidelines via the Edit menu or by clicking the lock icon between the rulers. To delete a guideline, drag it back to the ruler it came from or select it and press Delete. To remove all guidelines at once, go to Edit > Delete All Guidelines.

    Grids are a system of lines that can aid in aligning objects. By default, Inkscape has a rectangular grid with one-pixel spacing. You can toggle its visibility by going to View > Page Grid. Objects will snap to grid lines if snapping is enabled. You can customize the grid settings by going to File > Document Properties > Grids. Here, you can create new grids (rectangular or axonometric), adjust the spacing between grid lines, change the origin point, rotate axonometric grids, and control the grid’s visibility and whether objects snap to it. You can also enable minor grid lines, finer lines that appear when you zoom in, and decide if they should be snappable.

    For more in-depth color management, the Fill and Stroke dialogue (Object > Fill and Stroke) is essential. It has three tabs: Fill, Stroke paint, and Stroke style. In the Fill tab, you can choose the fill color using various methods like HSL, RGB, CMYK values, or a color wheel. You can also adjust the alpha value for opacity/transparency and choose no fill to make an object transparent. This tab also allows you to apply gradients (linear, radial, conical) and patterns as fills, with full control over colors, transitions, scale, orientation, and more. The Stroke paint tab is where you control the color of the stroke (outline) using the same color selection methods as the fill. You can also choose no stroke. The Stroke style tab allows you to adjust the width of the stroke, make it dashed with custom patterns and offsets, add markers (like arrows or dots), control the join style (mitered, beveled, rounded), adjust the cap style (how the ends look), and even control the stacking order of the stroke relative to the fill. The Eyedropper tool is a handy tool for picking up colors directly from your canvas. Select the tool and click on a color to select it for the fill; shift-click to select it for the stroke. You can even drag the eyedropper to get an average color from an area.

    While the sources introduce blend modes, blur, and opacity in the context of advanced visual effects, the basic concept of opacity (controlled by the alpha value in the Fill and Stroke dialogue) allows you to make objects partially transparent.

    Inkscape Interface: A Beginner’s Guide

    Let’s dive into the Inkscape interface. When you first open Inkscape, you’re usually greeted by a welcome dialogue that allows you to customize your document even before you start drawing, including canvas appearance (like background color, which is just visual and doesn’t affect the final artwork), icon size, and enabling dark mode. You can also access templates in the welcome dialogue, which are pre-set documents with specific dimensions for things like posters, business cards, social media posts, and more. If you accidentally close the welcome dialogue, you can always bring it back via Inkscape menu > Preferences on macOS or Edit menu > Preferences on Windows/Linux, then searching for “welcome” and checking the “Show Welcome dialogue” box.

    Once you’ve closed the welcome dialogue, you’ll see the main Inkscape interface, which can be broken down into several key areas:

    • The toolbox is usually located on the left side and contains all the tools for creating and manipulating objects, such as shapes, pens, and text. You can even resize this toolbox if needed.
    • The commands bar typically sits on the right side (though it can be moved to the top) and provides quick access to common actions like new document, open, save, undo, redo, copy, and paste.
    • The controls bar is located at the very top and is context-sensitive. It changes its options depending on the tool you currently have selected. For example, if you have the rectangle tool selected, the controls bar will display options for adjusting the rectangle’s width, height, and corner rounding.
    • Below the canvas, you’ll find the color palette, a long strip of colored squares. You can select an object and then click on a color to fill it, or shift-click a color to set its outline (stroke) color. You can scroll through more colors or access pre-made palettes via a menu on the right side of the color palette.
    • At the very bottom is the unassuming status bar. Despite its small size, it provides a lot of useful information, including the properties of selected objects, the current layer, the zoom level, and even if the canvas is rotated.
    • The main drawing area contains the canvas, which is the entire workspace, and the page, represented by a white rectangle in the middle. You can draw anywhere on the massive canvas, but the page defines the area that will be exported or printed. The colors of the canvas and page are for your visual reference while working and won’t appear in your final exported artwork. You can change the page size and orientation (portrait or landscape) in File > Document Properties.

    Understanding these basic parts of the Inkscape interface is the first step in navigating and utilizing its powerful features.

    Inkscape: Creating and Manipulating Basic Shapes

    Let’s delve into working with shapes in Inkscape. Inkscape provides a variety of tools for creating fundamental geometric forms. These basic shapes serve as the foundation for more complex designs.

    To create a shape, you first select the desired tool from the toolbox on the left. Inkscape offers tools for rectangles, ellipses, stars, and polygons, among others. Once a tool is selected, you simply click and drag on the canvas to draw the shape. Releasing the mouse button completes the creation of the shape.

    After creating a shape, you’ll notice little handles appearing around it when it’s selected with the selector tool (the first tool in the toolbox). The square handles located at the corners and sides are used for resizing the shape. Some shapes also have special handles that control unique properties. For instance, a rectangle might have a circular handle that allows you to round its corners.

    For more precise control over a shape’s dimensions and properties, you can use the controls bar at the top of the interface. This bar changes its options depending on the selected tool. When a shape tool is active or a shape is selected, the controls bar will display fields where you can type in exact values for properties like width, height, and, in the case of a rectangle, corner rounding. The sources emphasized that this precision is crucial when specific measurements are required.

    Modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt) play a significant role when creating and manipulating shapes:

    • Holding Ctrl while drawing a rectangle or ellipse will constrain it to a perfect square or circle, respectively. Similarly, holding Ctrl during resizing will maintain the shape’s original proportions, preventing distortion. When rotating, Ctrl will snap the rotation angle to 15-degree increments.
    • Holding Shift while drawing a shape will make it expand from the center point where you initially clicked. The same applies to scaling; it will scale the object in opposite directions from its center. For rotation, Shift can make the object rotate around a different point, such as the opposite corner.
    • The Alt key’s function can vary depending on the active tool and the specific action being performed. For example, with rotation, it can also snap to angles.

    To add color to your shapes, you use the color palette located at the bottom of the interface. Select a shape, then click on a color in the palette to fill the shape. To change the outline (stroke) color, shift-click on a color in the palette. If you want to remove the fill entirely, click the small red ‘X’ at the beginning of the color palette. To remove the stroke, shift-click the red ‘X’.

    When you have multiple shapes that overlap, their stacking order (or Z-order) determines which shapes appear on top. You can control this using the selector tool. After selecting an object, the controls bar will display arrow buttons that allow you to “raise to top,” “raise,” “lower,” or “lower to bottom”. “Raise” and “lower” adjust the stacking order by one level, while “to top” and “to bottom” move the selected object to the very front or back, respectively. For more complex arrangements, using layers provides a more robust way to manage stacking order, as we discussed previously.

    In summary, Inkscape offers intuitive tools and precise controls for creating and manipulating basic shapes, forming a crucial part of the vector graphics workflow.

    Inkscape: Mastering Paths

    Let’s delve into the crucial aspect of path manipulation in Inkscape. The sources emphasize that paths are the fundamental building blocks of everything you create in Inkscape. They provide the ultimate level of control over your vector graphics. Inkscape offers several tools and operations to create and modify paths.

    Creating Paths

    Inkscape provides three primary tools for creating paths:

    • The Calligraphy Tool: This tool functions like a digital brush pen, allowing you to create paths with a hand-drawn, organic feel. You can adjust stroke width and style, and even choose from presets.
    • The Pencil Tool: This is your tool for freehand drawing. As you click and drag, it creates a path following your mouse movements. A useful smoothing feature can help refine shaky lines, making them appear cleaner.
    • The Pen Tool (Bézier Tool): This is described as the master of precision for creating perfectly smooth curves using Bézier curves. You click to create straight line segments, and click and drag to create curves with handles that control the shape of the curve. Mastering the Pen tool is highly recommended for achieving precise and smooth results. To finish a path created with the Pen tool, you can close the path by moving your cursor back to the starting node (it will usually change appearance), or leave it open by right-clicking or hitting Enter.

    Manipulating Paths with Nodes

    Paths are composed of points called nodes. The Node tool (usually located below the Selector tool in the toolbox) is used to manipulate these nodes.

    • When you select a path with the Node tool, the individual nodes appear as small squares or diamonds. You can click and drag these nodes to reshape the path. Holding Ctrl while dragging can often constrain the movement for more precise adjustments.
    • Inkscape features different types of nodes, each influencing how the path curves through that point:
    • Corner Nodes: Displayed as diamond shapes, they create sharp angles because the handles on either side move independently.
    • Smooth Nodes: Shown as square shapes, they create flowing curves as their handles are linked; moving one handle mirrors the movement of the other.
    • Symmetric Nodes: A special type of smooth node where the handles are always at the same distance from the node, resulting in perfectly balanced curves.
    • Auto Smooth Nodes: These nodes are designed for maximum smoothness. When you move them, the handles automatically adjust to create the smoothest possible curve.
    • You can change the type of a node after creating it using the buttons in the Node tool’s controls bar. For example, you can convert a smooth node to a corner node for a sharp angle.
    • To add more detail to a path, you can add nodes. Select two existing nodes and click the “insert new node in selected segments” button in the Node tool’s controls bar, which will add a node in the middle. You can also double-click anywhere on a path segment to add a new node.
    • To remove a node, simply select it with the Node tool and press the Delete key. Be aware that deleting nodes can significantly alter the path’s shape.

    Converting Shapes to Paths

    Often, you might start with a basic shape (like a rectangle or circle) and then want more control over its form. Inkscape allows you to convert shapes to paths.

    • To do this, select the shape and go to Path > Object to Path. You can sometimes find a similar button in the Node tool’s controls bar as well.
    • It’s important to note that when you convert a shape to a path, you lose the shape-specific handles. For instance, the circular handles for rounding the corners of a rectangle will disappear.
    • However, Inkscape provides a solution for this with the Add Corners LPE (Live Path Effect), found in the Node tool’s controls bar. LPEs allow you to apply effects to paths that remain “live,” meaning you can still edit the underlying path. With Add Corners LPE, you can round the corners of a path (even after converting it from a shape) and control the type of corner rounding (fillets, inverse fillets, chamfers, etc.).

    Path Operations (Boolean Operations)

    Inkscape offers a powerful set of operations, often called Boolean operations, located under the Path menu, that allow you to combine and manipulate two or more paths in various ways. These are like “path surgery”. Here are some of the key operations:

    • Union: Merges two or more selected paths into a single path, combining any overlapping areas and joining the nodes.
    • Difference: The top object acts as a “cookie cutter,” cutting its shape out of the bottom object. The top object disappears, leaving a hole in the bottom one.
    • Intersection: Only the overlapping areas of the selected paths are retained; everything else is removed.
    • Exclusion: Keeps all areas of the selected paths except for the overlapping regions.
    • Division: Cuts the bottom object using the top object, but keeps all the resulting separate path segments that were created by the overlap.
    • Cut Path: Cuts the stroke of the bottom object into pieces wherever it is overlapped by the top object.
    • Combine: Turns all selected objects into a single object with multiple subpaths. They are treated as one object but retain their individual outlines.
    • Break Apart: Reverses the Combine operation, splitting a combined object back into its individual subpaths. If any subpaths form closed shapes, they will automatically be filled.
    • Split Path: Separates subpaths within an object that are not overlapping. It won’t affect overlapping subpaths or fill enclosed areas.
    • Fracture: Breaks all overlapping objects into individual fragments based on where they intersect.
    • Flatten: Removes all overlapping parts of selected objects, leaving only the outermost outlines as a single flattened shape.

    Mastering path manipulation, including understanding nodes and utilizing path operations, is fundamental to creating complex and precise vector graphics in Inkscape.

    Inkscape Visual Aids: Guidelines and Grids

    Let’s discuss visual aids in Inkscape. The sources highlight guidelines and grids as essential tools for maintaining organization and achieving precise alignment in your artwork.

    Guidelines

    • Creation: You can easily create guidelines by first ensuring that the rulers are visible (View > Show/Hide > Rulers).
    • To create a horizontal guideline, click on the top ruler and drag downwards.
    • To create a vertical guideline, click on the left ruler and drag to the right.
    • You can even create diagonal guidelines by dragging from the corners of the rulers.
    • Snapping: Guidelines are particularly useful when used with snapping enabled. If snapping is turned on (using the magnet icon at the top right), objects will snap to the guidelines as you move them. You can customize which elements Inkscape snaps to, including guidelines, in the snap controls located next to the magnet icon.
    • Manipulation:To move a guideline, hover your cursor over it until it changes to a hand icon, then click and drag it to the desired position.
    • Holding Shift while dragging a guideline will allow you to rotate it.
    • Holding Alt while dragging a guideline will rotate it around its origin point.
    • Advanced Control: Double-clicking on a guideline will open the Guideline dialog, where you can adjust its label, color, origin, and angle. You can also lock a guideline in this dialog.
    • Locking/Unlocking: You can lock all guidelines to prevent accidental movement by going to Edit > Lock All Guidelines or by clicking the lock icon located between the rulers. To unlock them, either go back to the Edit menu and choose Unlock All Guidelines or click the lock icon again.
    • Deletion: To delete a guideline, simply drag it back to the ruler it originated from or select it and press the Delete key. To remove all guidelines at once, go to Edit > Delete All Guidelines.

    Grids

    • Definition: Grids are a system of lines that provide a visual framework to help align objects. Inkscape’s default is a rectangular grid with a spacing of one pixel by one pixel.
    • Visibility and Snapping: You can toggle the visibility of the grid by going to View > Page Grid. Similar to guidelines, if snapping is enabled, objects will snap to the grid lines.
    • Customization: You can extensively customize the grid settings in the Document Properties dialog (File > Document Properties) under the Grids tab.
    • You can create new grids, choosing between rectangular and axonometric (perspective) types.
    • You can adjust the spacing between the grid lines.
    • You can change the origin point of the grid.
    • For axonometric grids, you can adjust the rotation.
    • You can enable or disable the grid’s visibility and whether objects snap to it.
    • Inkscape also features minor grid lines, which are finer lines that appear when you zoom in. You can control whether these minor grid lines are snappable as well.

    Both guidelines and grids serve as valuable visual references that aid in the precise placement and alignment of objects, which is crucial for creating well-structured and visually appealing vector graphics. The ability to customize these visual aids allows you to tailor your workspace to the specific needs of your design project. When used in conjunction with snapping, they significantly reduce guesswork and enhance the accuracy of your work.

    Inkscape 2024 Comprehensive Guide to Vector Design

    The Original Text

    all right diving in today folks we’re all about inkscape yeah that free open- source vector graphics powerhouse it’s kind of a big deal right whether you’re a design Pro or just starting out inkscape is seriously versatile couldn’t agree more and the pile of guides and blog posts you’ve given me wow it’s a gold mine it is right and that’s exactly why we’re doing this deep dive we’re going to extract the core the essence of inkscape and hand it to you our listeners thank of it as a super concentrated shot of inkscape knowledge ready to boost your skills Perfect Analogy we’ve got the interface Basics creating stuff manipulating paths getting Fancy with effects the whole nine yards exactly so no matter where you are on your inkscape journey this deep dive is going to have those aha moments for you I guarantee it all right let’s crack this thing up in now when you first fire up inkscape you usually get that welcome dialogue what’s the point of that thing ah the welcome dialogues it’s like setting the stage before the play you know you can customize your document even before you start drawing a lot of people don’t realize how much control you have right there so it’s not just about Aesthetics it’s about setting up for Success the sources mentioned playing with canvas appearance things like the background color but that doesn’t actually affect your final artwork right it’s just visual preference you got it like think of your desktop wallpaper it’s there for you makes things comfy but doesn’t get printed out with your documents same idea the canvas color it won’t show up in your exported file it’s just the there while you work gotcha so what about keyboard shortcuts can you mess with those too oh absolutely inkscape lets you customize those but honestly if you’re new stick with the defaults for a bit you’ll build that muscle memory and then later you can go wild and remap everything makes sense don’t want to overload right out of the gate anything else in that welcome dialogue worth mentioning oh yeah you can change how those little icons look that’s just personal taste really yeah and of course the big one dark mode ah yes got to save those eyeballs especially for those late night design sessions essential stuff now what if you accidentally close that welcome dialogue is it gone forever no way it’s always there Mac users head to the inkscape menu preferences Windows PO is under the edit menu preferences then just search welcome and boom you’ll see that show Welcome dialogue checkbox click it and you’re good to go it’ll either pop up right away or you’ll see it next time you launch inkscape always there when you need it handy and know was something about templates too right in the welcome dialogue those seem pretty powerful oh templates are a lifesaver they’re in the time to draw section all set up with specific dimensions like think about designing a poster or a business card instead of starting from scratch you grab a template that’s already the right size super efficient yeah I can see that no more guessing and resizing later so they have templates for common print sizes yep A4 us letter you name it but it goes way beyond that templates for video for social media posts even for specific screen resolutions so if I wanted to design say a YouTube thumbnail there’s a template ready to go you bet just click and start designing saves you tons of time they even have templates for icons and patterns and if you need something really specific you can create your own custom templates and save them talk about ultimate customization wow that’s the next level okay so you’ve picked your template or maybe just started with the default setup now you’re looking at the canvas that big space and the page that white rectangle in the middle what’s the difference there ah the canvas versus the page classic confusion think of it like the the canvas is your whole workspace right it can be huge yeah the page is the part that actually gets exported printed or shared think of it like a frame for your final artwork okay so I can actually draw anywhere on that massive canvas but the page is like the viewfinder showing what will end up in the final product exactly and here’s another thing the colors of the canvas and page they don’t matter in the end just there for your eyes while you’re working when you export it’s all transparent so that gray canvas won’t show up as a gray background in your PNG or anything like that oh good to know wouldn’t want any surprises there so what if you need to change the page size or orientation after you’ve started document properties is your friend go to file document properties and you can change everything the format custom Dimensions portrait or landscape even what units you’re working in millimeters pixels inches so that’s like the the control center for the whole document cool okay let’s look at the interface itself there’s a lot going on we’ve got toolbars panels all sorts of stuff where do we even start all right let’s break it down on the left we’ve got the toolbox all your tools live there shapes pens text The Works you can actually resize that toolbox too if you need more space for your drawing just grab the edge and drag nice handy if you’re on a smaller screen what about that bar usually on the right that my friend is the commands bar think of it as your quick access panel new document open save all that good stuff undo redo copy paste they’re all there it usually hangs out on the right but you can move it to the Top If you want a more traditional layout options options I like it and what about that bar at the very top Ah that’s the controls bar and this one’s smart it changes depending on what tool you’re using so if you’ve got the rectangle tool selected the controls bar will show you options for that rectangle with height Corner rounding all that so it’s like it knows what you’re thinking always giving you the relevant options and then below the canvas we’ve got that long strip of colored squares that’s the color palette right yep that’s it super handy for changing colors select your object click a color boom it’s filled want an outline shift click easy peasy and there are tons of colors hidden there you can scroll through using those little arrows or click that hamburger menu and choose from a whole bunch of pre-made pallettes a whole rainbow of possibilities awesome now at the very bottom we’ve got that unassumed in little bar the status bar yeah don’t underestimate it it’s packed with information the selected objects properties what layer you’re on zoom level even if your canvas is rotated keep an eye on that little guy he’s helpful oh and of course we can’t forget layers usually tucked away in a panel but crucial for organization layers right like those transparent sheets you stack up we’ll definitely come back to those but first let’s make some shapes inkscape’s got those tools built right in rectangles ellipses Stars polygons you know the B Basics the foundations of everything you grab a tool click and drag release the mouse and there’s your shape now when you select a shape you get those little handles around it the square ones are for resizing and then some shapes have special handles too like with a rectangle you might see a circular handle through rounding the corners and you can get really precise with the dimensions and Corner rounding using the controls bar right the sources were big on that Precision is key oh yeah the controls bar has number Fields where you can type in exact values super important when you need things to be just right especially if you’re working with specific measurements I can imagine now speaking of precision those modifier Keys Creole shift alt those seem like they’re pretty important in inkscape they’re like shortcuts to awesomeness holding Krill while you make a rectangle or ellipse will force it into a perfect square or Circle same with resizing hold crl and it keeps the original proportions no weird stretching and with rotation KL snaps the angle to 50 15° super useful for those symmetrical designs or when you’re making patterns so curl is all about constraints and snapping keeping things tidy what about shift shift usually means you’re working from the center so if you’re drawing a shape holding shift makes it expand from the point where you clicked same with scaling it scales in opposite directions from the center and for rotation shift can make it rotate around a different point like the opposite corner ah so it’s all about the center point and going in both directions cool what about alt alt is a bit more unpredictable it does different things depending on the tool and what you’re doing yeah with rotation it can also snap to angles like interesting bit of Controlled Chaos huh okay so we’ve got shapes on our canvas how do we add some color to these bad boys easy peasy select your shape then click any color in that color palette at the bottom bam filled one an outline shift click a color and you’ve got a stroke click for fill shift click for stroke got it and what if you want to change the stroke sickness or make it dashed or something for basic width the status bar is your friend it usually shows the current stroke width and if you rightclick you can choose from a few common sizes but for more control you’ll need to dive into the fill and stroke dialogue which we’ll get to later okay cool and what if you want to just get rid of the filler stroke entirely see that little red X in the color palette click that to make the fill transparent shift click for the stroke basically you’re telling inkscape hey I don’t want any color here like a little color eraser neat okay now things are getting a bit more complex we’ve got multiple shapes overlapping how do we decide which one is on top you know like a stack of papers in stacking order right or Z order you got it and inkscape gives you a couple of ways to control that first the selector tool select your object and in the controls bar you’ll see some Arrow buttons raise to top raise lower lower to bottom so raise just bumps it up one level lower drops it down and to top or to bottom sends it all the way exactly nice and intuitive but for more complicated drawings layers are your best friend ah layers are virtual transparent sheets how do those help with stacking order so with layers you’re basically organizing your drawing into separate Stacks the layers and objects dialogue is where you manage all that it’s under the layer menu the order of the layers in that dialogue is the stacking order on the canvas top of the list front of the drawing you can drag layers up and down to rearrange them so if I want this whole section to be on top I just drag its layer to the top of the list you got it and it gets even better within a layer you can also rearrange individual objects drag them up or down in that same dialogue to change their order within the layer plus you can hide layers lock them super useful for complex projects hiding and locking that’s brilliant keeps things tidy and prevents accidental edits and what about sub layers the sources mentioned those briefly what are those all about Su layers are like folders within folders but for layers you drag one layer onto another and it becomes a su layer so if you hide or lock the parent layer all Su layers go with it really useful for organizing complex objects like characters with multiple Parts Okay so we’ve got our shapes our layers now we need to be able to move them around resize them rotate them that’s where the selector tool comes in right the Swiss army knife of inkscape absolutely the selector tool is your go-to for all basic manipulations It’s usually the first tool in the toolbox click select click and drag to select multiple objects or shift click to add to a selection then just drag to move things around and we talked about scaling and rotating with modifier keys but can you do those without crol or shift for sure you select your object and you see those handles around it Corner handles for scaling side handles for stretching now to rotate or skew you need to click the object a second time those handles will change and you can drag to rotate or skew double click for rotation and skewing interesting the sources also mention a rotation Center what’s that that all about when you’re rotating you’ll see a little Crosshair in the middle of the object that’s the default rotation Center but you can click and drag that crosshairs anywhere even off the object then when you rotate it’ll pivot around that new Point think of it like spinning a wheel around its axle makes sense so you can really control how things rotate not just around their own Center and to reset it back to the middle you just shift click the Crosshair exactly super handy now what about making copies inkscape has a few ways to do that right yeah yeah I remember seeing copy paste duplicate and then there’s this thing called clones all right let’s break it down copy paste that’s your classic move Street roll plus C Street trol plus v or use the menus you get a completely independent copy do whatever you want with it duplicate is similar C plus d but it puts the copy directly on top of the original so it’s there but you won’t see it move until you drag it so copy past is like make a new one over there duplicate is like make another one right here but hidden for now Perfect Analogy now clones those are special they’re like link copies make a change to the original the Clone changes too so if I change the color of the original all the Clones change color too exactly really powerful for repeating elements or making variations of a design and if you want to break the link you just select the Clone and go to edit clone unlink clone okay clones are like magic linked copies got it now when you have a bunch of objects sometimes you want them perfectly aligned or spaced out that’s where the Align and distribute tools come in right you know it go to object align and distribute and you can do all sorts of fancy alignment stuff align left edges Center them vertically align to the bottom tons of options the sources kept mentioning something about an anchor though what’s that all about uh the anchor that’s what everything gets aligned to you can align to the first selected object the last selected the biggest the smallest even the page itself it’s like the reference point okay so the anchor is like the magnet and everything else gets pulled towards it exactly and then you have distribute options too distribute evenly horizontally vertically based on edges or centers it’s a lifesaver for creating visual Rhythm and spacing things out perfectly and what if you want to align things visually right on the canvas there was something about snapping right snapping is your best friend for visual alignment you turn it on with that little magnet icon at the top right then as you move objects around they’ll snap to other objects guidelines the grid the page edges it’s like magic so it takes the guesswork out of alignment exactly and you can customize what it snaps to using the snap controls right next to that magnet icon snap to bounding boxes nodes guidelines the grid you choose and there’s an advanced mode too if you want even more control wow that’s powerful okay we’ve covered a lot of ground here interface shapes layers manipulating objects now let’s get to the heart of vector graphics paths the sources were adamant that paths are the building blocks of everything in inkscape no doubt about it paths give you that ultimate level of control inkscape has three main tools for creating paths the calligraphy tool the pencil tool and the pen tool let’s start with calligraphy what’s that one all about the calligraphy tool is like having a digital brush pen you can change the stroke width the style even choose from presets it’s awesome for that handdrawn organic feel sounds perfect for adding a personal touch what about the pencil tool the pencil tool is your freehand drawing friend just click and drag and and it creates a path following your mouse and it has this cool smoothing feature so if your hand’s a bit shaky you can smooth out the line afterwards makes it look all nice and clean so it’s like sketch first refine later handy now the pen tool that’s the one that seems super important what makes it so special the pin tool is the master of precision it’s how you create those perfectly smooth curves using basa curves you click to create straight segments click and drag to create curves with those little handles that control the shape it takes a bit of practice but once you get it it’s like having superpowers yeah Bas a curves those can be tricky at first but mastering them is definitely worth it so once you’ve started a path with the pen tool how do you actually finish it if you want to close shape just move your cursor back to the very first point you created we’ll usually change to a circle or something showing you can close the path click and you’ve got a close shape ready to be filled with color to leave it open just right click or hit enter okay pen tool for precision and curves got it now paths are made up of these points called nodes right and you use the node tool to manipulate them exactly the node tool is usually right below the selector tool you select your path and those nodes appear as little squares or diamonds you can click and drag them to reshape the path and holding crital will often constrain the movement so you can make really precise adjustments I remember seeing different types of nodes mentioned Corner smooth symmetric Auto smooth what’s the difference between all those each node type controls how the path curves through that point Corner nodes they’re the ones with those diamond shapes they create sharp angles because the handles on either side move independently smooth nodes those are the square ones they make nice flowing curves because the handles are linked move one the other mirrors it makes sense so smooth nodes for gentle curves Corner nodes for Sharp turns what about symmetric and auto smooth symmetric nodes are a special kind of smooth node where the handles are always the same distance from the node makes perfectly balanced curves and auto smooth nodes those are like the ultimate smooth operators you move them and the handles adjust themselves to try to make the smoothest curve possible so they’re like self- adjusting for maximum smoothness cool what if you need to change the type of a node after you’ve created it like what if you need a sharp corner where there’s a smooth curve the node tools got you covered in the controls bar you’ll find buttons for converting between node types click a smooth node hit the corner button bam sharp corner super easy and what if you need more detail in a specific part of your path can you add or remove nodes absolutely to add a node you can select two existing nodes and then click the insert new node in selected segments button in the node tool controls bar it’ll add a node right in the middle of that segment and if you just want to add a node anywhere on a segment you can double click on that segment so clicking ads in between existing nodes double clicking ads anywhere you want got it what about removing nodes to get rid of a node simply select it with the node tool and hit the delete key poof it’s gone but be careful deleting nodes can significantly change the shape of your path so make sure you’re happy with the result before you commit always good to have that undo button handy yeah just in case okay we’re getting deep into paths here now the sources mentioned that sometimes you want to take an existing shape like a rectangle or a circle and turn it into a path so you can have more control over its points and curves that’s a really common workflow and it’s surprisingly easy you select your shape then go to path object to path or you can even do it right from the node tool controls bar there’s usually a button there for it so either through the path menu or the node tool got it but there was a caveat in the sources something about losing certain handles ah yes that’s important when you convert a shape to a path you lose those shape specific handles like if you had a rectangle with rounded Corners those little circular handles for rounding will disappear however don’t worry there’s a workaround there’s this awesome tool called add Corners LP which you can find in the node tool controls bar LP what does that stand for live preview it means you can see the effect happening in real time as you adjust the settings so at add Corners LP you can actually round the corners of your path after you’ve converted it from a shape it gives you a lot of control even over the type of corner rounding fets inverse fillets champers all sorts of fun stuff so you can reain that corner round and control even after converting to a path that’s great now let’s talk about the fun stuff path operations inkscape calls these Boolean operations they’re in the path menu and they let you combine and manipulate pabs in all sorts of crazy ways boan operations are like path surgery you’re cutting merging slicing dicing all with paths sounds intense let’s break down some of these operations what’s a union a union is like path marriage you select two or more paths or shapes hit Union and they become one big happy path any overlapping areas are merg together nodes get combined the whole thing becomes a single entity so it’s like taking two puzzle pieces and melting them into one what about difference difference is like a cookie cutter you’ve got your cookie dough which is the bottom object your cookie cutter which is the top object hit difference and the top object Cuts its shape out of the bottom object the top object disappears and you’re left of the hole in the bottom one I’m starting to see where that surgery analogy comes from okay what about intersection intersection is all about finding the common ground you select your objects hit intersection and only the areas where the overlap remain everything else vanishes it’s like finding the shared space between two ideas so it’s like what do these two shapes have in common and exclusion seems to be the opposite you’re right exclusion is like what’s unique about each shape you hit exclusion and it keeps everything except the overlapping areas it’s like highlighting the differences interesting and then there’s division that one sounds a bit more complex division gets a bit wild it’s like cutting the top object out of the bottom but then keeping all the little pieces that were overlapping at separate paths it’s like breaking something into its smallest components okay division is definitely one to experiment with what about cut path that sounds pretty self-explanatory it is cut path cuts the stroke of the bottom object into pieces wherever it’s overlapped by the top object it’s like taking scissors to a line and snipping it at specific points so it’s all about dividing the stroke not the fill and then there’s combine how’s that different from Union combine is like forming a team takes all your selected objects and turns them into a single object but with multiple subpaths so they’re all part of the same team but they retain their individual outlines so they’re United but distinct got it and then break apart seems to be the reverse of that yep break apart takes combined object and splits it back into its individual subpaths and here’s a cool thing if any of those subpaths formed a closed shape it will automatically fill in the enclosed area it can actually create new filled areas that’s neat what about split path split path is similar to break apart but it only separates sub path that aren’t overlapping so if you have two circles that are completely separate split path will make them two independent objects but if they’re overlapping it won’t do anything and it won’t fill in any enclosed areas either okay so it’s more about separating distinct elements and then we have fracture and flatten those sound pretty destructive they can be depending on what you’re going for fracture takes takes all your overlapping objects and breaks them into little fragments based on where they overlap it’s like shattering something into a million pieces wow that could get messy fast and flatten flatten is like taking a steamroller to your drawing it removes all the overlapping parts of the selected objects leaving only the outermost outlines it’s a way to create a simplified flattened version of a complex Arrangement so it’s like taking a 3D object and turning it into a 2d silhouette cool all right we’ve survived path surgery let’s move on to something a bit more guiding I’m talking about guidelines and grids those visual aids that can help you keep things organized and aligned guides and grids are essential especially when you’re working on precise layouts or illustrations so how do you actually create guidelines in inkscape guidelines are super easy to add first you need to make sure the rulers are visible go to view show hiide and check rulers if they’re not already showing then to create a guideline just click on the top ruler and drag downwards to create a hor Al guideline drag from the left ruler to create a vertical one and you can even create diagonal guidelines by dragging from the corners of the rulers so click and drag from the rulers got it and those guidelines they’re magnetic right things can snap to them exactly if you have snapping enabled you can make objects snap to your guidelines and in the snap controls you can even choose to snap to specific guidelines or types of guidelines handy now what if you need to move a guideline after you’ve created it just hover over the guideline and your cursor will change to a little hand icon click and drag to reposition it and if you hold down shift while dragging you can rotate the guideline alt plus drag will rotate it around its origin Point only you can also double click on a guideline to open up the guideline dialogue where you can adjust its label color origin angle and you can even lock it so double click for advanced control nice what about locking all the guidelines the sources mention that as a useful feature you got it you can either go to the edit menu and choose lock call guidelines or there’s usually a little lock icon between the rulers that you can click and to unlock them you just click the icon again or go back to the edit menu and choose unlock all guidelines and if you want to get rid of a guideline easy peasy just drag it all the way back to the ruler where it came from or select it and hit delete and if you want to Nuke all the guidelines at once go to edit delete all guidelines okay guidelines mastered what about grids how are those different and how do you use them grids are basically a system of lines that can help you align objects by default inkscape has rectangular grid that’s one pixel by one pixel you can see it by going to view page grid if it’s not checked the grid is hidden and objects can snap to those grid lines too right absolutely if snapping is enabled objects will snap to the grid points you can also customize the grid settings by going to file document properties grids so document properties is where we go to tweak all the grid stuff what kind of customizations can we make you can create new grids either rectangular or axonometric which is a type of perspective grid you can adjust the spacing between the grid lines change the origin point of the grid even rotated for those acidimetric grids you can also enable or disable the visibility of the grid and we objects snap to it and there are minor grid lines too which are just finer lines that appear when you zoom in and you can choose whether those are snappable as well wow that’s a lot of grid control yeah okay let’s shift gears a bit and talk about colors we’ve already touched on basic filling and stroking with the color palette but the source is dug a bit deeper into color Management in inkscape yeah the color palette is great for quick color changes but when you want more fine green control the fill and stroke dialogue is where it’s at you can open it by going to object fill and stroke so it’s like the advanced color settings panel what can we do in there it has three tabs fill stroke paint and stroke style in the fill tab you can choose the fill color for your selected object and you have a ton of options for how to choose that color you can use hsl values RGB values CMYK values you can pick a color from the color wheel you can even adjust the alpha value which is the opacity or transparency of the fill and of course you can also choose no fill if you want your object to be transparent so it’s like every way you could possibly imagine choosing a color what about gradients and patterns can we apply those as fills you bet in that same fill tab you have options for both gradients and patterns you can create linear gradients radial gradients even conical gradient gradients which radiate out from a point and you have full control over the colors the transitions the opacity of the gradient gradients are definitely a fun way to add depth and visual interest what about patterns patterns are amazing too you can choose from a bunch of built-in patterns or create your own and you can adjust things like the scale orientation offset and even the colors of some patterns it’s like having a library of textures at your fingertips sounds like a great way to add detail without having to draw everything by hand now the stroke paint tab that’s where you control the stroke color right yep same idea as the fill tab you can choose your color using all the same methods hsl RGB CMYK the color wheel Alpha value and you can also choose no stroke if you don’t want any outline okay so stroke paint is for the color and then stroke style is for well the style of the stroke you got it in the stroke style tab you can adjust the width of the stroke make it dashed with different Dash patterns and offsets add markers to the stroke like arrows or dots control the join style of the stroke like whether it’s mitered beveled or rounded and adjust the cap style which is how the ends of the stroke look and you can even control the stacking order of the stroke relative to the fill wow that’s a lot of stroke options and I remember seeing something about an eye dropper tool which seemed pretty Andy oh yeah the ey dropper is a lifesaver it lets you pick up colors from your canvas so if you see a color you like just select the eye dropper tool from the toolbox and click on that color boom you’ve got that color selected so it’s like a color Thief exactly and you can shift click with the ey dropper to pick up the stroke color instead of the fill color you can even drag the eye dropper to get an average color from a selected area that’s super useful for matching colors precisely now the sources also mentioned something about blend modes blur and opacity those seem like they could get pretty complex they can but they’re also incredibly powerful for achieving certain visual

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Canva Mastery: Beginner to Pro Guide and Earning Strategies

    Canva Mastery: Beginner to Pro Guide and Earning Strategies

    The provided text is from a Canva Mastery Course promotional video or transcript. It highlights the features of Canva as an accessible and versatile graphic design platform for both beginners and professionals. The course teaches users how to create various visuals such as social media posts, logos, and presentations, emphasizing the ease of use through drag-and-drop templates. The text details the benefits of Canva’s free and Pro versions, focusing on earning potential through freelancing, template sales, and affiliate programs. The video also includes practical tutorials on account creation, navigating the Canva interface, and specific design techniques such as creating pop effects, animated text, and QR codes. The speaker encourages viewers to learn and engage with the content, promising more skilled courses based on viewer interaction.

    Canva Mastery: A Comprehensive Study Guide

    Quiz: Short Answer Questions

    1. What is Canva? Canva is an online graphic design platform that offers a wide variety of tools and templates for creating visual content. It allows users to design graphics for social media, presentations, logos, and more, without needing technical expertise.
    2. Who is Canva designed for? Canva is designed for both personal and professional use, making it accessible to non-technical individuals. It’s suitable for beginners with no prior design experience and experienced designers looking for quick and easy solutions.
    3. Name three benefits of using Canva. Canva is user-friendly and easy to use. It offers a wide range of templates and free resources, and saves time with quick and easy design processes.
    4. What are the key differences between the free and Pro versions of Canva? The free version provides access to limited templates and elements, offers basic quality downloads, and has limited storage. The Pro version offers unlimited access to premium templates and elements, allows high-quality downloads, and provides ample cloud storage and advanced features like Brand Kit and Magic Resize.
    5. What are some ways you can make money using Canva? You can earn money by selling design templates, offering freelance design services, participating in Canva’s affiliate program, and creating custom print products. This allows skilled users to monetize their creativity and design abilities.
    6. What is a Brand Kit and why is it useful? A Brand Kit is a tool in Canva that allows you to store your brand’s logo, colors, and fonts, for easy use in all your designs. It’s useful for maintaining consistency across all brand-related materials.
    7. What is cloud-based storage, and why is it beneficial in Canva? Cloud-based storage means that all your designs and data are stored online rather than on your computer. This prevents data loss and allows you to access your work from any device.
    8. Name three design products you can produce using Canva. Users can create social media posts, presentations, and logos using Canva’s intuitive platform. This versatility makes Canva suitable for various design needs and projects.
    9. Why is “practice” emphasized in this course? Consistent practice is emphasized because it helps users improve their skills, refine their design quality, and increase their earning potential. The more users practice, the better they become at utilizing Canva’s features effectively.
    10. What is the minimum amount of users that Canva has? Canva has 75 million users.

    Quiz Answer Key

    1. Canva is an online graphic design platform that offers a wide variety of tools and templates for creating visual content. It allows users to design graphics for social media, presentations, logos, and more, without needing technical expertise.
    2. Canva is designed for both personal and professional use, making it accessible to non-technical individuals. It’s suitable for beginners with no prior design experience and experienced designers looking for quick and easy solutions.
    3. Canva is user-friendly and easy to use. It offers a wide range of templates and free resources, and saves time with quick and easy design processes.
    4. The free version provides access to limited templates and elements, offers basic quality downloads, and has limited storage. The Pro version offers unlimited access to premium templates and elements, allows high-quality downloads, and provides ample cloud storage and advanced features like Brand Kit and Magic Resize.
    5. You can earn money by selling design templates, offering freelance design services, participating in Canva’s affiliate program, and creating custom print products. This allows skilled users to monetize their creativity and design abilities.
    6. A Brand Kit is a tool in Canva that allows you to store your brand’s logo, colors, and fonts, for easy use in all your designs. It’s useful for maintaining consistency across all brand-related materials.
    7. Cloud-based storage means that all your designs and data are stored online rather than on your computer. This prevents data loss and allows you to access your work from any device.
    8. Users can create social media posts, presentations, and logos using Canva’s intuitive platform. This versatility makes Canva suitable for various design needs and projects.
    9. Consistent practice is emphasized because it helps users improve their skills, refine their design quality, and increase their earning potential. The more users practice, the better they become at utilizing Canva’s features effectively.
    10. Canva has 75 million users.

    Essay Questions

    1. Discuss the impact of user-friendly design platforms like Canva on democratizing graphic design. How has Canva empowered non-designers and small businesses to create professional-looking visuals?
    2. Compare and contrast the features of Canva’s free and Pro versions. Under what circumstances would upgrading to the Pro version be a worthwhile investment?
    3. Explore the various ways individuals can monetize their Canva skills. Which earning methods are most suitable for different skill levels and career goals?
    4. Analyze the importance of branding in today’s market and discuss how Canva’s Brand Kit feature can help maintain brand consistency across various design projects.
    5. Evaluate the significance of Canva’s cloud-based platform in today’s design landscape. How does it compare to traditional desktop-based design software in terms of accessibility, collaboration, and data security?

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • Template: A pre-designed layout in Canva that users can customize.
    • Element: Design components such as images, icons, shapes, and graphics that can be added to a Canva design.
    • Brand Kit: A Canva feature for storing a brand’s visual identity, including logos, colors, and fonts.
    • Cloud-Based: A system where data and software are stored on remote servers and accessed over the internet, rather than on a local device.
    • Affiliate Program: A marketing strategy where a company rewards individuals for driving traffic or sales to their products.
    • Freelancing: Offering one’s services to multiple clients on a project basis, rather than being employed by a single company.
    • User-Friendly Interface: A design that is intuitive and easy for users to navigate and understand.
    • Customizable Designs: Designs that can be modified to fit specific needs and preferences.
    • Premium Features: Advanced functionalities in Canva that are available in the Pro version.
    • Graphic Design: The art of visual communication through the use of typography, imagery, and layout.
    • Magic Resize: A Canva Pro feature that allows users to automatically resize designs for different platforms.
    • Collaboration Tools: Features that allow multiple users to work on a design project together.

    Canva Mastery: Skills, Design, and Monetization

    Okay, here’s a briefing document summarizing the main themes and ideas from the provided text, with relevant quotes:

    Briefing Document: Canva Mastery Course Overview

    Executive Summary: This document summarizes a sales pitch and introductory overview for a “Canva Mastery Course.” The course aims to equip individuals with skills ranging from beginner to professional-level Canva proficiency, emphasizing its applicability across various domains like digital marketing, social media, and office work. The pitch highlights Canva’s user-friendliness, extensive template library, and earning potential through design services and affiliate marketing. The course promises to add an important skill set applicable across various aspects of life, including digital marketing, artificial intelligence, design, office work, personal use, and social media.

    Main Themes and Ideas:

    • High Demand and Relevance of Canva Skills: The document stresses the popularity and demand for Canva skills in today’s digital landscape. “Kanva is such an in demand course and its uses There are so many, in whichever field you are To use personal level is to use professional level.” The course is positioned as a way to acquire a valuable and versatile skill.
    • Beginner-Friendly Approach with Potential for Professional Growth: The course is designed to cater to individuals with no prior design experience. “Any non technical person can also take this course if you watch this video completely.” It promises to take users from “beginner level means if you People, when you don’t know anything at the beginner level…[to] easy canvassing.” While starting at a basic level, the course also aims to enable users to eventually monetize their Canva skills professionally.
    • Comprehensive Curriculum: The course covers a wide range of topics, including:
    • Creating social media posts, presentations, logos, and flyers. “Good visuals High quality content you can create it ok like social media post presentation logo flyers.”
    • Utilizing pre-made templates for efficiency: “There are options here for pre-made templates. We have pre-made templates that half of our hard work would have been saved It is okay that smart work is being used it’s right here.”
    • Understanding the benefits of Canva’s free and Pro versions.
    • Exploring advanced features like Brand Kit, Magic Resize, and collaboration tools.
    • Benefits of Using Canva:User-Friendly Interface: Canva is presented as globally user-friendly: “Its interface is so user friendly that Anybody can easily understand and use it It can learn”.
    • Customizable Designs: “Designs can be customized to your According to your requirement”.
    • Collaboration Features: “If a particular project is big There is a project, multiple people are working on it If they are working then they should collaborate as a team can do it ok”.
    • Affordability: “Is Canva One of the Most Affordable Platforms in easy to use platforms is one from the world wide”.
    • Extensive Template Library: “wide range of templates You will find thousands of templates here.”
    • Cloud-Based Platform: Emphasizes data security and accessibility: “It is cloud based, everything operates online All data is safe here”.
    • Monetization Opportunities: The course highlights several ways to earn money using Canva skills:
    • Selling design templates.
    • Offering freelance design services. “You can earn money per month by freelancing Design services are ok”.
    • Creating social media content. “Social media will also be available in work from home Media Content Creation Obviously Today’s Date Who doesn’t create social media content”.
    • Participating in Canva’s affiliate program. “You can join affiliate program Through this if someone through you canva If you join then you will get the money”.
    • Creating custom print products (T-shirts, mugs, etc.). “Custom Print Products You Can Custom The printing industry is good these days Customized people want all these designs Even his business can be done through this friends where is it not used”.
    • Free vs. Pro Version: The document outlines the differences between the free and paid (Pro) versions of Canva:
    • Free: Limited access to templates and elements, basic quality downloads, limited storage (5GB), and no access to premium features like Brand Kit.
    • Pro: Unlimited access to premium content, high-quality downloads (including transparent backgrounds), increased storage, and access to advanced features like Brand Kit, Magic Resize, and team collaboration tools.
    • Call to Action and Community Engagement: The presenter actively encourages viewers to comment, subscribe, and share their interest in the course. This is to gauge interest and motivation for future content. “So friends, we moved forward in this course First, I want to see your love. if you guys think that our team I worked hard and these skills were useful…please comment Write in the section yes I will learn yes I please write will learn yes i will learn Because these comments only tell us that you How much are you liking our content?”

    Key Takeaways:

    • The Canva Mastery Course aims to provide comprehensive Canva training, suitable for beginners and those seeking professional-level skills.
    • The course emphasizes the practical application of Canva skills for diverse purposes, including design, marketing, and monetization.
    • The document uses strong promotional language, highlighting Canva’s benefits and the potential for learners to improve their skills and generate income.
    • The document showcases various editing techniques that Canva is capable of, and provides a guide on how to achieve these techniques within the software.

    This briefing document should give you a solid overview of the main points covered in the provided text.

    Canva: Design Platform, Features, and Usage Guide

    Canva FAQ

    1. What is Canva and who is it for?

    Canva is an online graphic design platform that allows users to create a wide variety of visuals, including social media posts, presentations, logos, flyers, and more. It’s designed to be user-friendly for both personal and professional use, even for individuals with no technical design experience or coding knowledge. Anyone from beginners to professionals can use Canva to create designs.

    2. What can I learn from a Canva course?

    A Canva course, like the “Canva Mastery Course”, can teach you everything from the basics to advanced techniques. You will learn how to use Canva’s features, create professional-looking designs, and potentially even make money through design skills. The course can also enhance skills applicable to digital marketing, artificial intelligence design, office work, social media, and more.

    3. What are the key benefits of using Canva?

    Canva offers several key benefits, including:

    • User-Friendly Interface: Its global interface is easy to understand and use, making it accessible to anyone.
    • Customizable Designs: Designs can be tailored to specific requirements.
    • Collaboration Features: Teams can collaborate on projects.
    • Affordability: Canva is considered one of the most affordable and easy-to-use design platforms.
    • Wide Range of Templates: Access to thousands of templates.
    • Elements: It contains plenty of elements you can add to your projects to improve creativity
    • Cloud-Based: Data is stored safely online, preventing data loss.
    • Brand Kit: Canva Pro provides a brand kit to manage brand consistency.
    • Printing Services: Designs can be printed on various items like T-shirts and mugs.

    4. What is the difference between the free and Pro versions of Canva?

    The free version offers:

    • Access to limited templates and elements.
    • Basic quality downloads.
    • Limited storage (up to 5GB).
    • No access to premium features like Brand Kit, Magic Resize, and Collaboration Tools.

    The Pro version provides:

    • Unlimited access to premium templates and elements.
    • High-quality downloads, including transparent backgrounds.
    • More cloud storage.
    • Access to advanced features like Brand Kit, Magic Resize, and Collaboration Tools.

    5. How can I make money using Canva?

    There are various ways to monetize Canva skills:

    • Selling Design Templates: If you have strong design skills, you can create and sell templates.
    • Freelancing Design Services: Offer freelance design services on platforms like Upwork.
    • Social Media Content Creation: Create social media content for businesses or individuals.
    • Affiliate Program: Earn money by referring others to Canva.
    • Custom Print Products: Design and sell custom print products.
    • Website Designs: Create website designs and banners.

    6. How do I create a Canva account?

    To create a Canva account:

    1. Open your browser and go to canva.com.
    2. Click “Sign up”.
    3. You can sign up using your Gmail account or another email address.
    4. Follow the prompts to complete the sign-up process.

    7. How do I make an image pop using Canva?

    1. Upload or select your image in Canva.
    2. Go to Elements, search for “curve,” and add a curved element.
    3. Rotate and position the curved element around your image.
    4. Duplicate the curved element and arrange them to frame the image.
    5. Adjust colors to make the pop effect more pronounced.
    6. Download the image and re-upload it to remove the background.
    7. Add shadow and adjust transparency to finalize the pop effect.

    8. How can I create animations on images using Canva?

    1. Open Canva and select a social media size for a new project.
    2. Upload or choose an image for animation.
    3. Go to apps and search for “Image Animate” and select it.
    4. The design will start loading automatically.
    5. You can save the resulting video.

    Canva Mastery: A Comprehensive Training Course

    The Canva Mastery Course aims to provide comprehensive training, from beginner to pro level, in using Canva for various purposes.

    Key aspects of the Canva Mastery Course:

    • Skills Development The course aims to add an important skill that is useful in digital marketing, artificial intelligence, design, office work, personal projects, and social media.
    • Target Audience The course is designed for both technical and non-technical individuals.
    • User-Friendly Interface Canva’s interface is user-friendly, allowing easy understanding and use.
    • Customizable Designs Designs can be customized according to specific requirements.
    • Collaborative Features Canva allows multiple people to collaborate on a project as a team.
    • Templates and Elements The course highlights the wide range of templates and elements available, which can be customized.
    • Cloud-Based Platform Canva is cloud-based, ensuring data safety and online operation.
    • Brand Kit Canva Pro offers a brand kit to manage brand-related elements like color schemes.
    • Printing Services Canva designs can be printed on various items like T-shirts and mugs.
    • Earning Opportunities The course suggests various methods to earn money using Canva, such as selling design templates, offering freelance design services, and joining affiliate programs.
    • Free vs Pro The course outlines the differences between the free and Pro versions of Canva, advising beginners to start with the free version and upgrade to Pro for professional use and access to advanced features.
    • The Pro version includes unlimited access to premium templates, high-quality downloads, and advanced features like Brand Kit and Magic Resize.
    • Practical learning The course emphasizes practical learning, encouraging users to practice and improve their skills.
    • Account Creation The course includes guidance on creating a Canva account.
    • Interface Overview The course provides an overview of the Canva interface, including the search bar, project options, templates, and brand features.
    • Design creation The course also provides detailed instructions on how to create various designs and apply different effects using Canva.

    Canva: Graphic Design Platform Overview

    Canva is highlighted as an online graphic design platform that allows users to create visuals and high-quality content.

    Key aspects of the graphic design platform Canva:

    • Accessibility It is considered a user-friendly platform on a global level, and a non-technical person can take a Canva course. Its interface is easy to understand and use. Users can access and design from any device.
    • Design Capabilities Users have access to a wide variety of options for creating designs, with thousands of pre-made templates available. Designs can be customized according to the user’s requirements.
    • Features and Tools The platform provides numerous elements to improve creativity and design. These include templates, images, icons, and other resources, many of which are free.
    • Collaboration Canva allows multiple people to collaborate on a project as a team.
    • Templates You can find millions of templates on Canva.
    • Cloud-Based Canva is cloud-based, ensuring data safety.
    • Brand Kit Canva pro has a brand kit that helps with things related to color.
    • Versatility Canva is used by individuals, companies, agencies, and big brands for various design needs. It can be used to create social media posts, presentations, logos, flyers, and more.
    • Printing services Canva designs can be printed on items like T-shirts and mugs.
    • Free vs Pro Canva offers both free and Pro versions, with the Pro version providing unlimited access to premium templates, high-quality downloads, and advanced features.
    • Earning You can earn by selling designs, doing freelance work, affiliate marketing, or custom print products.
    • User Base Canva has grown from zero users in 2013 to 75 million users.
    • Interface The interface includes a search bar, project options, templates, and brand features.
    • Apps The platform provides access to various apps for different design needs, such as gradient effects and image framing.
    • Editing Image editing options, including filters, shadows, and background removal, are available.
    • Animation Canva can be used to create animations.
    • QR Codes Canva can be used to create QR codes for brands and profiles.
    • Website Banners Canva can create website banners.
    • Typography You can create typography elements using Canva.
    • Thumbnails You can design thumbnails using Canva.
    • Logo Design You can design logos using Canva.

    Canva: A User-Friendly Design Platform

    Canva is considered a user-friendly platform with an interface that is easy to understand and use. This accessibility is highlighted as a key benefit, making it suitable for both technical and non-technical individuals.

    Key aspects of Canva’s user-friendly interface:

    • Global Accessibility The interface is designed to be easily understood and used by anyone, regardless of their technical expertise.
    • Intuitive Design The platform is designed to be user-friendly, which means it’s easy to navigate and find the tools needed for design projects.
    • Customizable Designs Users can customize designs according to their specific requirements, making the platform adaptable to various needs.
    • Templates and Elements A wide range of templates and elements are available, which simplifies the design process and provides users with numerous options.
    • Drag-and-Drop Interface Many options can be created by dragging and dropping elements through thousands of good interfaces.
    • Beginner-Friendly The course ensures that individuals with no prior design experience can learn to use Canva effectively.
    • Account Creation and Interface Overview The Canva Mastery Course includes guidance on creating a Canva account and provides an overview of the Canva interface.
    • Editing Options Image editing options such as filters, background removal, and shadows.
    • Pop Effects You can create pop effects using Canva.
    • Animation Canva can be used to create animations.
    • QR Codes Canva can be used to create QR codes.
    • Website Banners Canva can create website banners.
    • Typography You can create typography elements using Canva.
    • Thumbnails You can design thumbnails using Canva.
    • Logo Design You can design logos using Canva.

    Canva’s Premade Design Templates: Accessibility, Customization, and Versatility

    Premade design templates are a key feature of Canva, offering users a wide array of options to simplify and enhance their design process. These templates cater to various needs, from social media posts to presentations, and are a central component of Canva’s user-friendly approach.

    Key aspects of premade design templates in Canva:

    • Accessibility and Variety: Canva provides access to a wide variety of options for creating designs, with thousands of pre-made templates available.
    • Customization: Designs can be customized according to the user’s requirements.
    • Time-Saving: Premade templates save time and effort by providing a starting point for designs.
    • User-Friendly: The availability of pre-made templates simplifies the design process, making it more accessible for non-technical users.
    • Smart Work: Using pre-made templates is considered a smart way to save effort and time.
    • Free and Pro Options: Canva offers both free and Pro templates, with the Pro version providing unlimited access to premium templates.
    • Versatility: Templates are available for various purposes, including social media posts, presentations, logos, flyers, website banners, and more.
    • Examples of Use: Templates can be used for creating visually appealing content for social media.
    • Customization: Templates can be modified to fit specific branding needs, including color schemes and logos.
    • Learning Resource: The templates serve as examples that users can learn from and adapt.
    • Printable Designs: Readymade designs can be printed on items such as T-shirts and mugs.
    • Wide Range: You can find millions of templates on Canva.
    • Beginner friendly: The Canva Mastery Course ensures that individuals with no prior design experience can learn to use Canva templates effectively.

    Canva Pro: Unlocking Advanced Design Features and Capabilities

    The Pro version of Canva unlocks a range of benefits, especially for users who need more advanced features and capabilities.

    Key advantages of Canva Pro:

    • Unlimited Access to Premium Templates and Elements: Canva Pro provides unlimited access to premium templates and elements, offering a wider variety of design options compared to the free version.
    • High-Quality Downloads: Users can download designs in high-quality formats.
    • Transparent Backgrounds: The ability to download designs with transparent backgrounds is included.
    • Increased Storage: Canva Pro provides TV cloud storage, which is essential for storing a large number of content and design materials.
    • Advanced Features: Pro users gain access to advanced features such as Brand Kit, Magic Resize, and team collaboration tools.
    • Brand Kit: The Brand Kit feature allows users to upload and manage brand assets like logos, colors, and branding materials, ensuring consistency across designs.
    • Magic Resize: This feature enables users to resize designs quickly for different platforms.
    • Team Collaboration Tools: These tools facilitate teamwork and collaboration on design projects.
    • Earning Potential: While the course suggests various methods to earn money using Canva even with the free version, the Pro version enhances these opportunities by providing more professional tools and resources.
    • For Professionals: The Canva course advises to buy the pro version for professional use.
    Canva Latest Course 2025 | Graphic Designing Canva Full Course | Canva Tutorial for Beginners Hindi

    The Original Text

    The Canva Mastery Course has been launched Friends, only on your demand Latest Kanva course which will help you in beginner level will teach you everything from beginner to pro level Kanva is such an in demand course and its uses There are so many, in whichever field you are To use personal level is to use professional level If you want to use Kanva Pay then it is the best option Friends, we had to launch this course and Continuous demand came that Sir and advance Come and bring the latest course now because it is very If something has changed then it is the latest course We have brought you a lot in this So today I am going to teach you this I will tell you what you will learn in this course What are you going to benefit from this And how you can learn and make money from Canva yes what are the methods so friends this watch the course completely because this course After learning you will become a part of your life Skills will add an important skill and This gives you digital marketing artificial intelligence int jensen designing office work personal Work social media is going to be useful everywhere So friends, we moved forward in this course First, I want to see your love. if you guys think that our team I worked hard and these skills were useful This is for you people, bringing change in your life We can come up with something good for the society If you are doing it then friends please comment Write in the section yes I will learn yes I please write will learn yes i will learn Because these comments only tell us that you How much are you liking our content? We can see your love and motivation You get more skills like this friend for the people and for the people across the country If we kept bringing it, friends you would have made a comment and please those who are new to the channel, Subscribe and press the bell icon So that you can learn even one important skill from people Don’t miss it friends, before moving ahead I would like to make one more small announcement people are interested in you that he is live Practical with industry experts digital marketing artificial intelligence Sure whatsapp2 canva an online graphic Graphic design is a designing platform on which the graphics are made okay so Now you can create these graphics in this You have a very wide variety here It is not that you will get two, four, five or 10 options okay there’s a wide variety here that you Good visuals High quality content you can create it ok like social media post presentation logo flyers Okay here’s what you need to know You don’t need to be technical Should you know coding or any particular You have to master the software here Any non technical person can also take this course if you watch this video completely then Friends, what does Ezli say about this whole thing? The whole platform has to work it will go to practical level and as much as it he will practice as much as he can The quality of work will increase, that’s ok Growth happens only with practice but here you Many options can be created by dragging and dropping them through Thousands of good interfaces There are options here for pre-made templates. We have pre-made templates that half of our hard work would have been saved It is okay that smart work is being used it’s right here, okay here we make designs You can here beginner level means if you People, when you don’t know anything at the beginner level I am also promising you that this course watch it completely, I guarantee that you People will learn to do easy canvassing right now I will tell you what are its benefits and the money I will tell you everything about how you can earn, just join Now friends, the best thing is here what if this canvas is not complete antacid what does it do benefits that we the user want any design anywhere He can also access his things from any device can design and use his skills by doing his work whatever it means This can be accomplished through Canva. Let’s move on grow and understand What are the benefits of Canva in this What are the benefits of using Canva? So what is the best thing on a global level? It is considered user friendly ok We are not talking about a particular country Its interface is so user friendly that Anybody can easily understand and use it It can learn and has customizable designs Designs can be customized to your According to your requirement Apart from that, collectible features can be made Let me explain the call feature in simple language that If a particular project is big There is a project, multiple people are working on it If they are working then they should collaborate as a team can do it ok apart from that it is affordable Is Canva One of the Most Affordable Platforms in easy to use platforms is one from the world wide and we talk design is a kind of design school ok You can read a lot about designing here you can do it ok wide range of templates You will find thousands of templates here. You will get samples which can be used You can customize it according to your You can access the design by moulding Elements Lots of elements here You will find those who will help you, powerful inside making design is ok your Showcase to further improve creativity Cloud base will help you to Friends, here all this is about data loss. There is no circle of things at all It is cloud based, everything operates online All data is safe here Brand Kit But the brand which is available inside Kava Pra You also get a kit that helps If you have a brand, that brand is fine. You have to do things related to color fastness All those facilities are also available here It is available ok the printing is not like that People are using it at the individual level Companies Agencies Big Brands Canva We use print tongue in today’s date Services What’s best here that whatever designs you make, if Do you want to take a print or print it on something If you want to get it done then you can do that from here You can download it in that format and you can print things or there are lots of them It is a good thing that today from Canva Readymade designs can be printed like T-shirts The mug has been printed The card has been printed It is used everywhere, now we move forward And let’s understand why use Canva, brother Canva is this why do you already have so many I have already told you the benefits, still friends Easy to use, I have already told you here I told you it is very easy, just complete this course Learn from friends readymade templates free Resources: Many things are free. Free images free icons fats elements lots Things are free here, it’s ok, time saving It is quick and easy and accessible anyway So these are the things I’m going to tell you which you get through Canva Now friends we will talk about free and paid because many people have this question sir Should I use the free Canva or the Pro version? you should take it guys look i am going to give you guys I am just giving you a simple advice that right now I I will tell you about both for free. what is in me what is in the tree but when you are a If you are a beginner and are starting then its free for you that’s enough for you okay so you get started do it, learn it, then make it, before that You may feel that your use of it is very good. Very good, now you do it professionally Do you want to use it and make money from it? If yes then buy the pro version it is so cheap So friends what is free here Access to limited templates and elements You get it, obviously it is free but limited It may be okay but limited is also enough ok download designs with basic quality here a little quality here There would obviously be a little difference between the etc. in a pro and what you make in a normal Apart from that there is limited storage up to 5GB No access to premium features like Brand Kit Resizing Designs Automatic Why do I keep mentioning this brand kit again and again? In this course you will know Brand Kit What about Brand Kit let’s say if you’re a new company You need brand material for your brand If you want to design, then you can do it You can, but you are already a company If it is a brand then you must have the material Like logo and branding other material You can also upload it and also make some related information you can generate things how will that happen We will teach you everything in this course. But you get this in the pro version. Is Now friends, if we talk about the pro version So unlimited access to premium Now if you take the pro version then all the templates You will only get a few who offer this Their platform has premium Templates Elementor Stock Photos OK Download designs in high quality formats Inside you can download including Transparent backgrounds are ok too Includes and storage is available TV cloud storage is very important for you Content is also being created, material is being created Your store will keep on happening, it won’t go anywhere Advanced features like brand will be available nearby Kate Magic Resize & Collab Team Tools There are many more amazing things like this Features are now available in the Pro version We talk about how to earn from Kanva How can you earn money from Kanva friends? cell design templates obviously if you A skill came and inside it you gained mastery by practising You have creativity and thought inside you If there is a process then you can earn lakhs of rupees from here You can earn lakhs per month just by doing this thing You can earn money per month by freelancing Design services are ok, can do freelance so it happened that whatever designs you sell You will earn from that but in today’s date up work or Your work is done, it’s ruined, there are many such There are platforms where if your designs If I have guts then you can do it on R basis You can start freelancing for jobs There is no shortage if you are a good designer If yes then today jobs will be available to you globally It is available at the level, you will also get it in companies Social media will also be available in work from home Media Content Creation Obviously Today’s Date Who doesn’t create social media content in IMDb Individuals also create companies If you want to make it then get it created from here canva is of good level ok You can join affiliate program Through this if someone through you canva If you join then you will get the money You have an opportunity to earn through sale Custom Print Products You Can Custom The printing industry is good these days Customized people want all these designs Even his business can be done through this friends where is it not used If you want to make a website then you can do that Can you make designs etc.? Ok, banners. etc. you have to make paid ads You want to make thumbnails using Canva It is used everywhere, that’s the importance of this Learn and practice the full course Practicing is the most important Would Now friends, if we talk about Kanva Users from 2013 to 2024 means so many years You see how much I have grown in 2013 when I had come to understand that everything starts with the zero user Whoever it is, the user comes first After that today there are 75 million users. If it is Kanva’s then think how much it is used This must be happening on a daily basis and most of the friends What is good about our females? Look at the participation of females over 60 I am using Canva which has around 40 mails their ratio is around but and friends this You have to learn the whole course, now we will tell you We will teach you things one by one practically If you teach at the level then friends please Write in the comment section, yes I will learn, yes I will learn yes I will learn from these comments I will answer it myself and if I get a lot of answers Got comments, got likes, got shares, friends Strong skilled courses will keep coming to you So let’s learn it for Kanva hello friends welcome back to Marketing funds discussed in today’s video How can you easily create your Canva account? If you can create it then let’s start First of all you have to open your browser after that you have to search here canva.com If you enter this then you will see this in front of you The interface will appear in this manner, then after that What do you have to do if you have this Pay ID If it is already made then what should you do? No need to log in on this and but if your What to do if your ID is not created Sign up After signing up you will see this The interface will appear if your browser is connected to your g mail If you are logged in from then your g mail id should be There will be shows here like my two ID shows it is happening but if you don’t want your What do you need to do to log in with Gmail? Continue with another account then click here You get the option to continue with Continue it will take two to three seconds and Simply my account gets created then Friends you can easily make your own canvas in this way I hope you can create an account of hmm you must have liked the video If you like it then like the video, thank you Hello friends you are welcome In today’s video on marketing funds, we will We are going to do an overview of Canva, so let’s Let’s get started so I used Canva The dashboard has been opened Okay, so friends, this is how you can do it The most important thing you will get to see is the interface First, we start with the search bar So friends what to do in the search bar like You need to create a post If you search like this then it is digital We get post only related to marketing etc. it will show you now what it is You can also give the size of the story and the post can also give The size of the post will be given only when you You will make anything, this post is perfect Create that post on size Now let’s talk about the project Friends, see what the projects are As we go creator design after that we pick up the post Are Someone like this we took the post okay now What have we done in this? We have changed its color. diya or we are editing any post ok Is So this will now show up in our project option. Now I will show you how it will happen Friends, as we have seen, we are doing this work After that we have come to a new page or We accidentally deleted this page or this tab So what do we have to do? Open Canva After that we will see this project There is an option, if we click on it then we will Recently I am making a project that See all the designs here Recent Design will be written, click on it If we do it then we you can edit it again ok Cleared, the third option comes to you Click here to view the templates Here you will find millions of templates. Now friends the thing is that you You should know what to make that what do you want to make related to what Like here you have something related to business Want to make social media education video here You will find different templates for everything. If you go to any festival, you will get it If you want to add any related post then click here If you write about the festival then it is related to that You see this here it is very cute Templates are available friends, now let’s talk Let’s talk about brand features first Friends, this is our brand feature It is used in PR, okay, it is free for us. I don’t get access to use it otherwise what is its use so this is its use It’s like if you have an agency, you There is a company, it has some colors Like red, yellow, green or any color of yours Once the theme is done, if you create a post If you do then simply you can do this as soon as you When you click, it will become the theme of the same color It means we are creating a post Not at that time as soon as we used the brand colour If you go here, you will see our colours, our logo whatever we mean whatever elements Those which we have to use in every post We will get this thing in brand now here You get an option of apps on this Click you will do different pups in friends app for different things, such as gradient got type cut out Friends, I have written a single on this as well. I am bringing the video forward but I will also tell you I want to show an interface that does this thing What it’s like the image to frame is done as if we If we click on this then we will save our image as a you can make it in a frame then We can add anything inside so There are many ways for you to see here. it will be available for you ok After that Friends now the elements inside a post we would have looked at okay if we saw this post then see this You see this option a minute ago We will make it bigger or give you an option The design must be looking like we are Select the design in detail Take the latest from marketing This is a one minute pro feature friends this On whichever place you see a crown made Look, if you like this post then you will see this This must have been only for pro users To become pro you first need to Pro will need to upgrade to update mine is free that’s why in this I can’t get any access to it No, we take it for free or post it Alright now look at what’s in it You will see the Elements option here. What are the elements like you might not know Do you want to put any image on it or design anything? If you want to do it then what you have to do here like we write it grow If we come to graphics then see this from Related started giving us logos or elements See, we can edit them in this way ok you can see the photos here as well for which you get related to grow Video as well as audio, shapes mock ups many more You will find the thing to look into After that there is third option of text in it what is the use of the text whatever we get in it We have to add text on that text You will click on the heading as you wish look here we get some adding even if you write ‘d’ it will come here ok yes friends you will also find font combination in this get to see this Look, but friends, I want to say this I would like that if you use this for your personal use If you are using it for this then friends you can use Canva You can use it for free, that is the best but If you work for a company, if you If you want to do freelancing then friends For this you should get a pro who can do it for you It will be best if you get one here The option will be visible about the brand I already told you, look at this Like I said, the logo colors burst You can add all these things to it based on the brand You can, like if I create a post So I will drag and drop them from here. I can edit it now and talk to you friends we do uploads like whatever we We will upload the image here The show will be fine just like I put it So I can simply drag and drop it from here. I can also drop it and send it directly I can also put it here by clicking OK Now look at this, you will see the draw option it is happening as we click on it drop us like if we need to highlight something or change some background color or whatever we want to do are such by doing this we can use it okay After that comes the project Friends, as I told you in the beginning I had shown the same project like this There is a show here too, I saw it once I will let you see it here as a feature You must be seeing this project of ours when we At that time when you are creating a post There was a show here too Hey look at this yup after that friends here You have your apps section which I I have already told you, after that here See, you can see the edit option like If we go to it, here we will see its image can also edit Like I would delete them all first hmm okay after that as soon as we edit If you click, look friends we are here You can apply its filters and edit the shadows Can are ok and there is so much more to do in it For example if we need to blur the image We want to do auto focus, we want to do auto retouch You can do this in this, friends, here you will find Friends, you must be seeing this background remover Look, this is just our upgrade This free app is used only in the plan It is not for users, after this you will have to You must be seeing the border style, then look at this With this, if we use its image or any If we click on any post and When you click on it, its border will be created this will become a curve line because of this the corners will be okay if we If we want to flip the picture then we can do it normally you can do it right from here There should be transparency, there is transparency in this As much transparency as you want that means if you want a blurry image or if you want to show a little Clarity so this animation can be done with this There is an option of Animation when you click here You can apply any animation you want from this You can according to your ok after that your position options When you come into position you have to turn to the left it has to be done in the middle, it gets set automatically ok here we have layers like We could have taken some element are ok come to position and see like if I I want to bring this image to the top Meaning if this image is shown further then see this Do you see how it looks like If I want this element to be at the back Bring it up like I bring it up to you If the show starts happening here, friends, this was I hope you like today’s overview of Canva. You must like this video if the video is good If you like it then please like the video, thank you For watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing funda, you will You’re going to see how you create a pop effect You can use Canva for this, so let’s get started Do are the first to take After that friends whatever image you like You want to put any photo, put your image If you want then you can apply it, I have given this girl a put the image thi let’s zoom it in okay yes, I took the full page after this friends Coming to Elements or Searching on It curve and after that you get this element you will see this take it and this Rotate it 180 degrees and zoom a bit take its color let’s make it white okay after that press control d like this have to do it and bring it up so fine One more time Control D and rotate it a little bit Let’s reduce its size first in the same way From Okay, now you have to come to the drum section. Make its color white and its weight By filling it up, this part of it It’s all right to make it white, now this is yours You can download the image from here Lenny your image will be downloaded here Create a new page now which you have downloaded upload the image here ok it is being uploaded let’s zoom it in again and we will remove its background ok after this you come to edit it Shadows After that you will see a If you click on the outline option, Look, you will see the outline of it We have to change the color first to white and Let’s reduce its size to 10, okay? Why are you not getting the show now? Because the background is also white so the most First change its background too If yes then you are seeing it light lines okay after that the same thing that you have done this I took the image from this image and re-posted it here and then we’ll zoom in fully again This image will be brought to the page ok now friends first of all its look at the transparency here we will go to transparency and check it Let’s take the image in the back It is coming out all right so take a look at this There is a little bit of difference Now look at this, it has become completely hot As soon as we click on this image and see its Background Remove If you do it you will see that it comes out perfect Now its transparency is full We will cut it from here We’ll cut it from here and cut it from below also cut ok ok now what to do next You can see this image created by Koy Jo here I want to download from, go to download now All pages will be visible on this, page one will be visible Select and download the second page Now you have to create a page one last time You will come to another download which is image download yes it is please bring it here and upload it Let’s make it full screen also ok now its background again I will remove it On the edit will come and you will see the shadows again There will be a curve, if you click on it you will see it You can see the gap below, what should we do in this First of all its distance should be made zero and adjust the curve a little according to your needs Correct is his After that change the background from here Whichever background you like You can add it as per your requirement ok friends this is the way you can do it for yourself You can also apply pop up effect to your memes Friends I hope you like this video You might like it if you like the video Please like the video thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing fund you will How to Engage Yourself for a Family You can create post with Kanva Key Let’s start, first take the size of our will take Now friends, I took the size of A for Create a post and now if you want to make it for fun If you want to make it for your friend then you can buy it from here You can get this size here It will be okay, this must have happened to you too a facebook ok Now the first thing we need to do is Applying a background will go to Elements and y search Will do Balu background so here you will see the background If we get to see a little light We will take the same background as this yes, after this we will make our product We will put it on which we have to make a post I have already taken this post on here I wanted to remove its background I will give it a try and make it a little bigger Just make the size a little smaller Its Just search here after that Shadow and a little scroll will come to graphics and here Shadow You Let’s bring this element down and move it a little would shorten it Are This shows its shadow. Okay and then now we what to do search here Coffee come to bean photos Is If friends, if we have our element If we don’t get what we want to apply then we What to do on this website and search here is the element you need like I need coffee If you want it for bean then you can see it here the post must be coming I picked up one of these images I will copy this image like this one I am going here Paste After this remove its background I will rotate it a little bit and make it lighter see it here After doing it perfect, we add another element I will take Like this, increase the size by removing the background I will make it a bit smaller and edit it at the option of will come after that the effect will come on the ball You will click on the hole image and then will increase the intensity 50 You could have made its size a little smaller Are plus take it one more time REMOVE By doing this friends these are some things which I bring life into the image and the post don’t forget to do this We will duplicate this OK then we’ll go to text and this will be written in dummies after going to CODA Let’s double it, make its size a little bigger After that you come to the font and write here Give We will take this baton and change its color. They and come on effects apply this lift leave it at 60 and make it a little bigger let’s take the heading one more time and then will write good taste Mode size is reduced to this first I will take it and change its font also You will change the funnet color as well We would do it and leave it here, the size is small would shorten it Are OK, after selecting them, first press them a little let’s set it up ok after that if you have a company or You want to put his logo So you can add those people on here like this goes on I am a copy logo like this logo let’s copy it We will bring another page here paste it After that we will remove its background. will come to element and search on it do on circle graphics come and see this element take it and change its background let’s take it so that this show can be done okay now take this up Let’s layer it and place it exactly in the center I will do it friends, this is white on it I will tell you why it was necessary to bring it See the highlights of this as it was before This was not happening unless its background was like this now if I put this background on this If I apply it then it will hurt a lot, that’s why I am making its background white yes this is enough Then I copy it I will make it smaller First copy this and paste it here now Let me bring it here and make it a little smaller takes its size which shows If it had happened then our people would have come here. after that put it here You have to come back to Elements here again Searching Is White As soon as you search this you will get a little When scrolling, you should see this element first this is so no yes ok this element is placed in this image have to turn back so that it gets highlighted a little C now friends look at its background it looks like a very light background so here at We will search again Are Blue Background will come to the photos and take it from here once look at it this way, as if in this Just look at how much we put it in It’s highlighted now we’ll move it here a little bit first increase its size a little Are But after that I felt a shadow Now what do you do after this I want to come to the text, I will search here Write it as you like, you can rate it whatever you want The name will be the handle on this put it in and change its fit but I am using the burst I would make its size a little smaller Am I will search it here e gram This logo has come copied from this We will do this and paste it we will remove its background also Are First Ir Te If you had searched here, it would have come here If it is not coming in then we have to do it from outside If we had to do it, we would have engaged the people first Let’s do the background of it are going to the element at y Search do Cox takes it and colors it will take it will take this Now we will do these two behind copy and paste it here Please make its size a little smaller as well and this is how it is written below So friends, how did you like this post? Do tell us in the comment section and your friends In this way you can also make a good canvas I hope you guys can make a post You might like this video if you like the video If you like it, please like the video thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing fund you will You are going to see how you can use Canva with its help You can create website banner from this so let’s get started First of all, open your Canva After that you can search on this. will side banner his After this the template will start showing to you. While searching guys as you know there are different There are different sizes of websites Some are small and some are big, according to this website if the size is of then what do you need for that Here you have to choose the custom size option It will look like it has to come on this and we will be of standard size which are mostly from the website then put it in hat new design So here we got the size of the website. what do we have to do after that Adding a Background OK haite it ban okay guys so take this background We took it and then we clicked on the text do d heading and then put text on y you could have changed its fit are searching rotate it a bit take it and then ding it will write The cell can change its fit as well We will also cover the gap between them by setting the lament will reduce it change its colour take it or rotate it His After this your next step is here you have to If you want to add a product then click on the link for the product I have already uploaded the image for you Post your product here Background Remove will cut it a little will do this it is ok from will post it here 50 But while scrolling hey look leave this batch here we will give will search here The dots scroll a bit Are take its color white will make the size smaller Let’s duplicate it by pressing Control-D. leave it after and from the keyboard you will We will set this, okay, after that copy both will duplicate it here will take it ok it is what it is [music] ok then back to elements will come and search for shape come to the solution you will get this shape take this This is called take it bigger There will be a heading on the text I will change it [music] let’s make it smaller by multiplying it by Friends, this was the text of order now would have changed it So friends this is its final result now You can easily install it on your website I can tell you more before I leave. Like if you believe you have the background of this If you don’t feel good, what will you do? Search do Some skulls will appear on background photos Now, as this is the background, we will do it let’s bring it here okay if this It doesn’t look good, please check it once If you don’t feel like it then do it in this way You can do more background checks from Here it is Lock it, whichever background matches yours I hope you can apply it friends I hope you like this video If you like the video then like the video do thank you for watching hello friends welcome to your market In today’s video in Panda you will see how you A Kinetic Typography Can So let’s get started with the help of Canva First, open your browser Open the dashboard of Canva and then you have to come to the video section okay Click on the video to choose your size First of all let’s add it to For background you can click here please search the background is ok come on graphics come on photos and which one cute nice you can see the background take that take it ok after that you have to put your I want to install a product for the product What could I do Come to this website and get your product puts the name ok i will scroll a bit Friends like this click on this then copy We will take the image and paste it on here. Background of what you need to do next Removing ok let’s rotate it a bit let’s make it bigger than y okay let’s bring it to the center now okay You have to click on the product you’ll scroll to the animation and then You might be seeing this on Tumblr you will click ok hey you should have checked its time what do you do next text But whatever you want to write, come let it come You can write the heading shoes then you have to change its fat I am using this font right now Archive Black and its color change I will do it, okay, you should increase its size Let’s go to the center Let’s give it a try we are Elevator Animation scrolls a bit I will stop it, okay we will leave this one after that from here Let’s do Control D, bring it up. you will come to effects after that you will see here But I want to take Holo and the one who makes it 10 We will give its thickness by 10 okay let’s leave it on the animation now come you will scroll a little and you will see this Baseline will appear, click on it, OK In the same way you will control D minutes Control D and duplicate it and move it down okay friends what will you do after that What you have to do is click on the text below to do is to come to the baseline and its down To choose direction, click on down will do it okay after that the ones on top Click on the text to see the show timing As soon as you click here you will The timing is being shown to you here I have to click on my timing Option comes when you do show timing So you will get the timing shown on this, then click on it reduce it so much that when the previous text If this comes immediately after that then we would have done this Are Correct Now after this on the lowest tax You have to click and also reduce its timing Lenny Is ok now after this what you have to do is shoes this is take it behind your product this tux is fine So minutes do it the same way Now watch this once its final see the result If yes, then in this way you can buy the product for yourself can you make an image for a small one Now friends, you can create animations Like this is a little animation that came out seconds you want that in this way you and If you also want to install your product What do you mean by that it becomes a long animation? in that you have one after the other one after the other If the animation keeps coming then what do you need for it All you have to do is click on this and then click on duplicate If you want to come then see this, you will find it same as well will he make it like this and give it to you now what Do you want to change your product here? to do like that we will go here and search do Perfumes scroll like it’s here take the image will come here click on this you will do it and remember that you are going to do that in the second We will paste this on the animation and remove its background Now friends, the one behind you will give This is a product, you can delete it from here and make this product bigger will give one minutes now you can put it here let’s reduce its size a bit we will write it in the same way here also okay you have this product now You just need to add animation to it. The animation will be the same as the previous one I had put a tumbler in it, it’s ok now look at it checking the final result Yes friends, you can make more like this in this way now i will tell you as you have put in seconds We installed this one, we changed the background a bit let’s do it This will make it look even better So friends, in this way you can make a can create good animation Friends I hope you like this video You must have come if you liked the video then watch the video Like thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing funds, you will You are going to see how with the help of Kanva You can create QR codes for your brand for your profile or for any of your If you want to make it for your company then For that, simply go to Canva’s dashboard. You have to open it and then search here q r code so here you will find lots of templates get to see let’s take this customize this Template friends the way you see it There must have already been a QR code here If it is ready then we don’t have to do anything with it We have to go to the Apps section You have to search here by coming to the section You have to enter the QR code again so here you will see it here for a minute But you will see a QR code on it If you click here it is asking for it URL: So here you have to enter that URL of yours I have to give it to whomever you want that when my If the QR code is scanned then click on that profile Go to any place if you need your company do you have a profile or would you like to have one Scan this QR code to open the website If you do that then you can put that URL on here Like I’m putting my first yrl will have to take out Friends, like the URL came here I copy this I will paste it here ok If you generate QR code then friends you will You will see our picture above this QR code A QR code has arrived here I will make it bigger ok after this now if you want its If you want to change the background then you can do it from here change its color first search here will take [music] background this way You can create your own QR code from Friends, I hope you like this video You would be happy if you liked the video Like the video Thank you for watching Hello friends welcome to marketing In today’s video you are going to see in the fund How to Create a Swipe Animation So let’s start with the help of Kava First of all you will open your browser after that you can search here we will first click here and then You will see the video option here. Click here and you will see the video 1080 pixels click on this We will make its background in the color given here will do it first okay in elements will come here search We will make a circle and then put this shape here I want to bring it, make the size a little smaller after that bring it to the center and leave it okay what do you have to do after that I told you about a website thi was pre p so friends on this website you High quality images are available for free and if there is a tree also We will take out our table from here. j see it honestly D friends like this is the image I am from here I will copy and paste this from here okay after doing th school we will do it first The background will be removed We will remove it and reduce its size. I will leave it, okay friends, I have The images have been brought in this manner, you can also do the same can bring Ho Bakram I will do it, let’s cut it a little from the side [music] Its and six Tax is ok b leaf its back we will make it smaller to 0 degrees oh ok let’s remove the background will do it from the side Cut 90 degree payload or leave size make it a little smaller take it and leave it here okay now what do you do next First set them in a line which is called take it ok Is this happened this happened now what should you do The circle inside it changes its color Let’s do it okay now we have to group all of these I want to make it, go to share from control G You have to go to downloads here you will get mp4 The video will be visible, click on it Click on PNG and its size will be full by clicking on transparent background Download by If you do this then friends download our image It’s done, now what do you do after that You have to click on the text option and add a Now let’s put the heading here sir. We Kutu women can reduce its size will bring it here and leave it color it white will take this bring it to the center and leave it there okay so You have written Qutub Minar in the same way control d do y turn it from Lao come and leave me Will give D Correct let’s put it on big The pen will increase its size a little bit okay after doing this enough friends this is what is inside We had the image of this by clicking on it I have to delete all these groups now. make come on share come on download and I told you the way of PNG Bring it into the form and fill its size Download Transparent Background Image So friends, now we have both the things Now we will delete it from here First of all we will download the image I did it, I will bring him here and leave him, okay From here we will first reduce its size a bit. taking we’ll bring it here and make it bigger taking okay bring it here and leave it make it smaller by two sizes first its ok now what do you want to do You downloaded the text and it was I’ll drag and drop it, okay Now just like we placed the image in the same way We can also add text is this text or leave it ok The shows come in layers layers set this up first ok now you What to do, you saw on this screen You will see a dot, click on it and if you click on duplicate then You will get a duplicate here, after that What we have to do is show up in layers layers then image first we will The first second would have changed the background So in the second one we will take the background. I took it like red then do show layers Okay, after this let’s come to the image now. What we need to do is rotate the image Come Gyaan Sai should have made its image a little smaller [music] of ok is then Switch to Layers from Show Layers Text Now to the text You have to do it right bring it here and leave it ok to give let’s set it from here if the color is not matching then apply the color change a little bit we’ll take it okay after that same thing like we have done here duplicated from in the same way three Click on the dots and you will duplicate it Just like we made changes to this, we made changes to this as well will also show layers background Color has to come back in layers show layers but I have to come to the table and rotate it Is here you the image comes closer and come to the tax and turn it around OK [music] This is the same way we ground the beans Why would I rotate the duplicate page? will go to layers show layers We apply this after colouring it on May Texts will come Hoya leaf should be applied first by editing the text will come here, will come on layers, show layers image Click on rotate by do it right Layers will come in it again But sh layers don’t match its color Let’s make it a little darker Are ok now what do you do next is this transition effect visible You will click on TR and you will see this There must be a match and I will click on it and You can see its duration, you should watch it full I have to do it, okay, just like I put it in this same here too will apply transition match and move duration will do it full ok have to come on this ad The transition has to come, we have to move and be afraid Let’s see how its final result comes Y Look friends, I hope you like this You must have liked the video, if you like the video thanks for liking the video [music] watching hello friends in today’s video we You will know the eye catching attraction of Lincoln How to make a banner, let’s start First of all, we open our canvas Are We come here to the dashboard and write Search In Lincoln After that you will get templates here It goes a lot Whichever template you like you can Add it as per your choice like me or takes the template Now the most important thing is to know your niche What should you be related to? I want to make it like I want to make it now I will simply search for digital data Digital marketing look here i get a lot of Templates are now available in these templates I take what I like Like this is a template I would pick it up Now it’s written in it we are the best Digital Solution for the Business is like this You will find lots of talets, see them below You will see that you will get digital information related to this You will get templates related to marketing only You will find many more things in this We don’t have to do anything, I just simply have to do all this I like things like its color change If I want to do it, I can change this color its ok its okay if you text me I want to change it by removing its dot or by changing my number I can add my website I am here and I can put my name on it like this I told you about the photo earlier Drag and drop, tap on easy remove Let’s make it a little bigger here Pay and simple your person is here After that, now I see this color change I want to do this, I don’t like this color are So I will add it in the color of my choice In this and if I’m this person, if I What should be done if you want to highlight them? In the Elements I will come, I will search for fame and see this, it is very all frames are available We search for me first take shape Let’s take one Squares and Shapes I went here with my shapes We will bring a minute and change its color because that color is the same gone now [music] make it bigger Let’s bring it to the back and bring it here let’s set it a little from the sides Now let’s make a little border for it of the border You could have colored the inside as well whichever meaning seems good to you you can use that You can add color as per your choice Now if you want to add your number here By adding number like or add me your website If you want to do it then simply tap on me and click I will do Ddddd Marketing makes this bigger as it is written here below By bringing it simply I will do the tax and here writes on I am increasing its size let’s change the font of this why do you underline this you could have changed the colour also Let’s take a little hat do it ok Is and do it a little So we go to elements and search here do Shapes in dots and graphics are very useful to us. All the dots of the same type are found it’s like we got these dots Their color changes slightly every minute First, turn them at 90 degrees Take it down in this way and get the same control D I will duplicate it and do the same here too If you give then friends in this way you can make your own can prepare banner and I would like to give you a free tip my friends If you are making your banner of Lincoln then Try to at least fill it with elements because there are more elements than that That means there is too much mixing going on I don’t like it because that thing isn’t Then that thing doesn’t make you attractive, that’s different If she makes it then at least try it Add elements, keep the color grading correct and yes The most important thing is that whatever banner you make, keep it simple. Make it sober because it is eye catching It looks more attractive the simpler it is I hope you like it as much friends You might like this video if you If you like the video then please like the video thank you so Hello friends welcome In marketing funds as you know We are providing you the latest tips and tricks from Daily Kanwa We keep bringing today’s video for you in we will see how you can do a particular You can easily edit your text on Elementor so look at our Canva text we have come on board in this The size goes But now simply as I told you There is a free website pick will click on this So friends there is a Free Pick Joy website on this You are provided with high quality photos yes but it is a tree but mostly on it Messages are available free as well as paid But the best part is the high quality If the message is given then what should we do? Search us on y Hase Bud, friends, does not come in the name of bird Here we search Token may come in its name here it is available So look, we have taken this image here We copy it and bring it here I will paste it now let’s take this to the screen Let’s remove its background Remove the background first OK, now let’s duplicate this. Let’s delete this image now If you put it on the background then friends like now what should we do here Here we take this background The dragon will drop here And we will copy this image and bring it here will paste it okay now on y y in full It has come, if you want you can make it a little bigger can do yes ok now it is here now what do we do What do you have to do now after deleting them? What we have to do is to download the image will take it here Correct Now make it bigger and take up the whole screen taking okay now what do we have to do Have to go to Elements and search When you come to the frame you will see this frame Do you see the option of Now we have to search for the frame B so here you will find the tip will take make it bigger Let’s search on this hey bring this too yes and make it bigger You could have taken it as well Now look at this, just wait a minute, I will put it here r Take this also and see here 39 You must be able to see the distance clearly Perfect size same in both the letters will go 39 look here okay now here you Have to search D This is how we’ll get size 39 here I will make it bigger, okay, what should I do now? Look, BI RD has come now we have to take it here I have to go to uploads in uploads You will remember that I took this photo When you downloaded it, we went to uploads Look, we can see the image on top We will drag and drop it and then The image has already come later, we will focus on this After double clicking, you will double click Let’s make this post bigger now We have to do this much that joy is our frame From here onwards the whole thing is in this frame So let’s see how we need to set this up You must be seeing that there is no B show here It remained the same as we did in B. This is how we inserted it in the I we will make it bigger than this are in equal to lake do it ok it also disappeared a little bit increase the pressure ok in the same way now we have to do it in R also to do is double Click Zoom cut a little Let’s mix B then big and will pull it from here as well Now it cannot see the letters that you have Now what should we do about it I have to go to the background and do the background If you want to delete then Look at it this way You can make your own picture in word So friends, now after this you will get this The image is visible, we will do it from here copy but before that first read these four You will select it and you will see this border style click on this first We bring it and colour it White And we will paste it here, now see this You must be seeing the bird, what should we do now? No, first bring it to its full size One Do not destroy any of your images in this manner for a minute any one on your element any one of your bird or do you have any product that is used in this way You can edit your element with your you can do the letter and in this way your The post seems very engaging If you look attractive then I hope friends you will like the video if If you like it, please like the video thank you you hello friends welcome back to marketing Fund In today’s video you will see how you can buy Ili You can create a typography element So let’s get started with the help of Canva So here you go, Canva’s dashboard. It will open, here you can click on the thumbnail will come and on this you will click on the option of element I will go and search for it You can check the elements here. If you don’t find the best element here If you get the element related to If you don’t get it then you can click on it in the next page. will come and search here for free pic Click on the website By doing this we search here From here we will give whatever we want If you need any element, you can download it Like this, we can click on it and copy it. will take paste make it bigger by now what you have to do is you have to go Clicking on it in its apps section I have to search on this you type Then you will find an element here will click on You and you have to write this on text option we’ll write it in hey cups and we’ll font it on y change it will take At this we can change its color let’s make it a little bigger than y And from here you can add element to design Do it and you will see the design here Now we will manage it accordingly from here. We will do it and then you will see people here it is visible What do we have to do by clicking on this? You need to duplicate it from here By duplicating your mango here This is your text, right click on it And we will delete it from here. we will bring him here and then we will go By going to Elements in Elements, you will find Shapes to type on Shapes come in L, here you can see the shape will go or click it and drag drop it also You can do this but we can change its color taking Let’s bring its layer up Now you can simply download it from here take it go to share and download but Here we do not have to download both the pages We have to unselect page one and save it Now your here to download It is downloading You have to go to Gaya downloads to get it Scroll to here cut it out from the drink Now we will give you this on top of the mango There is text, we can cut it and bring it Let’s make it a little bigger and as i told you bg on y You have to click on the remover and your remove its background Let’s make it a little bigger so that it comes in perfect shape You have to click on it or you have to click on edit. You will see the option, click on it and look there is a dtone on it click on it do it and come to the cherry blossoms After this there is an option of highlight, come to highlight You have to make its color completely white and There are shadows here, make the shadows white as well. and from here you can crop it Take it here, enlarge it, crop it or take it bigger than the size of a [music] Do it simply friends, in this way you can Create your own typography elements I hope you liked the video video If you liked it then like the video Hello friends you are welcome In today’s video on marketing funda, you will You are going to see how you can create a thumbnail for a You can make it with the help of Canva, so come first of all start Friends, you should choose a background color which Being eye catching means looking attractive If the other person wants us then we will do it like this take the background isn’t this ok Is then click and upload let’s remove the background let’s take this for free okay we’ve created the image Di friends, after this you have to click on this image You have to click on edit and click on edit After clicking, it will shrink a little After that, we will click on the shadow option you have to click on the glow click on the glow After doing this you should change its color I will make it red in color and Set it to your liking okay so we put it on the background After this you search on y hey balu This comes on flair graphics Went okay move it behind this image it will go fine it will make it brighter a little bit here It is done, after this you will search here Add a Heading Then will write viral is ok Let’s change its fun andon change color and put bricks in it The left is okay, now you can make it bigger. tuck it in a little lightly We will take it, okay, after that press control D the same will come after that write Take The color will change as the size increases ok i’ll take it in cents okay after that you have to go a little side here I can put people on it so that you can put people on it Coming to Elements and Search to do Y logo is here now It’s like we can’t find the logo here. remained Direct search here do guys this we got this copy from this take it and paste it here I will give you ok should have removed the background yes we will make their size a little smaller ok now rotate it Friends, if we bring transparency in this If you reduce it then see it will become like this That means there will be no blur effect in this, just this The image will be washed out and not visible But if we want to blur this image But this show should happen but it is not If there is a blurry show then what should we do with this image Click on it and then go to edit Come to blur, here you will see an option Click on Blur under Effects After that you will see an option here We want to blur the entire image. So click on it and you will get its density tax according to Okay, after this we leave it and cut from y If you do this then our image will become blurred look you will see after this we will do a little Rotate We will do it and leave it to you now This is how we have to do Control-D Let’s rotate it a little bit to make it’s size Make it smaller by making it control D here we will do it by rotating it a little bit This way we will increase the size a bit its friends these little things inside it If this thing brings life to the thumbnail then it never don’t miss it too Okay, after that you can use an effect here. You are going to use the one whose name is Shadow now you see what will happen [music] it will happen we took this after this we put it here Due to this, whatever sides it has, they will be a little it will become dark, see this type fine than here take this code let’s rotate it ok after that you can search here Do Arrow Here you will get the option of arrow click this please rotate it We will make it a little smaller We will change its color, okay, here we are Go to elements and search Are come to square one and we’ll take the element One it here bring and leave okay we will change its color also and we will rotate it a little bit In a proper way Now just text whatever you want You have to enter the text inside this box can put lie we will change its fun Let’s change the colour its ok let’s rotate it Control D do it put it in make it smaller You will be instantly impressed by this If this fat is a little thin then it will be good will take then you can write it in or remove this and make a duplicate of this we give Of Let’s change its color first First let’s increase its size ok Is it can come inside easily Friends, it will go just like you have made it here You can do the same thing here as well Let’s take a minute to set this up first Its alignment is a bit wrong OK Coming to the elements, we will also add this in it Can are y people Correct after that we would take it one more time Let’s dock it, we’ll write it Rupees color it Yellow size makes it a bit smaller write this see its color change too will do ok now copy both of these now as it is shaking we will take it will lock it okay so that we can copy from this don’t do this anymore minute copy these two and bring them up here’s a minute before we get to the layers because the effect that we have behind it applied it was shaking again and again this one on this we’ll go and lock it first so that it didn’t move You can just set the lock on this as per your requirement okay then we will search again let’s do it Arrow Graphics here comes another one and let’s rotate it First will make it smaller ok yes, let’s change its color as well We are good is it ho Let’s add another element This has arrived, you should have changed its colour too let’s shorten it We will give it a try and rotate it here ok so friends this is the way you can do it You can create thumbnails, now there’s one more thing in this Let’s do one Search Bar Shadow: You will see a shadow in this element let’s take it and rotate it first okay Its size is less We will do it and post it on this viral post. ok will take it Now we will reduce its transparency a little. First Bus In this way friends, you can do this for yourself Can create engaging and eye-catching thumbnails yes friends i hope you like this video You might like it if you liked the video Please like the video thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing fundas you will You are going to see how you can achieve the paper cutout effect You can do it with the help of Cava so come starting off Look, here’s my Canva dashboard open. It’s done, I click on social media hmm and then you must be seeing this What should I do about this on Elements Do you want to go or search If you want to appear on paper photos, see this first the element would be visible let’s take it let’s make it bigger okay its After that you have to come to edit image and adjust You will scroll a little and then you will see this It will give the option of clarity in texture I will fill it up ok After this you have to upload your image If yes then you will go to upload image and click on your image I will upload it and remove the background Let’s make it a little bigger are ok And friends you can download this image from here do it okay now it is downloading After the image is downloaded we have to It has to be deleted and our image It has been downloaded, drag it to here and paste it Let’s take it to full screen after this you have to come to p section will search here You choppy then look here you will see the first one You will click on this or your image will appear it goes, you have to select this, see Like I’ll click the first one Click Seconds, this is how you create its boundaries After this, when your end comes friends then By bringing the end one here you will be directed to You have to click on the first dot that was there If you want to do it then come on our image page If you go then some interface like this will appear We will design the back image too We will delete it, we will take it and here we will We will make it bigger, okay friends, after that You have to come to Elements and search here will you Come on Brunch Graphics yes, let’s come to the photos, let’s do a little search If we see any good effect Background I mean like it is we have it here Let’s bring it and leave it, okay now we have to give it back If you want to do it on a layer then here we go to the layer option But let’s go send backwards okay so friends This was our final result, hopefully you will like this video if If you like the video then please like the video do thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing, you will You’re going to see how you can create a brand for yourself Can you design a logo for me please come Let’s start by searching here first. let’s take Look guys, here you will find a lot All templates are available for viewing from the logo of the logo related so if you know any of these people If you like the logo, you can design it. If not, then click here to creator design pe search You will do the logo, after that you will see the size here you will get it, take your size will take it ok First of all its background color change will that do We are grounded y ok after that we will search here You Coming to circle shapes and graphics a little bold we’ll take the circle okay We will make it bigger in this its ok just keep it like that we can change its color We will take it, after that take another slide You can put him in the middle of this circle It is ok to keep You could have changed its background color a little Are If he is not coming here earlier then we will I will enter the colour code this colour code Take it and set its background a little There is a circle inside it, we will take it as well change the colour a little bit will take it, will search here now circle, let’s keep its color white and Just need to get it to the center okay then come to elements and search here Come to Kapil, just search a bit, you will find someone It’s good if you find an element like this We get an element in graphics we will bring it to the center size first will make it a little smaller take it in the middle After that I will give you a tax here if so then we will come here and do the heading and this I will write it down change its fit I’m gonna take it It’s ok, after that you can use it on effect You will come by scrolling and you will see It will be in option shape, by doing this you can save it on your phone you set it accordingly take this from After that come to Elements and search here to do coffee then take this element make it smaller take it and rotate it a little After that you have to click on layers come show layers then you click on this If you do then you can move it easily [music] layers from then go to graphics and search it a bit do it P: Take this element and make it smaller This You can duplicate it and put it here Put go to text and then to heading write Give Change the stabilize text In this way friends you can make a logo for yourself I hope friends if you can create it you will like this video if If you like the video then please like the video do thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing funda, you will You are going to see how you can create a frame from an image can create let’s get started take a page first After that, friends, whatever image you You have to create a frame for that image upload it here will take like this is the image i want to create a frame for it First remove its background I will do it, the memes will come to us, okay After that you have to come to section A. But you have to search for image two see this frame you must be seeing it on this Image to Frame Application Click on it do After that you will see the option here Choose file or frame to design you can click on it Click and then convert image to frame as soon as you click on it then It will take two to three seconds and see it has a We simply created the frame and gave it away Zoom Now we will add whatever we want to it can do Are Like if we come to the elements on the ts If we want to add to it, come These Or you can make a frame for yourself in this way I hope friends can edit it You will like this video if the video If you liked it then please like the video, thank you you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing funds, you will to see How can you use Canva to create your normal life Canva can create animation on images So let’s start with the help of first of all we will open social media will take one size ok after that we will open a new tab now We need a pic and we will charge you a fee for that Let’s go and search on here Like this is the image, let’s take it from here Copy I will not do this size, I should have taken this size yes I will paste this image here will take this much for this and then for the apps You will go to the section and here you can search do Image Annie Mason, look at this, you are seeing the first application if you click on this will select an image in the The design will take 2-3 minutes to load I’m okay it took over now after this we What to do is, here you have the option to generate It is visible if you want then you can save your video You can select the type of video you want You can also describe it and even if you don’t You just have to do this automatically on generate You have to click and see it is visible here hey this could take one to two minutes toy one two it will take a minute to do it So see friends as it is here you can see After creating the image, we have been given a video Create this if we do the design If we do this, then see, we will add this here. We can make it bigger in this way Friends, we will take it in this way Now friends, I have given the talk after creating the animation Look at this it is like this, I just know it have created a bad image but as much as we We will give it a good image and the more we I will tell you nicely, by writing a prompt We will tell you that brother we need this type of image In this way we can see the image and its video If you want to make it then friends we should make it in this way I will provide the video directly told you in front of you by clicking on it I told you the way that you can do this in this way You can create video from images with How well are you at creating videos? Hi friends I hope you like this video if you got something to learn from If you like the video then please like the video do thank you for watching hello friends welcome In today’s video on marketing funds, you will You are going to see how you can make a product You can make promo videos using Canva Let’s start with Help first You will open Canva in the video section You will get the video in 1080 by clicking here After that we click on its background. For the background we take a gradient color will click on this Do it and see it will show 50% If you are okay then we will do this color will take red is its side potion na we call it red and the center one will be given yellow ok you might as well see it After that we put the bottle on it, for that we you can search on Are search on fy do Tomatoes will scroll a little take a copy of this Paste the image and the lock Remove its background and reduce its size would have made it bigger okay now let’s put an animation on it We’ll put a little slack on the animation and do By clicking on the glow you will increase its intensity Absolutely Ok so now let’s go to elements and here Search Karana Tomato If you come to slice photos then here you will find such The slice will be visible, we will take it make it a little smaller will take this method You will apply the effect by going to animation will scroll Rotate in the same way Control-D Set it in this manner at all four corners Okay, now we have to give rotation on these Take a minute to click on this and then Change the rotation from here In the same way we will change its rotation as well okay so friends this is how you will do it Now friends, you can create an animation if you want more and more if your If there are more products then you can buy them too If you want to add then it is very easy from here You will duplicate it and come here now Like you have a product You will search that product on this Cole okay so what we’re gonna do is copy this We will bring it here and paste it will delete this bottle from the back and remove it fill up the size I will remove its background and the animation is the same as what we did last time I had applied it, I should apply the same on this as well Is Wiggle and intensity exactly Well friends, we have put this but its We also need to change the background which will relates come to ho elements or search on Doing Pal Slices Photos But look, this is how it takes us here. come from here drink and give it a [music] check the minutes once Animation See, in this way you can also sell your product for whatever your brand is I hope you can create an amee friends I hope you liked this video if If you like the video, please like the video thank you for watching

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • .NET Development Using the Compiler API by Jason Bock – Study Notes

    .NET Development Using the Compiler API by Jason Bock – Study Notes

    Compiler API FAQ

    What is the Compiler API, and how does it differ from a traditional compiler?

    Traditionally, compilers were closed boxes, taking code as input and outputting an executable without exposing their internal processes. The Compiler API, introduced by Microsoft under the codename Project Roslyn, opens up the compiler’s internals through a public .NET API. This allows developers to analyze, manipulate, and generate code within their own .NET applications using familiar C# syntax.

    What are some key features and capabilities of the Compiler API?

    The Compiler API provides access to various stages of the compilation process, including:

    • Parsing: Breaking down code into individual tokens and classifying them.
    • Semantic Analysis: Determining the meaning of tokens and their relationships.
    • Syntax Trees: Representing code as hierarchical tree structures, allowing manipulation and analysis.
    • Diagnostics: Creating custom code analyzers to identify and report potential issues.
    • Code Fixes: Offering automated solutions to address diagnostic findings.
    • Refactorings: Implementing code transformations to improve structure and readability.
    • Scripting: Enabling dynamic code execution and evaluation using C# as a scripting language.

    How can I create custom diagnostics and code fixes using the Compiler API?

    You can create a diagnostic project using the provided template in Visual Studio. It includes an analyzer and a code fix provider.

    The analyzer uses the DiagnosticAnalyzer attribute to indicate its purpose. You define the SupportedDiagnostics property to return the list of diagnostics the analyzer supports. In the Initialize method, you register actions to analyze specific syntax nodes.

    Code fix providers use the ExportCodeFixProvider and Shared attributes. The FixableDiagnosticIds property specifies which diagnostics the provider can fix. The RegisterCodeFixesAsync method handles generating and applying the code fix.

    How can I write refactorings to improve my code base?

    Refactorings involve manipulating syntax trees to modify code structure without changing its functionality. You can create a refactoring project using the template provided in Visual Studio.

    In the refactoring class, you implement methods like ComputeRefactoringsAsync to analyze the code and offer potential refactorings. When the user selects a refactoring, methods like CreateChangedDocument are invoked to apply the transformation to the code.

    How does the Scripting API enable C# to be used as a scripting language?

    The Scripting API allows you to evaluate and execute C# code snippets dynamically. The CSharpScript class provides methods like EvaluateAsync and RunAsync to execute code. You can manage script state using ScriptState objects or by providing custom global contexts.

    What are some potential security concerns when using the Scripting API, and how can I mitigate them?

    Since the Scripting API allows arbitrary code execution, it’s crucial to be aware of potential security risks.

    • File System Access: Malicious scripts could access sensitive files. You can restrict access to the System.IO namespace or implement specific checks for file operations.
    • Reflection: Scripts could use reflection to bypass security measures. You can restrict access to the System.Reflection namespace and limit reflective calls.
    • External Dependencies: Scripts could load malicious external assemblies. You can control which assemblies are allowed by carefully managing script references.

    What are some real-world examples of how developers are using the Compiler API?

    • Mocking Frameworks: Generating mock objects dynamically using the Compiler API, offering type-safe and debuggable mocks.
    • Build Systems: Automating build processes and code generation tasks using C# as a scripting language.
    • Code Analysis Tools: Creating custom diagnostics to enforce coding standards and best practices.
    • Source Generators: Injecting code into existing classes during compilation based on attributes, reducing boilerplate code.

    What are some future possibilities and potential benefits of the Compiler API?

    The Compiler API unlocks exciting possibilities for code generation, analysis, and manipulation. Potential future benefits include:

    • Reduced Boilerplate Code: Source generators could automate repetitive tasks, like implementing interfaces or generating property change notifications.
    • Improved Code Consistency: Diagnostics and code fixes can help enforce coding standards across teams.
    • Enhanced Language Features: Experimenting with new language features and implementing prototypes using the Compiler API before they are officially released.
    • Dynamic Code Generation: Creating code on the fly based on runtime conditions or user input.
    • Domain-Specific Languages: Building custom languages tailored to specific problem domains.

    .NET Development Using the Compiler API Study Guide

    Quiz

    1. What are the three fundamental steps involved in the compilation process, and what does each step entail?
    2. Explain the distinction between compilers as a “closed box” and an “open box.” How does this relate to the .NET Compiler API (Roslyn)?
    3. Describe the purpose and functionality of the SyntaxFactory class in the context of the Compiler API. How is it used in code generation?
    4. Differentiate between SyntaxNode, SyntaxToken, and SyntaxTrivia. Provide examples of each type.
    5. How does immutability impact the process of editing syntax trees within the Compiler API? Discuss the advantages and potential drawbacks of this approach.
    6. What is the primary function of a diagnostic in the context of code analysis? Provide an example of a real-world code issue that could be addressed with a diagnostic.
    7. Explain the role of the AnalysisContext in the development of a diagnostic. What are some of the methods you might use on this object to control the analysis process?
    8. Describe the purpose of unit testing in the development of diagnostics and refactorings. Why is it crucial to have a robust testing strategy in place?
    9. What is the function of a VSIX package in the deployment of diagnostics and refactorings? How does it benefit developers who want to use these tools?
    10. How does the Scripting API empower C# as a scripting language? What are some potential use cases for this functionality?

    Answer Key

    1. The three steps are parsing, semantics, and emitting. Parsing involves breaking down code into individual tokens and classifying them. Semantics focuses on giving meaning to those tokens, determining their roles and relationships. Emitting translates the analyzed code into an executable format (e.g., assembly).
    2. Historically, compilers operated as a “closed box,” taking code as input and producing an output without offering insights into the internal workings. Roslyn, the .NET Compiler API, introduces the concept of an “open box,” exposing the compiler’s internal pipeline through a public API, allowing developers to access and manipulate code structures.
    3. The SyntaxFactory class provides a collection of static methods to create syntax tree elements like nodes, tokens, and trivia. Developers use these methods to programmatically construct code representations, facilitating code generation.
    4. SyntaxNode represents a structured element in the code, such as a class or method declaration. SyntaxToken signifies a terminal element like keywords, identifiers, or operators. SyntaxTrivia encapsulates non-essential code elements, such as whitespace and comments. Example: in int x = 5;, int is a SyntaxToken, x = 5; is a SyntaxNode, and whitespace around = is SyntaxTrivia.
    5. Immutability means that modifying a syntax tree creates a new tree with the changes applied, leaving the original tree intact. This ensures a history of changes and facilitates easy comparisons, aiding in debugging and analysis. However, it can lead to increased memory consumption if not managed carefully.
    6. A diagnostic analyzes code for potential issues, flagging them to the developer. For instance, a diagnostic could identify unused variables, unreachable code, or violations of coding conventions.
    7. The AnalysisContext object provides information and control over the code analysis process. Methods like RegisterSyntaxNodeAction and RegisterSymbolAction allow developers to specify which code elements to analyze and how to handle them.
    8. Unit testing ensures that diagnostics and refactorings function correctly, providing consistent and reliable results. It helps catch errors early in the development process and safeguards against regressions when code is modified.
    9. A VSIX package is used to distribute and install extensions to Visual Studio. This simplifies the process for developers to access and use custom diagnostics and refactorings within their IDE.
    10. The Scripting API enables the dynamic execution of C# code snippets, granting C# capabilities similar to traditional scripting languages. Use cases include interactive prototyping, automating tasks, and creating flexible runtime logic.

    Essay Questions

    1. Discuss the significance of the .NET Compiler API (Roslyn) in modern software development. How does it empower developers and improve the development process?
    2. Explain the concept of syntax trees in the context of code analysis and manipulation. Describe the key elements of a syntax tree and their relationships.
    3. Choose a specific code refactoring technique and elaborate on its purpose and benefits. Outline the steps involved in implementing this refactoring using the Compiler API.
    4. Analyze the security considerations associated with the Scripting API. Describe the potential risks and explain how developers can mitigate them.
    5. Imagine you are tasked with developing a source generator for C#. Describe a practical use case for a source generator and explain how you would leverage the Compiler API to implement it.

    Glossary

    TermDefinitionCompiler API (Roslyn)The open-source .NET Compiler Platform that provides APIs for analyzing and manipulating code.Syntax TreeA hierarchical representation of code structure, breaking down source code into its constituent elements.SyntaxNodeA node in the syntax tree representing a code element like a class or method declaration.SyntaxTokenA terminal node in the syntax tree signifying a keyword, identifier, or operator.SyntaxTriviaNon-essential code elements like whitespace and comments.SyntaxFactoryA class used to create syntax tree elements programmatically.DiagnosticA code analysis tool that identifies potential issues and reports them to the developer.RefactoringA code transformation technique that improves code structure and readability without altering its functionality.VSIX PackageA deployment format for Visual Studio extensions.Scripting APIEnables dynamic execution of C# code snippets.Source GeneratorA compile-time component that generates additional C# code based on existing code and metadata.

    .NET Development Using the Compiler API – A Deep Dive

    Source 1: Excerpts from “.NET Development Using the Compiler API” by Jason Bock

    Chapter 1: An Overview of the Compiler API

    • From Closed to Open: This section introduces the concept of the .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn) and how it transitioned from a closed black box to an open API, empowering developers to leverage compiler functionalities in their applications.
    • What Do Compilers Do?: This section explores the fundamental steps involved in the compilation process: parsing, semantics, and emitting. It uses the classic “Hello World” example to illustrate how code is transformed into executable machine code.
    • Compilers as an Open Box: This section delves into the benefits of having an open compiler API like Roslyn, emphasizing its impact on code analysis tools and developer capabilities for code generation and dynamic compilation.
    • Creating Your First “Hello World” Application: This section provides a practical example of utilizing the Compiler API to compile a simple “Hello World” program. It guides readers through the steps of creating a syntax tree, compilation object, and executing the compiled code.
    • Creating Code Using Trees: This section focuses on syntax trees, fundamental data structures representing the hierarchical structure of code. It demonstrates how to visualize syntax trees using the Syntax Visualizer tool and manually create a syntax tree from scratch for a simple function.
    • Finding Content from a Node: This section explores techniques for navigating and extracting specific information from syntax trees. It uses practical examples to illustrate how to find all methods within a code snippet using methods like DescendantNodes().
    • Editing Trees: This section explains how to modify syntax trees, emphasizing their immutability and the benefits of working with immutable structures. It covers techniques like replacing and rewriting nodes to modify code representations.
    • Using Annotations: This section introduces syntax annotations, a mechanism for attaching metadata to nodes in a syntax tree. It highlights how annotations are similar to attributes and can be used for various purposes like code analysis and transformation.
    • Using Formatters: This section covers code formatters and their role in maintaining code style consistency. It emphasizes the importance of preserving code formatting preferences and how the Compiler API allows for automated code formatting.

    Chapter 2: Writing Diagnostics

    • The Need to Diagnose Compilation: This section discusses the importance of diagnostics in identifying and addressing code issues during compilation. It highlights how custom diagnostics can be created to enforce specific coding practices and improve code quality.
    • Designing the Diagnostic: This section covers the process of designing a diagnostic, including understanding the problem, utilizing the Syntax Visualizer to analyze code structure, and creating the diagnostic using a template provided by the Compiler API.
    • Deploying and Installing Diagnostics: This section focuses on making diagnostics available to other developers. It covers two deployment methods: VSIX extensions and NuGet packages, explaining the pros and cons of each approach.

    Chapter 3: Creating Refactorings and Handling Workspaces

    • Refactoring in Structure: This section provides a general overview of code refactoring, emphasizing its importance in improving code structure, readability, and maintainability. It differentiates refactoring from diagnostics and highlights its non-breaking nature.
    • Developing a Refactoring: This section walks through the process of developing a refactoring, including understanding the problem, designing the solution, and implementing the refactoring using the Compiler API. It focuses on a practical example of moving types to separate files based on a specific folder structure.
    • Debugging Refactorings: This section covers strategies for testing and debugging refactorings, emphasizing the importance of unit testing to ensure correctness. It also discusses using VSIX projects to test refactorings within a Visual Studio environment.

    Chapter 4: Using the Scripting API

    • Evaluating Scripts: This section introduces the C# Scripting API, highlighting its capabilities for evaluating C# code snippets dynamically. It demonstrates basic script evaluation and explores advanced features like importing namespaces and referencing assemblies.
    • Analyzing Scripts: This section covers analyzing C# scripts for errors and potential issues. It utilizes the Compiler API to retrieve diagnostic information from compiled scripts and showcases methods for identifying and reporting syntax or semantic errors.
    • State Management in Scripts: This section delves into managing state within C# scripts, discussing techniques for persisting data across multiple script executions. It covers using global objects and custom context objects to maintain script state.
    • Concerns with the Scripting API: This section addresses potential security concerns associated with the C# Scripting API. It emphasizes the importance of restricting access to sensitive APIs and namespaces to prevent malicious code execution.

    Chapter 5: The Future of the Compiler API

    • Current Usage: This section explores various use cases of the Compiler API beyond traditional code analysis and refactoring. It covers examples like generating mock objects for unit testing and building code generation tools.
    • Looking into C#’s Future: This section speculates on potential future applications of the Compiler API, specifically focusing on source generators. It envisions using source generators to automate repetitive tasks, enhance code generation capabilities, and simplify common coding patterns.

    Source 2: Excerpts from “0387-.NET Development Using the Compiler API – LM done.pdf”

    Index: Keywords and Concepts

    This index provides an alphabetical list of key terms, concepts, and code elements mentioned throughout the book. Each entry points to the relevant page numbers where the concept or term is discussed. This comprehensive index allows readers to quickly locate specific information and revisit key points of the book.

    Timeline of Events

    This timeline is constructed from a limited set of excerpts and focuses on the creation and capabilities of the .NET Compiler API.

    Early Compiler Development (Pre-2007):

    • Compilers were largely viewed as “black boxes” by developers, performing essential tasks like tokenization, semantic analysis, and emitting executables.
    • The complexity of compiler internals deterred most developers from delving into their creation or modification.

    Project Roslyn (Around 2007):

    • Microsoft began development on a new compiler infrastructure codenamed “Project Roslyn.”
    • This project aimed to expose the compiler’s internal pipeline through a public .NET API.

    Public Availability of the .NET Compiler API:

    • The .NET Compiler API, also known as the Roslyn API, became publicly available.
    • This allowed developers to leverage the compiler’s functionality in .NET applications for tasks like code analysis, generation, and dynamic compilation.
    • The API standardized how developers could interact with the C# compiler, fostering greater flexibility and tool development.

    Emergence of Compiler API Applications:

    • Developers began using the Compiler API to build various tools and applications.
    • Examples include:
    • Diagnostics: Analyze code for potential errors, style violations, and other issues.
    • Code Fixes: Automatically correct issues identified by diagnostics.
    • Refactorings: Restructure code to improve readability, organization, and maintainability.
    • Mocking Frameworks (e.g., Rocks): Generate mock objects for unit testing without reliance on IL.
    • Build Systems (e.g., Cake): Execute build tasks using C# scripts.
    • The Compiler API enabled the creation of C# as a scripting language, bringing new dynamic capabilities.

    Future Potential of the Compiler API:

    • The book suggests potential future applications of the Compiler API, including:
    • Source Generators: Generate code at compile time based on attributes and code analysis.
    • Improved Property Change Notifications: Streamline common patterns with less boilerplate code.

    Cast of Characters

    Jason Bock: Author of the book “.NET Development Using the Compiler API.” A Practice Lead at Magenic and Microsoft MVP (C#), he brings over 20 years of experience working with diverse frameworks and languages.

    Microsoft: The developer of the .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn), which opened the doors for developers to interact with the C# compiler in new ways.

    Developers: The main beneficiaries of the Compiler API. They utilize the API to build tools and enhance the development process with features like diagnostics, code fixes, refactorings, and more.

    Tools and Frameworks Leveraging the Compiler API:

    • Roslyn Analyzers and Code Fixes: Built-in features within Visual Studio that analyze code and provide automatic corrections.
    • Rocks: A mocking framework that utilizes the Compiler API to generate mock objects dynamically.
    • Cake: A build system allowing developers to write C# scripts for defining and executing build tasks.

    This cast highlights the key players involved in the evolution and utilization of the .NET Compiler API.

    Briefing Doc: .NET Development Using the Compiler API by Jason Bock

    Main Themes:

    • Demystifying Compilers: The book introduces the inner workings of compilers and how they translate code into executable files.
    • Opening the Black Box: The focus is on the .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn), which opens up compiler internals through a public API, enabling developers to leverage its functionality in their applications.
    • Practical Applications: The book dives into real-world applications of the Compiler API, such as writing diagnostics, creating refactorings, working with workspaces, and exploring the scripting API.

    Key Ideas and Facts:

    Chapter 1: An Overview of the Compiler API

    • Compilers typically function as a “closed box” that developers interact with without understanding their internal processes. Roslyn changes this by providing an “open box” approach, allowing developers to access and utilize the compiler pipeline.
    • The basic steps of a compiler include:
    • Parsing: Identifying and classifying individual tokens in the code.
    • Semantics: Assigning meaning to tokens based on language rules.
    • Emitting: Generating an executable based on the semantic analysis.
    • Roslyn provides a .NET API to interact with these stages, enabling tasks like code analysis, generation, and dynamic compilation.
    • The chapter introduces core concepts like syntax trees, nodes, tokens, and trivia, demonstrating how to visualize and manipulate them.
    • Quote: “The compiler will find everything it can about that line of text and break it up into separate chunks. That includes the period between Console and Out, the tabs before the Console token, and the semicolon at the end of the line.”

    Chapter 2: Writing Diagnostics

    • Diagnostics help identify and potentially fix issues in code based on predefined rules and best practices.
    • This chapter details the process of writing diagnostics, including:
    • Designing the diagnostic logic and identifying specific nodes to analyze.
    • Using the semantic model to understand code meaning and relationships.
    • Implementing code fixes to automatically correct identified issues.
    • Unit testing diagnostics to ensure accurate functionality.
    • Packaging and deploying diagnostics as VSIX or NuGet packages.
    • Quote: “Most rules, idioms, practices, and so on can be codified into a diagnostic that will run for everyone on the development team so issues can be identified and (potentially) automatically fixed.”

    Chapter 3: Creating Refactorings and Handling Workspaces

    • Refactorings focus on improving code structure and organization without altering its functionality.
    • This chapter explains how to develop refactorings using the Compiler API, covering topics like:
    • Understanding the problem to be solved by the refactoring.
    • Implementing the refactoring logic to manipulate syntax trees and modify code.
    • Working with workspaces to manage multiple documents and projects within a solution.
    • Debugging refactorings using unit tests and VSIX projects.
    • Quote: “Refactorings by their definition shouldn’t do anything to a code base that would break current behavior. They’re only there to improve the code’s structure.”

    Chapter 4: Using the Scripting API

    • This chapter delves into the C# Scripting API, allowing developers to execute C# code dynamically and interactively.
    • Key aspects covered include:
    • Evaluating scripts and analyzing their results.
    • Managing state within scripts.
    • Addressing performance and memory concerns.
    • Implementing security measures to prevent malicious code execution.
    • Quote: “C# is now a scripting language! In this chapter, you’ll see how the Scripting API works.”

    Chapter 5: The Future of the Compiler API

    • The book concludes by looking at the future potential of the Compiler API and how it is being used in modern development practices.
    • Examples include:
    • Generating mock objects for unit testing using the Rocks framework.
    • Building code using code with tools like Cake.
    • Exploring future C# features like source generators.
    • Quote: “The ability to weave code into existing code via compile-time attributes will drastically reduce the amount of code a developer has to write in every class.”

    Overall, the book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding and utilizing the .NET Compiler API, demonstrating its power and versatility in various development scenarios. It aims to equip developers with the knowledge and tools to enhance their coding experience and create innovative solutions leveraging compiler capabilities.

    Here are the core concepts and functionalities of the .NET Compiler API:

    What is the .NET Compiler API?

    The .NET Compiler API, previously known as Project Roslyn, exposes the internals of the C# compiler via a public .NET API. This allows developers to programmatically access and manipulate code in a variety of ways. For example, developers can use the Compiler API to:

    • Analyze code for potential errors and style violations: You can build diagnostics that will flag code issues that the C# compiler doesn’t know about. For example, you could create a diagnostic to ensure that all classes that inherit from a certain base class are serializable. [1]
    • Suggest code fixes: You can provide automated code corrections for the issues that your diagnostics identify. [2]
    • Refactor code: You can automate common code transformations, such as renaming variables, extracting methods, and moving types to different files. [3]
    • Generate code: You can generate new code files or modify existing ones based on specific rules or patterns. [4]
    • Execute C# code as a scripting language: The Scripting API, a subset of the Compiler API, makes it possible to treat C# as a scripting language, enabling dynamic code execution and evaluation. [5]

    Core Concepts

    The .NET Compiler API relies on several core concepts to represent and manipulate code:

    • Tokens: The compiler breaks down code into individual units called tokens. These tokens represent keywords, identifiers, operators, and other language elements. [6]
    • Syntax Trees: The Compiler API organizes code into tree-like data structures called syntax trees. Each node in a syntax tree represents a specific language construct, such as a class declaration, a method definition, or an expression. [7, 8]
    • Semantic Models: Semantic models provide a higher-level understanding of the code by combining the information from the syntax tree with the context of the project and the referenced assemblies. This allows you to determine the types of variables, the accessibility of members, and other semantic information about the code. [9]
    • Workspaces: Workspaces abstract the management of solutions, projects, and documents, enabling you to interact with and manipulate the entire codebase of a project. [10, 11]

    Functionalities

    The .NET Compiler API offers a wide array of functionalities, allowing developers to perform many tasks related to code analysis, transformation, and generation. Some key functionalities include:

    • Parsing Code: The API provides methods to parse code into syntax trees, which can then be analyzed and manipulated. [12, 13]
    • Creating and Editing Syntax Trees: You can construct syntax trees programmatically or modify existing trees by replacing nodes, tokens, or trivia. [14-17]
    • Analyzing Code with Semantic Models: Using semantic models, you can retrieve comprehensive information about the code, including types, members, and their relationships. [18-20]
    • Creating Diagnostics and Code Fixes: You can define custom diagnostics to identify specific code issues and implement corresponding code fixes to automatically correct them. [21, 22]
    • Implementing Refactorings: The API supports implementing various refactorings, like renaming symbols, extracting methods, and organizing code structure. [3, 23-25]
    • Compiling Code: The API allows you to compile code on the fly, generating assemblies that can be executed dynamically. [12, 26]
    • Using C# as a Scripting Language: The Scripting API enables you to execute C# code snippets dynamically, providing features such as state management and access to external assemblies. [27, 28]

    Conclusion

    The .NET Compiler API is a powerful tool that empowers developers to interact with and manipulate code at a deeper level. By understanding its core concepts and functionalities, developers can leverage it to build sophisticated tools for code analysis, refactoring, code generation, and scripting, leading to increased productivity and code quality. [29, 30]

    Enhancing Code Quality and Development Productivity with the Compiler API

    The Compiler API can be used to enhance code quality and development productivity in several ways. Here are some key examples:

    • Writing Diagnostics and Code Fixes:
    • The Compiler API allows developers to write custom diagnostics that analyze code for potential issues beyond the standard C# compiler’s capabilities [1-3]. For example, you can create a diagnostic to enforce the use of DateTime.UtcNow instead of DateTime.Now or ensure all classes inheriting from a specific base class are serializable [3].
    • These diagnostics can be integrated into Visual Studio, providing immediate feedback to developers as they write code [4].
    • Furthermore, developers can create code fixes that automatically correct the identified issues, streamlining the development process [4, 5].
    • These diagnostics and code fixes can be packaged and deployed via NuGet or VSIX extensions, making it easy for teams to share and enforce coding standards [6, 7].
    • Creating Custom Refactorings:
    • Developers can build custom refactorings to improve code structure and organization [8, 9]. The sources provide an example of a refactoring that moves all types from a single file into separate files, demonstrating the API’s flexibility [9].
    • These refactorings can be integrated into Visual Studio, allowing developers to apply them with ease [10].
    • The Workspace API provides tools for interacting with the entire solution, enabling refactorings to make changes across multiple projects and documents [8, 11].
    • Automating Code Updates:
    • By leveraging the Workspace API, developers can create tools that automatically apply refactorings and code modifications across an entire solution [11, 12].
    • The sources show an example of a tool that removes comments from code files, highlighting the potential for automating repetitive tasks [13, 14].
    • This automation can be triggered by various events, such as pre- or post-build events, saving a file, or through custom Visual Studio extensions [15, 16].
    • Enabling C# as a Scripting Language:
    • The Scripting API empowers developers to treat C# as a scripting language, providing a dynamic and interactive coding experience [17, 18].
    • This allows for rapid prototyping, experimentation, and runtime code generation [19, 20].
    • The sources demonstrate the use of the CSharpScript object to evaluate C# code snippets, add assembly references, and manage state between script executions [21, 22].
    • While the Scripting API offers exciting possibilities, developers should be mindful of potential performance and security concerns [23].
    • Powering Innovative Tools and Frameworks:
    • The Compiler API has spurred the development of numerous open-source tools and frameworks that leverage its capabilities to provide innovative features [24].
    • The sources highlight two examples:
    • Rocks: A mocking framework that utilizes the Compiler API to generate mock objects at runtime using C# code instead of IL, providing a more developer-friendly experience and enhanced debugging capabilities [24, 25].
    • Cake: A build automation tool that allows developers to define build processes using a C#-like DSL, taking advantage of the Compiler API to compile and execute the build script [26].
    • Shaping the Future of C#:
    • While not explicitly detailed in the sources, the Compiler API is expected to play a key role in the evolution of the C# language itself. One potential application is the introduction of source generators, enabling developers to use compile-time attributes to trigger code generation, reducing boilerplate code and promoting code reuse [27-29].

    The Compiler API provides developers with a powerful set of tools to enhance code quality, streamline development processes, and create innovative solutions. By understanding the concepts and techniques presented in the sources, developers can leverage the Compiler API to build more robust, maintainable, and efficient applications.

    It is important to note that the information about potential future features of C# and its integration with the Compiler API, such as source generators, is based on current trends and discussions in the .NET community. As the language and framework continue to evolve, these features may be subject to change. It’s always recommended to refer to official documentation and announcements for the most up-to-date information.

    The Compiler API: Implications and Future for .NET Development

    The Compiler API is poised to have a significant impact on the future of .NET development, offering new capabilities for code analysis, generation, and dynamic execution [1-3]. This response will explore the potential implications and future directions of the Compiler API, drawing from the provided sources.

    Current Applications

    • Enhanced Code Analysis and Refactoring: The Compiler API provides a foundation for developing sophisticated diagnostics and refactorings that can automatically detect and fix code issues [4-6]. Tools like StyleCopAnalyzers and RefactoringEssentials are already using the Compiler API to enforce coding standards and simplify code maintenance [7].
    • Scripting Capabilities for C#: The introduction of the Scripting API enables C# to be used as a scripting language, allowing developers to execute code dynamically and interactively [6, 8-10]. This opens up new possibilities for extending applications and prototyping solutions [10].
    • Dynamic Code Generation: The Compiler API empowers frameworks like Rocks to generate code at runtime, bypassing the complexities of IL generation using System.Reflection.Emit [11-13]. This simplifies the creation of dynamic proxies, mocks, and other code generation scenarios [11, 14].
    • Customizable Build Processes: Build tools like Cake leverage the Compiler API to define build steps using a C#-like DSL, offering developers a familiar and expressive way to manage their build processes [15].

    Future Directions

    • Source Generators: A potential future direction for C# involves source generators, which would allow developers to define compile-time attributes that can generate additional code based on the annotated elements [16, 17]. This could significantly reduce boilerplate code and streamline common implementations, such as INotifyPropertyChanged and IDisposable [18-20].
    • Metaprogramming and Code Injection: The Compiler API lays the groundwork for more advanced metaprogramming techniques in C#, enabling developers to inject and modify code at compile time [21-23]. This could lead to more declarative and concise ways of expressing complex logic.

    Potential Implications

    • Increased Developer Productivity: The Compiler API enables the creation of tools and frameworks that automate tedious tasks, enforce coding standards, and simplify code generation, ultimately boosting developer productivity [22-24].
    • Improved Code Quality: Diagnostics and automated refactorings can help developers identify and address code issues early in the development cycle, leading to more robust and maintainable applications [6, 25, 26].
    • Extensibility and Innovation: The open nature of the Compiler API fosters a thriving ecosystem of tools and frameworks that extend the capabilities of the .NET platform and enable new development paradigms [24, 27, 28].

    Conclusion

    The Compiler API represents a pivotal shift in .NET development, opening up the compiler’s inner workings and empowering developers with unprecedented control over their code. As the API continues to evolve and the community embraces its potential, we can expect to see a surge in innovative tools and frameworks that reshape the .NET landscape. The Compiler API has set the stage for a future where C# is not only a powerful object-oriented language but also a dynamic and metaprogramming-capable platform.

    A Comprehensive Discussion of the Compiler API

    The Compiler API, formerly known as Project Roslyn, represents a significant advancement in .NET development, providing unprecedented access to the inner workings of the C# compiler. This API opens a realm of possibilities for analyzing, manipulating, and generating code, ultimately enhancing code quality, streamlining development processes, and enabling innovation in the .NET ecosystem.

    Understanding the Fundamentals: Compilers and Their Evolution

    Before exploring the Compiler API’s intricacies, it’s crucial to understand the fundamental role of compilers in software development. A compiler translates human-readable code, like C#, into machine-executable instructions. Traditionally, .NET compilers operated as “black boxes,” taking code as input and producing an assembly without exposing their internal processes [1, 2].

    The Compiler API revolutionizes this paradigm by exposing the compiler’s pipeline through a public API. This API provides developers with access to various stages of compilation, including:

    • Parsing: Breaking down code into individual tokens, the basic building blocks of a program [2-4].
    • Semantic Analysis: Assigning meaning to the tokens, understanding their relationships and resolving references [2, 5].
    • Emitting: Generating the final executable assembly based on the parsed and analyzed code [2, 6].

    This openness empowers developers to interact with the compiler in ways not previously possible, creating tools and frameworks that leverage the compiler’s capabilities for advanced code analysis, manipulation, and generation.

    Key Concepts and Capabilities

    The Compiler API offers a rich set of features and concepts, some of which are highlighted below:

    • Syntax Trees: Representing the structure of code as a hierarchical tree, enabling developers to navigate and analyze code elements [7, 8]. This tree structure, composed of nodes, tokens, and trivia, provides a granular representation of the code’s syntax [9, 10].
    • Semantic Models: Providing a deeper understanding of the code’s meaning, resolving symbols and types, and enabling analysis beyond pure syntax [4]. This model allows developers to query type information, relationships between code elements, and other semantic details not readily available from syntax trees alone [5, 11, 12].
    • Diagnostics and Code Fixes: Allowing developers to create custom analyzers that detect potential code issues beyond the standard C# compiler’s checks [13]. Developers can also create code fixes that automatically correct these issues, streamlining the development process [14]. These diagnostics can be integrated into Visual Studio, providing real-time feedback as developers write code [15].
    • Custom Refactorings: Empowering developers to create refactorings that modify code structure and organization, improving code maintainability and readability [16]. These refactorings can also be integrated into Visual Studio, providing a user-friendly way to apply them [16].
    • Scripting API: Enabling the use of C# as a scripting language, allowing dynamic code execution and interactive experimentation [17]. This capability opens up new possibilities for rapid prototyping, runtime code generation, and extending applications with user-defined scripts [18].
    • Workspaces: Providing an abstraction over the solution and project structure in Visual Studio, enabling interaction with multiple documents and projects during code analysis and refactoring [19, 20].

    Illustrative Examples from the Sources

    The sources offer concrete examples of the Compiler API’s capabilities in action. These examples provide practical insights into how the API can be used to solve real-world development challenges.

    • Building a “Hello World” Application at Runtime: Demonstrating the core functionality of the Compiler API by programmatically compiling and executing a simple “Hello World” application using CSharpCompilation and MetadataReference [21-23].
    • Creating a Tree from Scratch: Showcasing the creation of a syntax tree using SyntaxFactory to represent a simple C# method, illustrating the granular control developers have over code structure [24, 25].
    • Finding Method Information Using Syntax Trees and Semantic Models: Highlighting the different approaches to extracting information from code. Using DescendentNodes to traverse a syntax tree and find specific elements [26, 27] and leveraging a SemanticModel to access type information and symbol details [28, 29].
    • Writing a Diagnostic and Code Fix for Missing Base Method Invocations: Demonstrating the creation of a custom diagnostic that enforces the invocation of base methods when a specific attribute (MustInvokeAttribute) is present [30]. This example includes creating a code fix that automatically inserts the base method call, streamlining the correction process [14, 31].
    • Moving Types to Separate Files with a Refactoring: Building a custom refactoring that moves each type declaration in a file to its own dedicated file, illustrating the use of the Workspace API to modify an entire solution [16, 32].
    • Creating a Mocking Framework Using the Compiler API (Rocks): Utilizing the Compiler API to generate mock objects at runtime, showcasing the power of dynamic code generation. This example highlights the benefits of generating C# code instead of relying on IL generation using System.Reflection.Emit [33, 34].

    Potential Implications and Future Directions

    The Compiler API is not merely a set of tools; it represents a fundamental shift in .NET development, enabling a new era of extensibility, innovation, and developer empowerment. The API’s potential implications are far-reaching, influencing how developers write, analyze, and interact with code.

    • Increased Developer Productivity: By automating repetitive tasks, enforcing coding standards, and simplifying complex implementations, the Compiler API can significantly enhance developer productivity, allowing developers to focus on solving business problems rather than wrestling with boilerplate code.
    • Improved Code Quality: The ability to create custom diagnostics and automated refactorings promotes proactive code quality management. These tools can detect and address potential issues early in the development cycle, leading to more robust, maintainable, and reliable applications.
    • Thriving Ecosystem of Tools and Frameworks: The open nature of the Compiler API fosters a vibrant community of developers creating innovative tools and frameworks. As the community expands, we can expect to see a surge in solutions that address various development needs and challenges.
    • Empowering New Development Paradigms: The Compiler API lays the groundwork for future advancements in C#, including metaprogramming and code injection. These capabilities could lead to more declarative and concise ways of expressing complex logic, reducing code verbosity and improving code comprehension.

    A Glimpse into the Future: Source Generators

    While not yet a reality, source generators represent a potential future direction for C#, leveraging the Compiler API to enhance code generation capabilities. Source generators would allow developers to define compile-time attributes that can generate additional code based on the annotated elements. This feature could revolutionize C# development by:

    • Reducing Boilerplate Code: Common implementations, such as INotifyPropertyChanged and IDisposable, could be automated using source generators, eliminating the need for repetitive code and reducing the potential for errors.
    • Promoting Code Reuse: Source generators could encapsulate complex logic and patterns, making them reusable across different parts of an application or even across multiple projects.
    • Improving Code Readability: By abstracting away complex implementations behind attributes, source generators can improve code readability, making it easier for developers to understand the core logic of an application.

    Conclusion: A Great Time to Be a .NET Developer

    The Compiler API marks a significant milestone in .NET development, providing developers with unprecedented access to the compiler’s inner workings and enabling the creation of tools and frameworks that were previously unimaginable. This API has ushered in a new era of extensibility and innovation, empowering developers to shape the future of .NET development. As the API continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more creative and powerful solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible with C# and the .NET platform.

    The sources provide a foundational understanding of the Compiler API and its potential. As you continue to explore this exciting area of .NET development, remember that the information about potential future features like source generators is based on current trends and discussions in the community [35]. These features are subject to change. Always refer to official documentation and announcements for the most up-to-date information.

    C# as a Scripting Language: Exploring the Scripting API

    The Scripting API, a component within the Compiler API, introduces a transformative capability to C#: the ability to treat it as a scripting language [1, 2]. This empowers developers to execute C# code dynamically, experiment interactively, and extend applications in ways not envisioned during their initial design.

    Understanding Scripting Languages and Their Characteristics

    Traditionally, scripting languages have served as “glue languages,” orchestrating and connecting different components and systems [3]. While not as feature-rich as conventional programming languages, their strength lies in simplicity and flexibility, enabling developers to extend existing systems without the overhead of traditional compilation and deployment cycles.

    Scripting languages often exhibit dynamic characteristics, allowing for loose or even absent type enforcement [4]. Types can evolve during code execution, providing flexibility in code structure. However, it’s important to note that scripting languages can also be statically typed. The C# Scripting API, while enabling a scripting environment, preserves the strong typing semantics inherent to C# [5].

    The hallmark of a scripting language is its interactive nature, typically facilitated by a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) environment [2]. REPLs allow developers to execute code snippets in real time, experiment with different approaches, and immediately see the results, fostering rapid prototyping and exploration. The C# Scripting API brings this interactive capability to C#, a feature previously absent in the .NET framework.

    Leveraging the C# Scripting API

    The C# Scripting API provides the foundation for interactive C# experiences. The CSharpScript class serves as the primary entry point for script execution and analysis [6]. To utilize the Scripting API, you need to include the Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Scripting NuGet package in your project [6].

    Executing C# Code Dynamically

    The EvaluateAsync method of the CSharpScript class enables the dynamic execution of C# code snippets [7]. This method allows for simple code evaluation, returning the result of the script execution. You can provide assembly references and import namespaces using ScriptOptions, allowing scripts to utilize types and members from external assemblies [8]. This extensibility empowers developers to expose application-specific object models to scripts, enabling users to interact with application functionality in dynamic ways.

    Analyzing Script Content Before Execution

    Beyond simple execution, the Scripting API offers the ability to analyze script content before running it. The Create method of the CSharpScript class returns a Script object, providing access to compilation information [9]. You can obtain diagnostics, syntax trees, and semantic models, enabling in-depth analysis of the submitted script.

    Managing State Across Script Executions

    The C# Scripting API also provides mechanisms for managing state between script executions [10]. The ScriptState class, returned by RunAsync, captures the state of a script execution, including variables and the return value. This state can then be used to continue execution with subsequent scripts via ContinueWithAsync, enabling the creation of interactive script sessions where variables and context persist.

    Addressing Performance, Memory, and Security Concerns

    While the Scripting API opens a world of possibilities, developers should be mindful of potential performance, memory, and security implications [11].

    • Performance and Memory Usage: Dynamic script execution inherently incurs some overhead. The process of compiling and executing scripts can consume more memory and time compared to pre-compiled code. While this might not be a concern for infrequent script executions, applications heavily reliant on dynamic scripting should carefully consider the performance and memory implications.
    • Security Considerations: Granting users the ability to execute arbitrary C# code demands robust security measures [12]. Developers need to carefully consider the potential for malicious code execution and implement appropriate safeguards. Techniques such as limiting accessible APIs, using restricted user accounts, and sandboxing script execution environments are crucial for mitigating security risks.

    The Future of C# Scripting

    The Scripting API represents a significant evolution in C#’s capabilities, blurring the lines between traditional compiled languages and dynamic scripting environments. As the API matures and developers embrace its potential, we can expect to see new and innovative applications that leverage the power of C# scripting. The sources provide a glimpse into the current capabilities and future potential of C# scripting.

    Mock Objects in Unit Testing

    Mock objects play a crucial role in unit testing, providing a way to isolate the unit under test from its dependencies and to control the behavior of those dependencies. They serve as stand-ins for real dependencies, allowing developers to focus on testing the logic of the unit being tested without the complexities and potential side effects of interacting with real dependencies.

    The Role of Mock Objects

    As explained in the sources, unit testing focuses on verifying the functionality of individual units of code in isolation [1]. This isolation is crucial to ensure that tests are reliable, repeatable, and focused solely on the behavior of the unit being tested [1]. However, units of code often interact with other components, such as external services, databases, or other classes within the system [1]. These dependencies can introduce complexities that make unit testing difficult, as they might not always be readily available or might introduce unpredictable behavior [1].

    Mock objects address this challenge by providing controlled substitutes for real dependencies [1]. Instead of interacting with a real database, for example, a unit test can utilize a mock object that simulates database interactions. This allows developers to define specific behaviors for the mock object, ensuring that the unit under test receives predictable responses and that the test focuses solely on the unit’s logic [1].

    Creating and Using Mock Objects

    The sources highlight a mocking framework called Rocks, which leverages the Compiler API to generate mock objects at runtime [2]. Rocks provides a fluent API for defining mock object behavior and verifying interactions [2].

    Let’s consider an example where we have a class ServiceUser that depends on an interface IService. To unit test ServiceUser, we can use Rocks to create a mock object that implements IService:

    var service = Rock.Create<IService>();

    service.Handle(_ => _.GetId()).Returns(2);

    var user = new ServiceUser(service.Make());

    Debug.Assert(user.Id == 2);

    service.Verify();

    In this example:

    • Rock.Create<IService>() creates a mock object for the IService interface.
    • service.Handle(_ => _.GetId()).Returns(2) sets up the mock object to return the value 2 when the GetId method is called.
    • service.Make() generates a concrete implementation of the mock object.
    • The Debug.Assert statement checks if the Id property of the ServiceUser object is set to 2 as expected.
    • service.Verify() ensures that the GetId method was indeed called during the test.

    Benefits of Using Mock Objects

    Mock objects offer several benefits in unit testing:

    • Isolation: They isolate the unit under test from its dependencies, ensuring that the test results reflect the unit’s behavior and not external factors.
    • Control: They provide precise control over the behavior of dependencies, allowing developers to simulate different scenarios and edge cases.
    • Simplicity: Mocking frameworks like Rocks simplify the process of creating and configuring mock objects, reducing the amount of boilerplate code required.

    Rocks and the Compiler API

    The sources explain how Rocks uses the Compiler API to generate mock objects using C# code, rather than relying on IL generation like some other mocking frameworks [3]. This approach offers several advantages:

    • Readability: The generated mock code is in C#, making it easier for developers to understand and debug.
    • Debuggability: Rocks leverages the Compiler API’s debugging capabilities, allowing developers to step into the generated mock code during debugging.
    • Maintainability: Using C# for mock generation makes the Rocks framework easier to maintain and extend.

    Conclusion

    Mock objects are indispensable tools for effective unit testing. They promote isolation, control, and simplicity, leading to more reliable and maintainable tests. Frameworks like Rocks, which utilize the Compiler API for mock generation, further enhance the testability of C# code by providing readable, debuggable, and maintainable mock objects.

    Working with Code Structures: Exploring the Workspace API

    The Workspace API within the Compiler API provides a structured representation of a developer’s codebase, mirroring the familiar solution, project, and document organization found in Visual Studio. It provides an abstraction over these code structures, enabling interaction with and manipulation of code elements at various levels of granularity.

    Key Concepts and Functionality

    The Workspace API revolves around the concept of a Workspace, which encapsulates a Solution. A Solution in turn contains one or more Project objects, each of which can hold multiple Document objects. This hierarchical structure mirrors the way code is typically organized in Visual Studio, with solutions containing projects and projects containing individual code files or documents.

    Workspace Implementations

    The sources discuss three primary implementations of the Workspace API:

    • AdhocWorkspace: This implementation is primarily used in testing scenarios. It allows the dynamic creation of workspaces, solutions, projects, and documents in memory, making it suitable for unit testing and experimenting with code transformations without affecting the actual codebase.
    • MSBuildWorkspace: As the name suggests, this implementation is designed for interaction with MSBuild projects and solutions. It provides a bridge between the Compiler API and MSBuild, allowing programmatic manipulation of MSBuild-based projects.
    • VisualStudioWorkspace: This is the workspace implementation used within the Visual Studio IDE. It allows extensions and tools to interact with the active codebase within Visual Studio, enabling features like refactoring, code analysis, and code generation.

    Updating Solutions and Projects

    The sources showcase the use of the Workspace API to implement automatic code refactorings. The MSBuildWorkspace and VisualStudioWorkspace implementations are particularly relevant in this context. The sources illustrate how to leverage the Workspace API to traverse project structures, modify document content, and apply those changes back to the solution.

    For example, a refactoring to remove comments from code files would involve the following steps:

    1. Obtain the relevant workspace implementation (MSBuildWorkspace for command-line or MSBuild integration, VisualStudioWorkspace for Visual Studio extensions).
    2. Open the target solution using OpenSolutionAsync.
    3. Iterate through projects and documents within the solution.
    4. For each document, retrieve the syntax tree using GetSyntaxRootAsync.
    5. Modify the syntax tree as needed (e.g., remove comment nodes).
    6. If changes were made, update the document in the solution using WithDocumentSyntaxRoot.
    7. Apply the changes to the solution using TryApplyChanges (MSBuildWorkspace) or by invoking Save on the EnvDTE.Document object (VisualStudioWorkspace).

    Benefits of the Workspace API

    The Workspace API offers several advantages:

    • Structured Code Representation: Provides a hierarchical representation of the codebase, making it easier to navigate and manipulate code elements.
    • Abstraction: Offers an abstraction layer over different build systems (e.g., MSBuild) and IDE environments (e.g., Visual Studio).
    • Automation: Enables programmatic manipulation of codebases, facilitating automated refactorings, code generation, and other code transformations.

    Conclusion

    The Workspace API is a powerful tool for interacting with and manipulating code structures. Its various implementations cater to different scenarios, from unit testing to Visual Studio extensions. By providing a structured representation and an abstraction layer, it empowers developers to build sophisticated tools and automate code transformations. The sources demonstrate practical examples of leveraging the Workspace API to implement automated code refactorings, highlighting its capabilities and potential.

    Refactoring Code: Improving Internal Structure Without Altering External Behavior

    Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior [1, 2]. This means that the code’s functionality remains the same, but its internal structure is improved. The goal of refactoring is to make code easier to understand, maintain, and extend [1, 2].

    The sources emphasize that refactoring should not break existing functionality [1]. They provide an example of refactoring a simple arithmetic calculation using Visual Studio’s built-in refactoring tools.

    Refactoring Example: Simple Arithmetic Calculation

    The following steps outline the refactoring process applied to a simple arithmetic calculation in the sources:

    1. Extract Method: The initial code for the calculation is extracted into a separate method using Visual Studio’s “Extract Method” refactoring [3]. This improves code organization by isolating the calculation logic [4].
    2. Rename Method: The extracted method is given a more descriptive name using the “Rename” refactoring [4]. This improves code readability [4].
    3. Create Constant: A string literal used in the code is extracted into a constant using a refactoring tool [5]. This promotes code reusability and maintainability [5].
    4. Remove Unused Using Statements: Unnecessary using directives are removed, reducing code clutter [6].

    These refactorings result in a code structure that is more organized, readable, and maintainable, all while preserving the original functionality of the code [6, 7].

    Developing Custom Refactorings with the Compiler API

    The sources highlight the capability of the Compiler API to create custom refactorings, extending Visual Studio’s refactoring capabilities [8]. They outline the process of developing a custom refactoring to move types from a single file into separate files, demonstrating the power of the Compiler API in code transformation.

    Steps Involved in Developing a Custom Refactoring:

    1. Understanding the Problem: Clearly define the refactoring’s goal and the code transformations required [9]. The sources consider various scenarios and edge cases to ensure a robust refactoring implementation [10].
    2. Creating a Refactoring Solution: Utilize the Visual Studio refactoring project template to set up the necessary projects and structure [11]. The template provides a basic example that can be modified to implement the custom refactoring [11].
    3. Building the Refactoring: Implement the core logic of the refactoring, leveraging the Compiler API’s syntax tree manipulation capabilities [12, 13]. The sources provide detailed code examples, showcasing the use of SyntaxNode, SemanticModel, and other Compiler API components to perform the code transformations [13-15].
    4. Executing and Testing the Refactoring: Test the refactoring within Visual Studio using the generated VSIX project [16]. The sources emphasize the importance of testing to ensure the refactoring works as expected [17].

    The sources provide a comprehensive example of building and executing a custom refactoring, illustrating the potential of the Compiler API to enhance developer productivity and code quality.

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • Photoshop Layers: A Beginner’s Guide to Mastering the Layers Panel by GFXMentor

    Photoshop Layers: A Beginner’s Guide to Mastering the Layers Panel by GFXMentor

    The provided text is a transcript of an online class instructing beginners on how to use layers in Adobe Photoshop. The instructor, Imran, explains the fundamentals of the layers panel, covering topics such as background layers, normal layers, opacity, and fill. The lesson also explores the different types of locks available for layers, including transparent pixels, image pixels, and position locks. Furthermore, the tutorial goes into blending modes, demonstrating how they affect the interaction of layers, specifically discussing dissolve, multiply, screen, overlay, and color modes. Finally, the lesson briefly reviews searching for layers, creating groups, and copying.

    01
    Rainbow Dreams: A Coloring Journey for Kids Paperback – October 11, 2025

    Photoshop Layers: A Comprehensive Study Guide

    Quiz: Short Answer Questions

    1. What is a background layer in Photoshop, and how does it differ from a normal layer?
    2. Explain how to convert a background layer into a normal layer.
    3. Describe the function of the Opacity and Fill settings in the Layers panel. What are some situations when you would use Opacity and when you would use Fill?
    4. What are the three main types of layer locks, and how does each affect your ability to edit a layer?
    5. How do you transform a layer in Photoshop, and what key should you press to maintain proportional scaling during transformation?
    6. Explain the function of Blending Modes and provide two specific examples of how they can be used creatively.
    7. Describe how the “Multiply” blending mode can be used to remove white backgrounds from images.
    8. Explain how the “Screen” blending mode can be used to remove black backgrounds from images.
    9. Describe how to create a group of layers and explain the benefits of organizing layers into groups.
    10. Explain how to find a specific layer by searching by its name in the Layers panel.

    Quiz Answer Key

    1. A background layer is the initial layer in a new or opened image, often locked and unmovable. A normal layer is unlocked, allowing for modifications like moving, opacity changes, and transformations.
    2. To convert a background layer to a normal layer, double-click on the background layer where it is written. A dialog box will appear, allowing you to rename the layer, and upon clicking “OK,” it becomes a normal layer (Layer 0).
    3. Opacity controls the overall transparency of the layer, making everything on the layer more or less visible. Fill affects the transparency of the pixels on the layer but doesn’t affect layer styles. Opacity is good for adjusting the overall visibility, while Fill can be useful when working with layer styles to make color or gradients transparent without affecting the effects.
    4. The three main types of layer locks are: Lock Transparent Pixels (prevents painting on transparent areas), Lock Image Pixels (prevents any drawing on the layer), and Lock Position (prevents moving the layer).
    5. To transform a layer, select it in the Layers panel and press Ctrl+T (Command+T on Mac) to activate the Transform tool. Press the Shift key while scaling to maintain proportional scaling.
    6. Blending Modes change how a layer interacts with the layers beneath it, altering the colors and tones. Multiply removes white and darkens the image, useful for placing dark line art over a background. Screen removes black and lightens the image, useful for placing white designs over a background.
    7. The “Multiply” blending mode makes white pixels transparent, allowing the content below the layer to show through. This is useful for removing white backgrounds from line art or sketches.
    8. The “Screen” blending mode makes black pixels transparent, allowing the content below the layer to show through. This is useful for placing a white design on a dark or colorful background.
    9. To create a group, select multiple layers by clicking while holding Shift or Ctrl (Command on Mac) and then press Ctrl+G (Command+G on Mac). Grouping organizes layers, simplifies moving and copying related elements together, and reduces clutter in the Layers panel.
    10. In the Layers panel, there is a search bar at the top. Type the name (or part of the name) of the layer you’re looking for into the search bar, and Photoshop will filter the Layers panel to show only the layers that match your search term.

    Essay Questions

    1. Discuss the importance of layers in Photoshop and how they contribute to non-destructive editing. Provide examples of how layers are used to create complex image manipulations and designs.
    2. Compare and contrast the different layer blending modes in Photoshop, explaining how they affect the interaction between layers. Illustrate your answer with specific examples of how different blending modes can be used to achieve various effects.
    3. Explain the various layer locking options available in Photoshop and how they can be used to protect and control the elements of a design. Provide specific scenarios where each type of lock would be beneficial.
    4. Describe the process of importing images into Photoshop as layers and discuss different methods for positioning and arranging layers within a composition.
    5. Discuss the concept of layer opacity and fill in Photoshop, highlighting the similarities and differences between these two settings. Explain how they can be used creatively to create subtle effects and enhance visual designs.

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • Layer: A single level in a Photoshop file that can contain images, text, or effects, allowing for independent editing and manipulation.
    • Background Layer: The default, usually locked, layer that is automatically created when a new Photoshop document is opened.
    • Normal Layer: An unlocked layer that can be freely moved, edited, and manipulated with all available Photoshop tools.
    • Opacity: A setting that controls the transparency of a layer, allowing you to see through it to the layers below.
    • Fill: A setting similar to opacity that controls the transparency of the content on a layer but does not affect layer styles.
    • Layer Locking: A feature that prevents certain types of edits to a layer, such as moving, painting, or modifying transparent pixels.
    • Transform: To change the size, shape, or orientation of a layer using tools like scaling, rotating, and skewing.
    • Blending Modes: Options that determine how a layer interacts with the layers below it, affecting color, brightness, and overall appearance.
    • Multiply: A blending mode that darkens the image by multiplying the colors of the selected layer with the colors of the layers below.
    • Screen: A blending mode that lightens the image by screening the colors of the selected layer with the colors of the layers below.
    • Overlay: A blending mode that combines the effects of Multiply and Screen, darkening dark areas and lightening light areas.
    • Hue: A blending mode that applies the color (hue) of a layer to the layers below while retaining their luminance and saturation.
    • Group: A container that holds multiple layers, allowing you to organize and manipulate them as a single unit.
    • Transparent Pixels: Areas of a layer that have no color or opacity, allowing the layers below to show through.
    • Artboard: A canvas-like area within a Photoshop document that allows designers to work on multiple layouts or designs in a single file.
    • Blending Options: A more comprehensive set of effects you can apply to a layer.

    Photoshop Layers: A Beginner’s Guide

    Okay, here’s a briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided transcript of the Photoshop tutorial:

    Briefing Document: Photoshop Layers Tutorial

    Source: Excerpts from “01.pdf” (Transcript of a Photoshop Beginner Series Class #3)

    Main Theme: Understanding and utilizing the Layers Panel in Adobe Photoshop. The tutorial aims to demystify layers and demonstrate their fundamental functionalities in a practical, hands-on manner.

    Key Concepts and Ideas:

    1. Background Layer vs. Normal Layers:
    • The tutorial starts by explaining the difference between a “Background Layer” (the default layer when opening an image) and a “Normal Layer.”
    • The Background Layer is initially locked and restricted, preventing movement or modification without conversion: “Now this background layer is such a layer that you cannot even move it, you cannot do anything. As soon as you drag it, it says convert to normal layer.”
    • Converting the Background Layer to a Normal Layer unlocks its potential, allowing for opacity adjustments, transformations, and other manipulations. Double-clicking the background layer allows conversion.
    • Normal layers have accessible options like opacity and are not locked by default, unlike the background layer.
    1. Layer Manipulation (Opacity, Fill, Ordering):
    • Opacity: Adjusting the opacity of a layer makes it more transparent, allowing underlying layers to show through. “In this you have all the features like you can move it to the right and you can lower its opacity from here so what is the opacity obviously it becomes a little transparent.”
    • Fill: While similar to opacity in initial appearance, Fill has different applications which will be covered in more detail when layer styles/blending options are discussed later. “well if you look down in this, then you have an option given to fill, the work of fill is something else…if you understand, then it is exactly like opacity, right, so it is your choice, whether you use opacity or fill, both will have the same work, for now”
    • Layer Ordering: Layers can be rearranged in the Layers Panel to control which elements appear on top of others in the image. Dragging layers up or down changes their visual priority.
    • Importing Images as Layers: Images can be added as new layers through drag-and-drop or copy-pasting (Control+A, Control+C, Control+V). “…apart from drag and drop, you can also do this, if you are not able to drag and drop, then there is no problem, control A means select all, control C means copy and coming here, control V means paste…”
    1. Layer Locking Options:
    • Photoshop provides various locking options to protect layers from unwanted modifications:
    • Lock Transparent Pixels: Prevents painting or editing on transparent areas of the layer. You can only paint on the existing pixels. “see, the paint is not happening here because all the transparent pixels of this layer are locked…if I paint here, it will be done…”
    • Lock Image Pixels: Disables all painting or editing directly on the layer’s content. “…locked image pixels, now as I locked this, see, this also got locked, that means now I cannot draw anything on this layer…”
    • Lock Position: Prevents the layer from being moved or transformed. “You cannot move this layer, you cannot transform it…I can work on the entire layer but I cannot move this layer.”
    • Lock All: Completely locks the layer, disabling all editing and movement. It makes the layer act like the background layer and deactivates any layer-based modifications. “By lock all, it means that this layer of yours has been totally locked and now you can neither move it nor create anything on it.”
    • Auto Nesting Lock (Artboards): The tutorial mentions a lock related to artboards (introduced in later versions of Photoshop) that prevents layers from accidentally moving between or nesting within different artboards. This topic is briefly addressed but not explored in depth due to its complexity for beginner users. “Auto nesting into and out of artboards…this lock was not there even in 2015 because there were no artboards in it”
    1. Blending Modes:
    • Blending modes control how a layer interacts with the layers beneath it, creating various visual effects.
    • The tutorial introduces several key blending modes:
    • Dissolve: Turns off random pixels based on the opacity set, creating a grainy or textured look. “as I lower the opacity, it will start turning off some random pixels…here random pixels are turning off…”
    • Multiply: Removes white colors, leaving only the darker tones of the layer visible. “…if you want the white color to disappear completely and the black color to remain purely here…you just go and delete the image. We have to multiply it…”
    • Screen: Removes black colors, leaving only the lighter tones of the layer visible. “…the black will disappear completely and you will be left with white…”
    • Overlay: Combines both dark and light colors, making the image darker where the overlaying layer is black and lighter where it is white. “wherever I had black, my image became dark and wherever I had white, my image became bright from there.”
    • Color: Applies the hue and saturation of the blending layer to the base layer, while maintaining the luminosity of the base layer. “…your normal layer was on some blue tone…it will give a blue color to the overall layer…you can even do this, paint on a black and white picture and change its mode color, then it becomes color…”
    • The instructor emphasizes that experimenting with different blending modes is crucial to understanding their effects, as the results can be unpredictable based on the colors involved. “you cannot predict what result will come with which colour…it is a bit of a matter of trial and error, you can use where you like it…”
    • Inverting colors is done by going to Image -> Adjustments -> Invert, or pressing Control + I. This can be useful to convert blacks to whites to apply blending modes effectively.
    1. Layer Management (Searching, Grouping):
    • The tutorial demonstrates how to search for specific layers by name or type using the search bar at the top of the Layers Panel.
    • Layers can be grouped together into folders for better organization. Selecting multiple layers and pressing Control+G creates a group. “you can create a group by selecting all of them together…control-G will group.”
    • Groups can be moved, copied, and manipulated as a single unit. “The advantage of this group is that all the layers in it will remain in one place. You can move it or even copy it.”

    Target Audience: Beginners learning Photoshop.

    Overall Tone: The tutorial is presented in a friendly and approachable manner, with the instructor using simple language and practical examples to illustrate the concepts.

    Key Takeaway: The Layers Panel is the cornerstone of Photoshop, and understanding its features is essential for creating complex and well-organized image edits. Experimentation and practice are encouraged to master the various layer options and blending modes.

    Photoshop Layers: FAQs and Essential Techniques

    Here are 8 frequently asked questions (FAQs) about working with layers in Adobe Photoshop, based on the provided document.

    Q1: What is a background layer in Photoshop, and how does it differ from a normal layer?

    A background layer is the default layer you see when you create a new image or open an existing one in Photoshop. It’s initially locked, meaning you can’t move it or directly adjust its opacity. To unlock it and gain full editing capabilities, you need to double-click the background layer in the Layers panel. This converts it into a normal layer (Layer 0, by default), unlocking options like opacity control, blending modes, and the ability to move and transform the layer. A normal layer is not locked by default, allowing for immediate modifications.

    Q2: How can I add an image to an existing Photoshop file as a new layer?

    There are two primary methods:

    1. Drag and Drop: Open the image you want to add. Select the “Move” tool. Click and drag the image from its current window to the tab of your target Photoshop file. Wait for the target file’s canvas to display (you’ll see a white border around it) and release the mouse button to drop the image as a new layer.
    2. Copy and Paste: Open the image you want to add. Press Ctrl+A (Windows) or Cmd+A (Mac) to select the entire image. Press Ctrl+C (Windows) or Cmd+C (Mac) to copy it. Go to your target Photoshop file and press Ctrl+V (Windows) or Cmd+V (Mac) to paste the image as a new layer.

    Q3: What are the different types of layer locks available in Photoshop, and what does each one do?

    Photoshop offers several layer lock options, each restricting different aspects of layer editing:

    • Lock Transparent Pixels: This prevents you from painting or modifying any of the transparent areas on the layer. You can only paint on the opaque parts of the layer. You can still move the layer.
    • Lock Image Pixels: This prevents you from directly painting or making any pixel-level edits to the layer content. You can still move and transform the layer.
    • Lock Position: This prevents you from moving the layer, but you can still make edits to its content (unless other locks are also active).
    • Lock All: This completely locks the layer, preventing any changes whatsoever, including moving, editing, or adjusting opacity. It essentially behaves like the original background layer before it’s unlocked.
    • Auto Nesting into and out of Artboards (CC 2017+): This lock prevents the automatic movement of layers between different Artboards.

    Q4: What’s the difference between “Opacity” and “Fill” in the Layers panel?

    Initially, “Opacity” and “Fill” may appear to do the same thing: make a layer more transparent. However, the difference lies in how they affect layer styles and blending options. “Opacity” affects the entire layer, including any layer styles applied to it. “Fill” only affects the layer’s content pixels, leaving any applied layer styles at full opacity. The document states they function similarly until Layer Styles or Blending Options are used.

    Q5: What are Blending Modes, and how can they be used to modify the appearance of layers?

    Blending Modes determine how a layer interacts with the layers below it. They offer various ways to blend the colors and tones of layers, creating a wide range of effects. Some common blending modes include:

    • Dissolve: Creates a grainy, pixelated effect by randomly turning off pixels based on opacity.
    • Darken Modes (e.g., Multiply): These modes darken the image. Multiply removes white colors, keeping only black tones.
    • Lighten Modes (e.g., Screen): These modes lighten the image. Screen removes black colors, keeping only white tones.
    • Overlay: Highlights both dark and light colors within an image
    • Color: Can be used to color black and white pictures.

    The narrator suggests experimenting with different blending modes and using the arrow keys to see which option suits you best.

    Q6: How can I remove a white background from an image using blending modes?

    The easiest way to remove a purely white background from an image placed on a layer above other content is to change the layer’s blending mode to “Multiply”. This mode makes white pixels transparent, allowing the content beneath to show through, while keeping the black pixels visible.

    Q7: How can I invert the colors of a layer?

    To invert the colors of a layer (e.g., turning black to white and vice versa), select the layer and press Ctrl+I (Windows) or Cmd+I (Mac), or go to Image > Adjustments > Invert. This will reverse the color values of the pixels on that layer.

    Q8: How can I group layers together, and what are the benefits of doing so?

    To group layers, select the desired layers in the Layers panel. You can select multiple contiguous layers by clicking on the first layer, holding down the Shift key, and then clicking on the last layer. For non-contiguous layers, click the first layer, hold down the Ctrl/Cmd key, and then click on each additional layer you want to include in the group. Once the layers are selected, press Ctrl+G (Windows) or Cmd+G (Mac) to create a group. Alternatively, click the “Create a new group” icon (folder icon) at the bottom of the Layers panel. Benefits of grouping layers include:

    • Organization: Keeps your Layers panel tidy and manageable, especially in complex projects with many layers.
    • Collective Transformations: Allows you to move, transform, or apply effects to the entire group as a single unit.
    • Copying and Pasting The entire group can be copied and pasted elsewhere.

    Photoshop Layers: Management, Blending, and Properties

    The Layers panel in Photoshop contains multiple options that allow you to manipulate and organize different elements of an image.

    Background Layer:

    • When you open an image in Photoshop, it often appears as a background layer which is locked.
    • A locked background layer cannot be moved or have its opacity adjusted until it is converted to a normal layer by double-clicking it.
    • Once converted to a normal layer, you can rename it and access all the features like opacity control.

    Normal Layers:

    • Normal layers have all options available, such as opacity and blending modes.
    • These layers are not locked and allow for full manipulation.

    Moving Images Between Layers/Files:

    • You can drag and drop images between files using the move tool.
    • Alternatively, you can copy (Control+C) and paste (Control+V) images between files.

    Opacity and Fill:

    • Opacity adjusts the transparency of a layer.
    • Fill also affects transparency, but its full effect is realized with layer styles or blending options.
    • For now, opacity and fill can be considered the same.

    Locks:

    • Lock Transparent Pixels: Prevents painting on transparent areas of the layer.
    • When enabled, you can only draw on the non-transparent parts of the layer.
    • If transparent pixels are unlocked, using “alt + backspace” will fill the entire layer with color.
    • Lock Image Pixels: Prevents any drawing or editing on the layer but still allows moving and transforming it.
    • Lock Position: Prevents moving the layer.
    • You can work on the layer, but its position remains fixed.
    • Lock All: Completely locks the layer, preventing any modifications.
    • Disables all features, similar to a background layer.
    • Auto Nesting (Artboard): Prevents automatic movement of layers between artboards.
    • This lock ensures that when working with multiple artboards, the artwork stays within its intended artboard.

    Blending Modes:

    • Blending modes affect how layers interact with each other.
    • Dissolve: Turns off random pixels as opacity is lowered, creating a grainy effect.
    • Multiply: Removes white colors, leaving only the black colors.
    • Useful for removing white backgrounds from images.
    • Screen: Removes black colors, leaving only the white colors.
    • Inverting colors (Control+I) can switch black to white and vice versa, useful with the Screen blending mode.
    • Overlay: Highlights both light and dark colors.
    • Dark areas become darker, and light areas become lighter.
    • Hue: Applies a color tone to the layer.
    • Color: Can be used to colorize black and white images.
    • Luminous: Retains the colors from the layer below.

    Layer Search:

    • You can search for layers by name or effect.
    • Filter layers by type (image, pixel, adjustment layer, etc.).

    Layer Management:

    • Delete Layer: Click the layer and delete it.
    • Groups:
    • You can group layers by selecting them and pressing Control+G.
    • Groups act like folders, keeping layers organized.
    • Groups can be moved and copied.

    Photoshop: Converting Background Layers to Normal Layers

    When an image is first opened in Photoshop, it often appears as a background layer, which has certain restrictions. To unlock the full potential for editing, this background layer needs to be converted into a normal layer.

    Here’s how you can convert a background layer to a normal layer and the implications of doing so:

    • Conversion Process: To convert a background layer into a normal layer, simply double-click on the background layer in the Layers panel. A dialog box will appear, allowing you to rename the layer. Upon clicking “OK”, the background layer is transformed into a normal layer.
    • Features of a Normal Layer: Once the layer is converted, it becomes a normal layer, unlocking several features:
    • Moveable: The layer can be moved freely within the canvas.
    • Opacity Adjustments: You can adjust the opacity of the layer, making it more or less transparent.
    • Blending Modes: Access to blending modes, which allow you to change how the layer interacts with the layers beneath it.
    • Unlocked: The layer is no longer locked, meaning you can make any modifications you like.

    Moving Images Between Layers and Files in Photoshop

    To move images between layers or files in Photoshop, you can use the drag-and-drop method. Here’s how:

    • Using the Move Tool: Select the move tool in Photoshop.
    • Dragging the Image: Click on the image you want to move and drag it.
    • Moving Between Files: If you are moving the image to another file, drag the image to the destination file’s tab. Once you hover over the tab, the destination file will open. Then, drag the image onto the canvas of the destination file and release the mouse button to drop the image. A white border around the canvas indicates where you are dropping the image.

    Alternatively, you can also copy and paste images between files:

    • Copy: Select all (Control+A) the contents of the image you wish to move, and then copy it (Control+C).
    • Paste: Go to the destination file and paste (Control+V) the image.

    Photoshop: Locking Transparent Pixels in Layers

    The Lock Transparent Pixels option in Photoshop’s Layers panel allows you to restrict drawing or painting only to the non-transparent areas of a layer. When this lock is enabled, the transparent pixels of the layer are protected, and you can only modify the parts of the layer that already contain content.

    Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

    • Functionality: When you lock transparent pixels, you prevent any modifications to the transparent areas of the selected layer. This means you can only draw or paint on the parts of the layer that already have pixels.
    • Visual Indicator: A small lock icon appears on the layer in the Layers panel when transparent pixels are locked.
    • Use Case: This lock is useful when you want to add details or shading to an object on a layer without accidentally painting outside its boundaries.
    • Behavior:
    • With transparent pixels locked, attempting to draw on a transparent area will have no effect.
    • Drawing on existing, non-transparent pixels will work as expected.
    • Filling the Layer: If transparent pixels are unlocked, using “Alt + Backspace” will fill the entire layer with the foreground color, overwriting any existing content. If the transparent pixels are locked, “Alt + Backspace” will only fill the non-transparent pixels.
    • Moving and Transforming: Locking transparent pixels does not prevent you from moving or transforming the layer. You can still adjust the position and size of the layer, but you cannot alter its transparent areas.

    Photoshop Blending Modes: A Comprehensive Guide

    Blending modes in Photoshop are used to determine how layers interact with each other, creating various effects. Here’s a detailed overview of how to use blending modes:

    • Accessing Blending Modes: Blending modes are located at the top of the Layers panel. They offer a range of options that change how the selected layer blends with the layers beneath it.
    • Types of Blending Modes and Their Uses:
    • Dissolve: This mode turns off random pixels as the opacity is lowered, creating a grainy or textured effect. When the opacity is reduced, instead of becoming transparent, random pixels disappear.
    • Darken Modes: This set of modes generally produces darker colors or removes lighter colors.
    • Multiply: This mode removes white colors, leaving only the black colors. It is useful for removing white backgrounds from images.
    • Lighten Modes: These modes generally produce lighter colors or remove darker colors.
    • Screen: This mode removes black colors, leaving only the white colors. Inverting the colors (Control+I) can switch black to white and vice versa, which is useful with the Screen blending mode.
    • Overlay: This mode highlights both light and dark colors. Dark areas become darker, and light areas become lighter. It makes the image dark where there is black and light where there is white.
    • Hue: This mode applies a color tone to the layer. For example, applying a blue hue will give the overall layer a blue tone.
    • Color: This mode can be used to colorize black and white images.
    • Luminous: This mode retains the colors from the layer below, making them prominent regardless of the color applied on the current layer.
    • Practical Applications and Tips:
    • Removing White Backgrounds: Use the Multiply blending mode to make white backgrounds disappear, leaving only the darker elements.
    • Removing Black Backgrounds: Use the Screen blending mode to remove black backgrounds and keep the white elements.
    • Creating Overlays: The Overlay mode is useful for creating effects where both light and dark areas are enhanced.
    • Colorizing: Use the Color mode to add specific colors to an image, especially useful for black and white photos.
    • Experimentation: Since the results of blending modes can vary based on the colors and content of the layers, it’s often necessary to experiment to achieve the desired effect. You can cycle through different blending modes using the arrow keys to see the results in real-time.
    • Non-Predictable Results: Some blending modes produce results that may not be immediately predictable, especially with colored images. Trial and error can help in understanding their effects.
    Layers Panel – Adobe Photoshop for Beginners – Class 3 – Urdu / Hindi

    The Original Text

    [Music] Assalam Walekum Welcome to GF, a mentor, I am your teacher Imran and today this is our class number three of Photoshop beginner series and today our topic is layers, that is, the layers panel on the right end, some students find it a little scary, a little frightening, but it is not that much of a problem, I had given you guys the idea of ​​layers earlier that layers are very important, let’s see today what other options do we get with layers and how easy the layers panel is, you can find things very easily with great fun, so let’s see, so first of all I am taking a new file from here and see, I am telling you the options of some layers from the very basic point of view and I am telling you the options of this one of 1000, 500, well it does not matter, you can take any size and so let’s suppose here if you see, you have the background, if this is now our focus today is on this panel, the entire layer’s end The first thing that you see is if you take a new image or even open any image, you see this background layer. In this, if I open any image, so let’s suppose I am opening this image and okay, so as soon as I open this image, you can see here in it, here also you have a background layer. Now this background layer is such a layer that you cannot even move it, you cannot do anything. As soon as you drag it, it says convert to normal layer. Now what is this normal layer? Normal layer is such a layer in which all these options like opacity etc. are present. This layer is not locked. Normal layer is locked in this way. Look here, if you notice carefully, there is a small lock, right, so this layer is locked. If instead of this, I take a layer above and suppose I create anything on it and let’s take this yellow color and paint it here. Okay, now as I painted, this layer is a normal layer. In this you have all the features like you can move it to the right and you can lower its opacity from here so what is the opacity obviously it becomes a little transparent okay below this you have the fill given here now this fill etc. is obviously present on it but what if you want that we can use this background layer on top and we can lower the opacity on it then we can simply do this work that double click on it like on the background layer you have to simply double click where it is written and this layer zero will be given its name itself if you want you can change its name you will click ok as soon as you click ok here you have the layer zero converted now see you have all these features and in fact if I want that yes I keep this yellow colour layer of mine below and I keep it on top now why should I keep it on top maybe I wanted to lower its opacity see this and and it is possible that I want to change its I wanted to cut a little, like suppose I selected this much part and deleted it, so now see, it’s a simple thing that I wanted this yellow color below and this layer of mine is coming on top, so yes, this is possible only when you have this normal layer or transparent layer, right after your background layer, which is coming to you and that is your transparent layer, you know, okay, if you see here, now it is not necessary that you create something, you can also bring another image, so let’s bring some other image open and I am opening this image and I am simply dragging it with the move tool to this tab and leaving it here, so what will happen is that simply a copy of it will come to us here, so I dragged this image from here and dropped it here, see, apart from drag and drop, you can also do this, if you are not able to drag and drop, then there is no problem, control A means select all, control C means copy and coming here, control V means paste, so you can also do these things You can do it, it is not necessary that you only do drag and drop, so if you want to do drag and drop, then I will tell you once again that simply you will go to this file and drag and which tool will you use, this move tool, okay, by dragging with this you have to come up on this tab, now come down and see here, you will see a white border on or around your entire canvas, okay, this shows where you are dropping, right, now as soon as you release the mouse button, this image will come here, okay, so it is quite simple, now see here in this, if I am lowering its opacity, then this is happening, okay, well if you look down in this, then you have an option given to fill, the work of fill is something else, when we will see layer styles or blending options, we will not see in today’s class, we will see later, but we will see it is very useful, but for now, if you understand, then it is exactly like opacity, right, so it is your choice, whether you use opacity or fill, both will have the same work, for now Its further work is that we will see in some other class but we will definitely see that if you come here next to it, then you have some locks given, so for example if I lock this one, this is your transparent pixels lock transparent pixels, as soon as I lock it, see, a small lock has been formed here, but in locking it your layer has not been completely locked, you can still move it, okay, you can even transform, now what is transform, how will it happen, if you press control t, then you can transform any layer, so as soon as I pressed control t, see, here you have got this bounding box, now you can make it smaller, you can destroy it like this, so if you do not want to destroy it, then please press shift so that it can be proportionally smaller or bigger, okay, so I proportionally reduced it a little and now brought it here and as soon as you finalize, your editing or transformation is finalized, so please press enter on this now So after pressing enter, now see, its size has become smaller, now see what was the advantage of this lock, as I said, you have locked it, but even after locking, your layer is moving, so let’s say I want to paint something here, see, the paint is not happening here because all the transparent pixels of this layer are locked, yes, of course, if I paint here, it will be done, so this can be done very easily, you can do things like this and the interesting thing is that if your transparent pixels are locked, then you can simply do all back space, so just like the foreground color is filled, you can fill here, and if these transparent pixels of yours are not locked, then if you do all back space, then your entire layer will be filled with color and that image of yours will be gone, okay, so just remember now that locked transparent pixels means all the extra area, that is, if I hide the layer below for a while, then you will see that yes, this entire layer is transparent. Pixels are these, they are locked, so if you come here moving the brush or you are drawing anything with any tool, then you will be able to draw only in that area which is not locked, that means what was locked, only the transparent area, after this if I unlock this and lock this one, so what is this, locked image pixels, now as I locked this, see, this also got locked, that means now I cannot draw anything on this layer, as soon as I try to draw, it is giving me an error that I could not use the brush tool because the layer is locked, but still I can move it, I can transform it and it’s quite easy, it’s just that now you cannot create anything on this layer, okay, next you are coming to this, this will be your locked position, now in this you cannot move this layer, you cannot transform it, I am doing control T, nothing is happening, okay, but remember I had unlocked both of them just now, so that It means that I can work on the entire layer but I cannot move this layer. So, many times we need to work on something but we don’t want to move it. So, we just lock its position. Yes, this can also be done. For example, you said that it should not move and the secondary transparent pixels should be locked. So, now you see, if I am moving the brush, it is happening only in this part and you are not able to move this layer. So, look here, these two types of locks have been added to you. Okay, so now I have unlocked all of them. This is a new lock that has come to you. I guess, this was added since CC 2017. Auto nesting into and out of artboards. Well, it is related to artboard. At this time, there is no artboard in our file. I am stopping it for now. When we will see the artboards, I will definitely tell you guys about it. Otherwise, you guys will get confused. Let it come here. By the way, by the way, this This lock was not there even in 2015 because there were no artboards in it, right, so as far as artboards are concerned, or I think they were, I don’t know, I don’t remember, but it was definitely not there in CS6. In CS6, there were only one or two or four locks. Well, let me tell you the advantage of this artboard is that when we are working on multiple artboards, it should not automatically move to another artboard, it should not get nested. Problems arise sometimes that this artwork was here, it was on this artboard and then it is also in that artboard. It was found that when I removed it from one place, it got removed from the other place as well. So, this is a lock to prevent that nesting. So, right now you guys might get a little confused about this. Just forget it, there is no issue in this. We will look into it later. Now next, you have this lock all. By lock all, it means that this layer of yours has been totally locked and now you can neither move it nor create anything on it. You cannot do anything. It has become exactly like your Opacity means the background layer got locked in the same way and all the features above got disabled so let me tell you one more thing that all your locks are fine apart from this you can lower the opacity etc. in all of them but remember that if you lock all then all your things will also get disabled so I believe you guys must have understood locks very well next we have a very important thing given here see I am actually going from below and will keep coming up now this is we have blending modes in photo photoshop however this thing is also present in illustrator but it is used so much in photoshop on layers in fact apart from layers it is present in many places blending modes so if you understand blending mode here then you will also understand to a great extent wherever it is available in other tools so first of all so see one thing that if I am using this image When I am lowering the opacity, it is becoming more graduated, okay, but if I come from here and change its blending mode, dissolving is happening, so you can control this thing through these options, these are called blending modes, blending options are a different thing, these are blending modes, okay, so if I do dissolving option, there is no problem, yes, if I lower its opacity now, then something different will happen, this is a grainy, noisy result, you are getting the result, now what is happening, if I zoom it a lot and I make its opacity full, then you will understand now that as I lower the opacity, it will start turning off some random pixels, that means see, usually when we lower the opacity, the pixels start turning transparent, here it is not becoming transparent, here random pixels are turning off, so because of which you have a big A very textured kind of result is coming out directly if I zoom out to the right so this is [music] the results that will come out will be like this which is unpredictable because different results are coming with every colour in these yes let me tell you a few things like if you look here it is dark noon you can see here there is a line so this is a complete set which will always be giving you the response of dark colours or will be giving the result of dark colours as soon as I do this you have dark colours and light colours will get removed okay and there is a multiply in it which is being used very intensively if we want to remove white completely now for example I have closed this image and let’s open an image which is a little different this is an image I have taken and although it has transparent pixels I suppose I will make it white and merge it okay how I did the merge is a matter of later control This is a shortcut. No matter how many layers you want to merge, we don’t do it manually. I am doing this only to explain to you that this is such an image which has black and white artwork. There is no other color in it, it is only purely black or purely white. I am bringing this image to this image of mine. Now I have brought it here. Let’s zoom in and see. I want the white color to be completely removed from this image. So if you are thinking that I should select it with the magic wand. Well, it is possible that with the magic wand, you can remove all these contents, etc., and click on white and press delete, then yes it will be done. But sometimes there are some issues. Anyway, this can also be solved. But I want to tell you a very different technique than this. Sometimes we do too much work with these blending modes. Now remember that if you want the white color to disappear completely and the black color to remain purely here, you don’t have to do anything, you just go and delete the image. We have to multiply it [Music] [Music] That’s straight, like here there is a division which is responding to dark colors and this one is responding to light colors, so if I look at light colors, here the screen is at second number, see here the multiply is at second number and in this second portion the screen is at second number, if I zoom in then the black pure will disappear, the black will disappear completely and you will be left with white, so now if you zoom in and see it, then you have simply white color and the black color has completely disappeared, well I will give you a small tip that if I have kept any of your layers in normal mode right now, if you press control I or go to image go to adjustment and you have a given invert, remember this is control I which we were using for selection, it was inverse shift control I this is only for selection but if you do image adjustment and invert then the colors will be inverted, that is black which It will be converted to white and the white will be converted to black. As soon as I click on it or press Control I on the keyboard, okay, what happened is that all the white that was there became black and all the black that was there became white. Now if I screen it, the black will disappear and this design of ours is present in front of you and you must have seen such artworks many times where there is an image at the back and a design is made on top of the white or some times text is placed, right, so I believe you must have understood this and it is a very useful thing. In this, you do not need any selection etc. Many times you simply pick up an image with a sketch or sketch it yourself and it is on a white paper, you simply placed it on top of the image, Control I it means it will be inverted and by multiplying or screening you can show your artwork. If you screen then white will be visible, if you multiply then black will be visible. Now, the third portion in this is highlighting both of yours, meaning both are visible. There are light colours as well as dark colours, so if I overlay it, then look carefully, wherever I had black, my image became dark and wherever I had white, my image became bright from there. If you look very carefully, see this here very clearly you can see that it was black here but the image is visible, all the content inside is visible from everywhere, but what is happening is that where there is black, it becomes dark, where there was white, it becomes light. Now remember, as I said in the beginning, there are so many of these, you cannot predict what result will come with which colour. So, if I bring a coloured image here, then you will get completely different things. I am picking up this image and bringing it here and see this, if I lighten it, then the light result will be coming, if I darken it, then the dark result will be coming, but then again in multiply, a little different colour in burn and different in linear burn and different and so on, but usually what do we do? We are doing that once we click here and by pressing down the arrow keys from the keyboard we are seeing, where we get a satisfactory result we stop there, so there is a bit of guess work involved in this, definitely we cannot call it fixed values, fixed values ​​two three, as I told you guys what dissolve does, everyone knows that as soon as you bring down the opacity, random pixels will go off, you will get a result of a little texture type or green type, what will multiply do, it will make your whites disappear completely, it will keep the blacks and what will screen do, it will make all your blacks disappear and keep the whites in front, right, the third one that I told you is overlay, what is overlay doing that it is showing both, right, b b again, if now you have a colored image, then a little different result is coming, yes, it is a bit of a matter of trial and error, you can use where you like it, but as you practice, you will get a good sense of it and You must be using these blending modes very confidently in creating things. Okay, lastly, there is some difference given here. It is giving very opposite results. Exclusion and then Subtract and Divide. So again, different results must be coming with each color. I am not going to tell you anything or anyone about what result will come from which. I am just telling you that you will get an idea that when you use these, you will start understanding. Now the next thing you have here is Hue. Hue is the color. Look, what is happening is that your normal layer was on some blue tone. That’s right, it will give a blue color to the overall layer. But if you want exactly the same colors, then color it. Now this color will be useful. Many times, we can take its help in coloring black and white pictures. So, for example, if we talk about this layer only, I am taking a new layer from here and here I am wanting I want this apple to become some other color, that means it should become blue. Now I am doing a strange thing, I know, I took the blue color and I made my brush a little smaller and pressed it a little, okay Rat, and I simply started painting on it. Now obviously, you all know that if I color it like this, it will look very bad. So do a very simple thing, make a selection of it. Please, I quickly took this quick selection and started selecting this L. Coming to this layer, I am making the brush bigger, I hope you all remember the previous class well. Okay, so I have selected this L. I will take a little part out of the selection. So I took this selection and I simply came to this new layer and filled it with blue color. Now obviously, it looks so bad that I mean the L has disappeared. You can do this, come from here and put its color mode, which is the blending mode, on color. What will happen is that your L will become blue. Obviously we have many other ways to change its color, very good ways for now, just for my beginners students, this is enough for them, you can even do this, paint on a black and white picture and change its mode color, then it becomes color, so to a large extent you can get your work done with this, Luminous is a bit strange and but what is happening with Luminous is that the color which was below will keep coming, now no matter what your color is from above, for example, even if I make it red, I filled it red, nothing happened, only green came, because actually green was in it, it will keep bringing it in front of you by making it prominent, so anyway don’t worry about this, which you are not able to understand, there is no issue at least right now you can play with multiply screen overlay and color in the beginning, well, okay, so I hope you guys must have understood everything till here, now if you come to the top, then these are some very interesting things placed here. Sometimes it happens that we have a file which has a lot of layers. Now if we want to select or search any of the many layers, then we can do it from here. Like for example, you tell me the name. Let’s say I said layer. As soon as I typed that, I saw that the background layer disappeared. And here the file with the name of the layer is visible. And you can also search by name. Sometimes you can search by some effect, bevel or emoji applied or what, we will see later. But it can also be that you can see the kind that like the image is pixels or rar or your adjustment layer. Now obviously there was no adjustment layer in it. Type layer is not there either. Vector layer is not there either. So whatever it is, you can directly turn it on from here and that particular type of layer will start appearing to you. Remember, in Illustrator, I mean sorry [music] [music], if you want to delete it, then you simply click on it. Go and it will keep asking you if you check ‘Don’t show again’ then it won’t ask you again. I usually keep it on so that if I accidentally click here, my layer doesn’t disappear and I do n’t even know about it. So I always keep it on. The second thing is that if you have a lot of layers, you can create a group by selecting all of them together. What happens in a group is that it becomes a kind of folder. So let’s suppose I selected all these layers, clicked on it, pressed shift and clicked here, these will be selected together. Or you can also do this, I clicked here, pressed control and clicked here and skipped it. If I press control-G, then control-G will group. See, you have a group. The advantage of this group is that all the layers in it will remain in one place. I will also explain it to you in a new file. Let’s say I have this one. Oh sorry, I created it on the background layer itself. Let’s say I have this one and I want to create some more layers. I make circles of different colours on different layers, like this one, I took another layer and let’s take one of these, so don’t worry, I have taken my brush in a blurry way. Now, I selected all these three layers by holding down shift. This, I clicked here, holding down shift, clicked here and control. What is the advantage of this? Now, this is your complete group. You can move it or even copy it. See how the copy will be done. If you drag with alt, it will be copied. Just like in illustrator. And see here, the entire group has been copied. Similarly, not an empty group, you can actually copy the layer as well. In the same way, you will use this move tool with alt and you can move it. So, I hope you guys have understood till now. There are a few things here regarding the group. Let’s stop now. I will definitely explain you in the upcoming classes. That’s all for today’s class. I hope you guys liked it. And if you liked it, then Please like and if you have n’t subscribed then please subscribe thank you [music]

    By Amjad Izhar
    Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
    https://amjadizhar.blog

  • President Donald Trump’s address to Congress State of the Union: A Common Sense Revolution

    President Donald Trump’s address to Congress State of the Union: A Common Sense Revolution

    This source presents a transcript of a speech by the President of the United States to a joint session of Congress. The President touts the achievements of his administration’s first six weeks, claiming unprecedented success and a mandate from the people. He outlines numerous executive orders and policy changes, focusing on border security, economic revitalization through deregulation and tariffs, and a rollback of what he terms “woke” ideologies. The speech also includes recognition of individuals, proposed legislation, and foreign policy stances, particularly regarding Ukraine. The President calls for unity and action to further his agenda and secure America’s future.

    01
    Rainbow Dreams: A Coloring Journey for Kids Paperback – October 11, 2025

    State of the Union Address Study Guide

    Quiz

    1. What did the speaker say is a key focus to defeat inflation? The speaker states that rapidly reducing the cost of energy is a major focus in the fight to defeat inflation, emphasizing the need to reverse policies that hindered energy production.
    2. How did the speaker describe the state of the country’s southern border, and what actions were taken? The speaker describes the southern border as being in a state of national emergency due to illegal crossings and an invasion. To address this, the speaker declared a national emergency, deployed the military and border patrol, resulting in the lowest illegal border crossings ever recorded.
    3. What is the gold card, and what is its purpose? The “Gold Card” is a $5 million offering that allows successful job creators from around the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship, designed to attract talent, generate tax revenue, and stimulate job creation.
    4. What actions has the speaker taken regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies? The speaker states to have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the entire federal government, the private sector, and the military.
    5. What specific trade policy changes were announced, and what is their purpose? The speaker announced the implementation of reciprocal tariffs, where the U.S. will impose tariffs on other countries equal to those they charge on American goods, to create a fairer trade system and generate revenue for the U.S.
    6. What action is the speaker taking regarding the Panama Canal, and why? The speaker announced reclamation of the Panama Canal, stating that the previous agreement with Panama has been violated severely and that an American company is purchasing ports and other holdings around the canal.
    7. What actions has the speaker taken regarding crime, and why? The speaker signed an executive order mandating the death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer and supports stricter measures against repeat offenders. They aim to restore law and order, ensure fair justice, and protect law enforcement.
    8. What policies did the speaker rescind from the previous administration? The speaker ended all of Biden’s environmental restrictions, the electric vehicle mandate, and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization, and the UN Human Rights Council.
    9. What is the Laken Riley Act, and what prompted its creation? The Laken Riley Act mandates the detention of dangerous criminal aliens who threaten public safety, prompted by the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal alien.
    10. What are some examples of government spending the speaker intends to cut? The speaker intends to cut spending on programs such as free housing and cars for illegal aliens, diversity equity and inclusion scholarships, improving social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants, and promoting lgbtqi Plus in African nations.

    Essay Questions

    1. Analyze the speaker’s rhetorical strategies used to convey a sense of national renewal and progress. Provide specific examples from the text to support your claims.
    2. Critically evaluate the speaker’s claims regarding economic achievements and policies, considering potential counterarguments and alternative perspectives.
    3. Discuss the speaker’s approach to immigration and border security, examining the balance between national security concerns and humanitarian considerations.
    4. Assess the speaker’s vision for America’s role in international affairs, considering the implications of policies such as trade tariffs and relationships with other nations.
    5. Examine the speaker’s use of personal anecdotes and appeals to emotion, and discuss their effectiveness in connecting with the audience and promoting the speaker’s agenda.

    Glossary of Key Terms

    • Reciprocal Tariffs: A trade policy where a country imposes tariffs on goods imported from another country at the same rate that the other country tariffs its goods.
    • Laken Riley Act: Legislation mandating the detention of illegal aliens who commit crimes, named after Laken Riley, who was murdered by an undocumented immigrant.
    • Critical Race Theory: An academic framework that examines how race and racism have shaped legal systems and societal structures in the United States.
    • “Gold Card”: A path to citizenship for job creators who pay a fee and taxes.
    • Green New Deal: A proposed package of economic stimulus programs in the United States that aim to address climate change and economic inequality.
    • DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion): Policies and practices designed to promote representation and fair treatment of individuals from different backgrounds.
    • Open Border Policy: A border policy that eliminates restrictions and regulations on who can cross.
    • Sanctuary City: A city that has policies in place designed to not prosecute people solely for violating federal immigration laws.
    • Fentanyl: A powerful synthetic opioid that is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent, often associated with drug overdoses.
    • Cartels: Criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking and other illegal activities, often operating across international borders.

    Speech Analysis: Nationalism, Economy, and Security

    Okay, here is a briefing document summarizing the main themes and key ideas from the provided text.

    Briefing Document: Analysis of “01.pdf” (Speech Excerpts)

    Date: October 26, 2023

    Subject: Analysis of Excerpts from a Speech

    Source Material: “01.pdf” (excerpts)

    Executive Summary:

    The provided text appears to be excerpts from a speech, delivered to Congress, that is characterized by strong claims of success, a highly nationalistic tone, and a focus on reversing policies of the previous administration. The speaker frequently uses hyperbolic language and expresses deep animosity toward political opponents. Key themes include border security, economic nationalism, reversing “woke” policies, and a commitment to “draining the swamp” of government bureaucracy. The speech also contains numerous specific policy proposals, including tax cuts, reciprocal tariffs, and initiatives related to healthcare, education, and national security. The speaker frequently mentions specific individuals and expresses gratitude for their support.

    Key Themes and Ideas:

    • Self-Congratulatory Tone and Claims of Unprecedented Success: The speaker repeatedly emphasizes the achievements of their administration in a short period of time, claiming they have surpassed the accomplishments of previous administrations.
    • “We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years and we are just getting started.”
    • “In fact it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency it’s our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation by many”
    • Reversal of Previous Administration’s Policies: A major focus is on dismantling the policies enacted by the previous administration (referred to as “Joe Biden, the worst president in American history”), particularly concerning energy, immigration, and environmental regulations.
    • “We ended all of Biden’s environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable and importantly we ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate saving our Auto Workers and companies from economic destruction.”
    • “Under Joe Biden the worst president in American history there were hundred of thousands of illegal Crossings a month and virtually all of them including murderers drug dealers gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums were released into our country who would want to do that”
    • Economic Nationalism and Protectionism: The speech advocates for policies aimed at bolstering the American economy, including tax cuts, reciprocal tariffs, and incentives for domestic manufacturing. There’s a strong emphasis on bringing jobs and investment back to the United States.
    • “To unshackle our economy I have directed that for every one new regulation 10 old regulations must be eliminated just like I did in my very successful first and in that first term we set records on ending unnecessary rules and regulations like no other president had done before”
    • “So on April 2nd reciprocal tariffs kick in and whatever they tariff us other countries we will tariff them that’s reciprocal back and forth whatever they tax us we will tax them”
    • Immigration and Border Security: The speaker expresses strong views on border security, framing it as a national emergency and emphasizing the need to stop illegal immigration. The speech includes anecdotes about crimes committed by illegal immigrants to underscore the urgency of the issue.
    • “Within hours of taking the oath of office I declared a National Emergency on our Southern border and I deployed the US Military and border patrol to repel the invasion of our country and what a job they’ve done as a result illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded ever they heard my words and they chose not to come much easier that way”
    • “That’s why the very first bill I signed into law as your 47th president mandates the Detention of all dangerous criminal aliens who threaten Public Safety it’s very strong powerful act it’s called the lakan Riley act”
    • Combating “Wokeness” and Cultural Issues: The speech explicitly targets “woke” ideologies, particularly in schools, the military, and government. The speaker announces policies to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, ban critical race theory, and define gender as binary.
    • “Last we’ve Ended the tyranny of so-called diversity equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military and our country will be woke no longer”
    • “We have removed the poison of critical race Theory from our public schools and I signed an order making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders male and female”
    • “Draining the Swamp” and Government Efficiency: The speaker promises to reduce government waste, fraud, and inefficiency, and to hold bureaucrats accountable. A “Department of Government Efficiency,” headed by Elon Musk, is mentioned.
    • “The government accountability office federal government office has estimated annual fraud of over $500 billion in our nation and we are working very hard to stop it we’re going to we’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on”
    • “We will reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy and we will restore true democracy to America again and any federal bureaucrat who resists this change will be removed from office [Applause] immediately because we are draining the swamp it’s very simple and the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over”
    • Foreign Policy: The speech touches on various foreign policy issues, including the conflict in Ukraine, relations with Russia, the Abraham Accords, and the apprehension of terrorists. It also mentions reclaiming the Panama Canal and potentially annexing Greenland.
    • “To further enhance our national security my Administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal and we’ve already started doing it”
    • “I am also working tirelessly to end the Savage conflict in Ukraine millions of ukrainians and Russians have been needlessly killed or wounded in this horrific and brutal conflict with no end in sight”
    • Invocation of God and American Exceptionalism: The speech concludes with a strong appeal to American exceptionalism, emphasizing the country’s historical achievements and its potential for future greatness, with repeated references to divine guidance.
    • “From the Patriots of Lexington and Concord to the heroes of Gettysburg and Normandy…Americans have always been the people who defied all Arts transcended all dangers made the most extraordinary sacrifices and did whatever it took to defend our children our country and our freedom”
    • “With God’s help over the next four years we are going to lead this nation even higher and we are going to forge the freest most advanced most dynamic IC and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth”

    Notable Policy Proposals:

    • Tax Cuts: Permanent income tax cuts, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security benefits for seniors.
    • “Gold Card” for Citizenship: Allowing wealthy individuals to purchase a path to US citizenship for $5 million.
    • Reciprocal Tariffs: Imposing tariffs on countries that tax American goods.
    • Laken Riley Act: Mandating the detention of dangerous criminal aliens.
    • Renaming of Gulf of Mexico: Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America”.
    • Death Penalty for Murdering Police Officers: Requiring a mandatory death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer.
    • Resurrect American Ship Building Industry: Creating a new office of ship building in the White House and offer special tax incentives.

    Overall Impression:

    The speech reflects a populist, nationalist ideology with a strong emphasis on traditional values and a rejection of progressive policies. The speaker seeks to rally support by appealing to patriotism, fear of external threats (both economic and physical), and resentment towards political elites and bureaucratic structures. The numerous mentions of individuals suggest a focus on personal relationships and loyalty. The reliability of the claims made in the speech would require further verification.

    America’s Resurgence: Policy and Priorities

    Frequently Asked Questions

    • What is the central theme of the speech, and what actions have been taken to support this theme? The central theme is the resurgence of America, marked by a return to common sense, safety, optimism, and wealth. The speaker claims to have initiated this comeback through swift actions, including signing numerous executive orders, declaring a national emergency on the southern border to combat illegal immigration, and rolling back policies from the previous administration, deemed a disaster, particularly in areas of energy and environmental regulation.
    • How is the current administration addressing economic issues, specifically inflation and energy costs? The administration aims to rescue the economy and provide immediate relief to working families by combating inflation and lowering energy costs. The speech cites measures such as opening up power plants, promoting domestic energy production through initiatives like “drill baby drill,” and working on a large natural gas pipeline in Alaska. The administration also established a Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate wasteful spending, targeting programs perceived as fraudulent or unnecessary, such as DEI scholarships and transgender related medical research.
    • What changes have been made regarding federal regulations and hiring practices? The administration has imposed a freeze on federal hiring, new regulations, and foreign aid. For every new regulation, ten old ones are to be eliminated, mirroring past efforts to reduce unnecessary rules. Federal workers have been ordered to return to the office or face removal. There is an emphasis on merit-based hiring and promotion, ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies across the federal government.
    • What are the administration’s views on border security and immigration policies? Border security is a top priority, with the declaration of a National Emergency on the Southern border and the deployment of the military and border patrol. The administration claims a significant decrease in illegal border crossings compared to the previous administration. A key focus is on detaining dangerous criminal aliens, exemplified by the “Laken Riley Act,” and removing those who entered the country under what the speaker refers to as the “open border policies” of the previous administration.
    • What actions have been taken concerning social and cultural issues, particularly related to gender and education? The administration has taken several actions to reverse “woke” ideologies. English has been declared the official language, diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have been ended, and the poison of critical race theory has been removed from public schools. The official policy of the government is that there are only two genders, and there are plans to ban men from playing in women’s sports and criminalize sex changes on children.
    • What are the key components of the proposed tax and trade policies? The administration is seeking tax cuts for everyone, including permanent income tax cuts, no tax on tips, overtime, or Social Security benefits. There is a call to make interest payments on car loans tax deductible, but only if the car is made in America. A reciprocal tariff policy will be implemented, where the United States will tariff countries at the same rate they tariff the US.
    • How does the administration plan to improve national security and foreign policy? Plans to reclaim the Panama Canal and support Greenland’s right to determine its own future are in the works. A golden dome missile defense shield is proposed to protect the homeland. Military strength will be boosted by resurrecting the American shipbuilding industry. The administration also aims to apprehend terrorists and negotiate peace in conflicts like the one in Ukraine.
    • What initiatives are being launched to protect children and address health concerns? The administration is focused on protecting children from toxic ideologies in schools, banning the sexual mutilation of youth, and promoting the idea that children are perfect the way God made them. A presidential commission is tasked with making America healthy again, aiming to remove toxins from the environment and food supply. The issue of rising rates of childhood cancer is being addressed.

    Economic Recovery Plan: Energy, Efficiency, and Tax Cuts

    In his address, the speaker discusses the economy and taxes, stating that his administration inherited an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare, but is fighting to reverse the damage and make America affordable again.

    The speaker outlines several approaches to stimulating the economy:

    • Energy Production The speaker declared a national energy emergency and authorized the most talented team to increase energy production. The speaker’s administration is also working on a natural gas pipeline in Alaska and will take action to expand production of critical minerals and rare earths in the USA.
    • Department of Government Efficiency The speaker created a new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, to identify and eliminate wasteful spending. They have already identified billions of dollars in wasteful spending and terminated various scams. The speaker aims to cut fraud, waste, and theft to defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect seniors, and put more money in the pockets of American families.
    • Gold Card The speaker plans to introduce a “gold card” for $5 million, offering a path to US citizenship for successful job creators from around the world, who will be required to pay taxes in the US.
    • Tax Cuts The speaker calls on Congress to pass tax cuts for everyone, seeking permanent income tax cuts across the board. He proposes no tax on tips, overtime, or Social Security benefits for seniors. Additionally, he suggests making interest payments on car loans tax deductible, but only if the car is made in America.
    • Tariffs Beginning April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs will be implemented, meaning whatever other countries tariff the US, the US will tariff them. The speaker has also imposed a 25% tariff on foreign aluminum, copper, lumber, and steel.
    • Investment in America Due to “America First policies,” there has been $1.7 trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks.
    • Reclaiming the Panama Canal The speaker’s administration is reclaiming the Panama Canal. A large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal.

    Securing the Border: A National Emergency and Immigration Crackdown

    The speaker addresses border security and immigration, stating that within hours of taking office, a national emergency was declared on the southern border, and the U.S. military and border patrol were deployed to repel the invasion of the country. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were the lowest ever recorded.

    Key points and actions related to border security and immigration as described in the address:

    • National Emergency and Military Deployment: A national emergency was declared at the southern border, leading to the deployment of the U.S. military and border patrol.
    • Lowest Illegal Border Crossings: Illegal border crossings decreased to the lowest levels ever recorded.
    • Criticism of Past Administration: Under Joe Biden, there were hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month, with individuals released into the country.
    • Detention of Criminal Aliens: The first bill signed into law mandates the detention of all dangerous criminal aliens who threaten public safety, known as the Laken Riley Act.
    • Border and Immigration Crackdown: The administration launched a sweeping border and immigration crackdown, achieving the lowest numbers of illegal border crossings ever recorded.
    • Migrant Occupation: The speaker claims Joe Biden flew illegal aliens over the borders to overwhelm schools, hospitals, and communities, leading to the destruction of beautiful towns.
    • Foreign Terrorist Organizations: The Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, along with MS13 and Mexican drug cartels, have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
    • Deportation Operation: Congress has been sent a detailed funding request to eliminate threats to the homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history.
    • Mexico’s Role: The speaker notes that Mexican authorities handed over 29 of the biggest cartel leaders, but he emphasizes the need for Mexico and Canada to do much more to stop the flow of fentanyl and drugs into the U.S..
    • Impact of Open Border Policies: Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States, including murderers, human traffickers, and gang members, due to open border policies.

    Speaker’s Address on Foreign Policy Initiatives

    The speaker’s address includes several points related to foreign policy:

    • Paris Climate Accord, World Health Organization, and UN Human Rights Council: The speaker withdrew from the unfair Paris Climate Accord, the corrupt World Health Organization, and the anti-American UN Human Rights Council.
    • Gulf of America: The speaker renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
    • Natural Gas Pipeline in Alaska: The speaker’s administration is working on a gigantic natural gas pipeline in Alaska, with Japan, South Korea, and other nations as potential investment partners.
    • Tariffs and Trade: On April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs will take effect, so that whatever other countries tariff the U.S., the U.S. will tariff them. The speaker states that the U.S. has been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on Earth and that this will no longer be allowed.
    • Investment in America: Thanks to “America First policies,” there has been $1.7 trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks.
    • Panama Canal: The speaker’s administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, which was given away by the Carter Administration for $1, but that agreement has been severely violated.
    • Greenland: The speaker strongly supports Greenland’s right to determine its own future and welcomes it into the United States of America if it chooses. The speaker states that the U.S. needs Greenland for National Security and even International Security.
    • Radical Islamic Terrorism: The speaker announced the apprehension of the top terrorist responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing in Afghanistan.
    • Abraham Accords: In the Middle East, the speaker aims to build on the Abraham Accords to create a more peaceful and prosperous future for the entire region.
    • Conflict in Ukraine: The speaker is working to end the conflict in Ukraine, stating that millions of Ukrainians and Russians have been needlessly killed or wounded. The speaker states that he received a letter from President Zalinski of Ukraine indicating that Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. The speaker also indicated that they have received strong signals from Russia that they are ready for peace.

    Law and Order Address: Justice, Borders, and Cartels

    The speaker’s address includes several points related to law and order.

    Justice System and Law Enforcement:

    • The speaker states that in recent years, the justice system has been turned upside down by radical left lunatics, with many jurisdictions ceasing to enforce the law against dangerous repeat offenders while weaponizing law enforcement against political opponents.
    • The speaker claims his administration has acted swiftly and decisively to restore fair, equal, and partial justice under the Constitutional rule of law, starting at the FBI and the DOJ.
    • The speaker expresses support for police officers, stating they deserve support, protection, and respect, and that his administration is giving it to them.
    • An executive order has already been signed requiring a mandatory death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer, and Congress is being asked to pass that policy into permanent law. The speaker is also asking for a new crime bill getting tough on repeat offenders while enhancing protections for America’s police officers so they can do their jobs without fear of their lives being totally destroyed.

    Border Security and Immigration:

    • The speaker declared a national emergency on the southern border and deployed the U.S. Military and border patrol to repel the invasion of the country.
    • The speaker states that his administration has launched a sweeping border and immigration crackdown.
    • The speaker notes that Mexican authorities handed over 29 of the biggest cartel leaders.
    • The speaker sent Congress a detailed funding request laying out exactly how the U.S. will eliminate threats to the homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history.

    Combating Criminal Organizations:

    • The Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, along with MS13 and Mexican drug cartels, have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
    • The speaker aims to round up every last one of these terrorists, forcibly remove them from the country, or, if they’re too dangerous, put them in jail and have them stand trial in the U.S.
    • The territory to the immediate south of the U.S. border is now dominated entirely by criminal cartels that murder, rape, torture, and exercise total control. The speaker says the cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels.
    • Five nights ago, Mexican authorities handed over 29 of the biggest cartel leaders in their country to the U.S. because of tariff policies being imposed on them.

    Addressing Social Issues: Education, Gender, and Health Policies

    The speaker’s address touches on several social issues, including education, gender, and health.

    Key social issues discussed in the address:

    • English as the Official Language: An order was signed making English the official language of the United States.
    • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): The speaker claims to have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the federal government, the private sector, and the military. The speaker believes that individuals should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.
    • Critical Race Theory: The speaker claims to have removed the poison of critical race theory from public schools.
    • Gender Identity:
    • An order was signed making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.
    • An executive order was signed to ban men from playing in women’s sports. Schools will kick men off the girls’ team, or they will lose all federal funding.
    • Wasteful Spending:
    • The speaker mentions wasteful spending, including “$45 million for diversity equity and inclusion Scholarships in Burma” and “$8 million to promote lgbtqi Plus in the African nation of luto”.
    • The speaker claims to have swiftly terminated these scams.
    • Wokeness: The speaker states that wokeness is being removed from schools, the military, and society.
    • Child Health and Safety:
    • The speaker is asking Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body.
    • The speaker references a presidential commission to make America healthy again, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with the goal of getting toxins out of the environment and poisons out of the food supply to keep children healthy and strong.
    • The speaker discusses increasing rates of child cancer and autism.
    • Secret Social Transitioning in Schools: The speaker references an executive order banning public schools from indoctrinating children with transgender ideology and cutting off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of youth.
    President Donald Trump’s address to Congress [FULL SPEECH]

    The Original Text

    Mr Speaker the president of the United States the only guy I wait for [Applause] is Mr President terrible [Applause] w thank you for [Applause] [Applause] for coming [Applause] w us w w [Applause] thank you thank you very much thank you very much it’s great honor thank you very much speaker Johnson vice president Vance the first lady of the United States members of the United States Congress thank you very much and to my fellow citizens America is back six weeks ago I stood beneath the Dome of this capital and proclaimed the dawn of the golden age of America from that moment on it has been nothing but Swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country we have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years and we are just getting started I returned to this chamber tonight to report that America’s momentum is back our spirit is back our pride is back our confidence is back and the American dream is surging bigger and better than ever before the American dream is Unstoppable and our country is on the verge of a comeback the likes of which the world has never witnessed and perhaps will never witness again there never been anything like it the presidential election of November 5th was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades we won all seven swing States giving us an electoral college victory of 312 votes we won the popular vote by big numbers and won counties in our [Applause] country and one counties in our country 2,700 to 525 on a map that reads almost completely red for Republican now for the first time in modern history more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction in fact it’s an astonishing record 27 point swing the most ever likewise small business optimism so it’s single largest one month gain ever recorded a 41o jump members are directed to uphold and maintain theorum in the house and to cease any further disruptions that’s your warning members are engaging in willful in continuing breach of the Quorum and the chair is prepared to direct the sergeant-at-arms to restore order to the Joint session Mr Green take your seat take your seat sir take your seat finding that members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum the chair now directs the at Arms to restore order remove this gentleman from the chamber [Music] [Music] members are directed to uphold and maintain the Quorum in the house Mr President you continue thank you over the past 6 weeks I have signed nearly 100 executive orders and taken more than 400 executive actions a record to restore Common Sense safety optimism and wealth all across our wonderful land the people elected me to do the job and I’m doing it in in fact it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency it’s our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation by many and what makes it even more impressive is that do you know who number two is George Washington how about that how about I don’t know about that list but but we’ll take it within hours of taking the oath of office I declared a National Emergency on our Southern border and I deployed the US Military and border patrol to repel the invasion of our country and what a job they’ve done as a result illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded ever they heard my words and they chose not to come much easier that way in comparison under Joe Biden the worst president in American history there were hundred of thousands of illegal Crossings a month and virtually all of them including murderers drug dealers gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums were released into our country who would want to do that this is my fifth such speech to Congress and once again I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud nothing I can do I could find a cure to the most devastating disease a disease that would wipe out entire nations or announce the answers to the greatest economy and history or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded and these people sitting right here will not clap will not stand and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements they won’t do it no matter what five five times I’ve been up here it’s very sad and it just shouldn’t be this way so Democrats sitting before me for just this one night why not join us in celebrating so many incredible wins for America for the good of our nation let’s work together and let’s truly make America great again every day my Administration is fighting to deliver the change America needs to bring a future that America deserves and we’re doing it this is a time for Big Dreams and bold action upon taking office I imposed an immediate freeze on all federal hiring a freeze on all new federal regulations and a freeze on all foreign aid I terminated the ridiculous green news scam I withdrew from the unfair Paris climate Accord which was costing us trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying I withdrew from the corrupt World Health Organization and I also withdrew from the anti-American UN Human Rights Council we ended all of Biden’s environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable and importantly we ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate saving our Auto Workers and companies from economic destruction to unshackle our economy I have directed that for every one new regulation 10 old regulations must be eliminated just like I did in my very successful first and in that first term we set records on ending unnecessary rules and regulations like no other president had done before we ordered all federal workers to return to the office they will either show up for work in person or be removed from their job and we have ended weaponized government where as an example a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent like me how did that work out not too not too good and I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America it’s back and two days ago I signed an order making English the official language of the United States States of America I renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and likewise I renamed for a great President William mck Ley Mount McKinley again beautiful last we love Al last We’ve Ended the tyranny of so-called diversity equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military and our country will be woke no longer we believe that whether you are a doctor an accountant a lawyer or an heir traffic controller you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence not race or gender very important you should be hired based on Merit and the Supreme Court in A Brave and very powerful decision has allowed us to do so thank you thank you very much we have removed the poison of critical race Theory from our public schools and I signed an order making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders male and female I also signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women’s sports three years ago pton McNab was an Allstar High School athlete one of the best preparing for a future in college sports but when her girls volleyball match was invaded by a male he smashed the ball so hard in Payton’s face causing traumatic brain injury partially paralyzing her right side and ending her athletic career it was a shot like she’s never seen before she’s never seen anything like it Payton is here tonight in the gallery and pton from now on schools will kick the men off the girls team or they will lose all federal funding and if you really want to see numbers just take a look at what happened in the woman’s boxing weightlifting track and field swimming or cycling where a male recently finished a longdistance race 5 hours and 14 minutes ahead of a woman for a new record by 5 hours broke the record by 5 hours it’s demeaning for women and it’s very bad for our country we’re not going to put up with it any longer what I have just described is only a small fraction of the Common Sense Revolution that is now because of us sweeping the entire world Common Sense has become a common theme and we will never go back never never going to let that happen among my very highest priorities is to rescue our economy and get dramatic and immediate relief to Working Families as you know we inherited from the last Administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare their policies drove up Energy prices pushed up grocery costs and drove the necessities of life Out Of Reach for millions and millions of Americans they’ve never had anything like it we suffered the worst inflation in 48 years but perhaps even in the history hist of our country they’re not sure as president I’m fighting every day to reverse this damage and make America affordable again Joe Biden is especially let the price of eggs get out of control the egg prices out of control and we’re working hard to get it back down secretary do a good job on that you inherited a total mess from the previous administration do a good job a major focus of our fight to defeat inflation is rapidly reducing the cost of energy the previous administration cut the number of new oil and gas leases by 95% slowed pipeline construction to a halt and closed more than 100 power plants we are opening up many of those power plants right now and frankly we have never seen anything like it that’s why on my first day in office I declared a national Energy emergency as you’ve heard me say many times we have more Liquid Gold under our feet than any Nation on Earth and by far and now I fully authorize the most talented team ever assembled to go and get it it’s called drill baby drill my Administration is also working on a gigantic natural gas pipeline in Alaska among the largest in the world where Japan South Korea and other nations want to be our partner with Investments of trillions of dollars each there’s never been anything like that one it will be truly spectacular it’s all set to go the permitting has got and later this week I will also take historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare Earths here in the USA to further combat inflation we will not only be reducing the cost of energy but we’ll be ending the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars and to that end I have created the brand new Department of government efficiency go perhaps you’ve heard of it perhaps which is headed by Elon Musk who is in the gallery tonight thank you Elon he’s working very hard he didn’t need this he didn’t need this thank you very much we app appreciate it everybody here even this side appreciates it I believe they just don’t want to admit that just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified 22 billion doar from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens $45 million for diversity equity and inclusion Scholarships in Burma $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants nobody knows what that is $8 million to promote lgbtqi Plus in the African nation of luto which nobody has ever heard of $60 million for indigenous peoples and afro Colombian empowerment in central America $60 million $8 million for making mice transgender this is real $32 million for a left-wing propaganda operation in mova $10 million for male circumcision in mosambique 20 million dollar for the Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East it’s a program $20 million for a program $1.9 billion to recently created decarbonization of homes committee headed up and we know she’s involved just at the last moment the money was passed over by a woman named Stacy Abrams have you ever heard of her a $3.5 million Consulting contract for lavish fish monitoring $1.5 million for voter confidence in Liberia $14 million for social cohesion in Mali $59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City he’s a real estate developer he’s done very well $250,000 to increase vegan local climate action innovation in Zambia $42 million for social and behavior change in Uganda $14 million for improving public procurement in Serbia $47 million for improving learning outcomes in Asia Asia is doing very well with learning we don’t know what we’re doing should use it ourselves now1 million for Dei contracts at the Department of Education the most ever paid nothing even like it under the Trump Administration all of these scams and they’re far worse but I didn’t think it was appropriate to talk about them they’re so bad many more have been found out and exposed and swiftly terminated by a group of very intelligent mostly young people headed up by Elon and we appreciate it we found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and we’ve taken back the money and reduced our debt to fight inflation and other things taking back a lot of that money we got it just in time this is just the beginning the government accountability office federal government office has estimated annual fraud of over $500 billion in our nation and we are working very hard to stop it we’re going to we’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on Believe It or Not government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old it lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119 I don’t know any of them I know some people that are rather elderly but not quite that elderly 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149 and money is being paid to many of them and we’re searching right now fact Pam good luck good luck you’re going to find it with a lot of money is paid out to people because it just keeps getting paid and paid and nobody does and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159 and over 130,000 people according to the Social Security databases are age over 160 years old we have a healthier country than I thought Bobby including to finish 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229 one person between the age of 240 and 249 and one person is listed at 360 years of age more than 100 years more than a 100 years older than our country but we’re going to find out where that money is going and it’s not going to be pretty by slashing all of the fraud waste and theft we can find we will defeat inflation bring down mortgage rates lower car payment ments and grocery prices protect our seniors and put more money in the pockets of American families and today interest rates took a beautiful Drop big beautiful Drop it’s about time and in the near future I want to to do what has not been done in 24 years balance the federal budget we’re going to balance it with that goal in mind we have developed in great detail what we are calling the gold card which goes on sale very very soon for $5 million we will allow the most successful job creating people from all over the world to buy a path to US citizenship it’s like the green card but better and more sophisticated and these people will have to pay tax in our country they won’t have to pay tax from where they came the money that they’ve made you wouldn’t want to do that but then have to pay tax create jobs they’ll also be taking people out of colleges and paying for them so that we can keep them in our country instead of having them be being forced out number one at the top school as an example being forced out and not being allowed to stay and create tremendous numbers of jobs and great success for a company out there so while we take out the criminals killers traffickers and child Predators who are allowed to enter our country under the open border policy of these people the Democrats the Biden Administration the open border insane policies that you’ve allowed to destroy our country we will now bring in brilliant hardworking job creating people they’re going to pay a lot of money and we’re going to reduce our debt with that money Americans have given us a mandate for bold and profound change for nearly 100 years the federal bureaucracy has grown until it has crushed our freedoms ballooned our deficits and held back America’s potential in every possible way the nation founded by pioneers and Risk Takers now drowns under millions and millions of pages of regulations and debt approvals that should take 10 days to get instead take 10 years 15 years and even 20 years before you rejected meanwhile we have hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have not been showing up to work my Administration will reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy and we will restore true democracy to America again and any federal bureaucrat who resists this change will be removed from office [Applause] immediately because we are draining the swamp it’s very simple and the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over and the next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody they’re in there they’re waiting for you to vote and I’m sure that the people on my right I don’t mean the Republican right but my right right here I’m sure you’re going to vote for those tax cuts because otherwise I don’t believe the people will ever vote you into office so I’m doing you a big favor by telling you that but I know this group is going to be voting for the tax thank you it’s a very very big part of our plan we had tremendous success in our first term with it a very big part of our plan we’re seeking permanent income tax cuts all across the board and to get urgently needed relief to Americans hit especially hard by inflation I’m calling for no tax on tips no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security benefits for our great seniors good J and I also want to make interest payments on car loans tax deductible but only if the car is made in America and by the way we’re going to have growth in the Auto industry like nobody’s ever seen plants are opening up all over the place deals are being made never seen that’s a combination of the election win and tariffs it’s a beautiful word isn’t it that along with our other policies will allow our Auto industry to absolutely boom it’s going to Boom spoke to the majors today all three the top people and they’re so excited in fact already numerous car companies have announced that they will be building massive automobile plants in America with Honda just announcing a new plant in Indiana one of the largest anywhere in the world and this has taken place since our great Victory on November 5th a date which was will hopefully go down as one of the most important in the history of our country in addition as part of our tax cuts we want to cut taxes on domestic production and all manufacturing and just as we did before we will provide 100% expensing it will be retroactive to January 20th 2025 and it was one of the main reasons why our tax cuts were so successful in our first term giving us the most successful economy in the history of our country first term we had a great first term if you don’t make your product in America however under the Trump Administration you will pay a tariff and in some cases is a rather large one other countries have used tariffs against us for decades and now it’s our turn to start using them against those other countries on average the European Union China Brazil India Mexico and Canada have you heard of them and countless other nations charge us tremendously higher tariffs than we charge them it’s very unfair India charges us Auto tariffs higher than 100% China’s average tariff on our products is twice twice what we charge them and South Korea’s average tariff is four times higher think of that four times higher and we give so much help militarily and in so many other ways to South Korea but that’s what happens this is happening by friend and foe this system is not fair to the United States and never was and so on April 2nd I wanted to make it April 1st but I didn’t want to be accused of April Fool’s Day that’s what that’s not just one day was cost us a lot of money but we’re going to do it in April I’m a very superstitious person April 2nd reciprocal tariffs kick in and whatever they tariff us other countries we will tariff them that’s reciprocal back and forth whatever they tax us we will tax them if they do not monetary tariffs to keep us out of their market then we will do non-monetary barriers to keep them out of our Market there’s a lot of that too they don’t even allow us in their Market we will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before I did it with China and I did it with others and the Biden Administration couldn’t do anything about it because it was so much money they couldn’t do anything about it we have been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on Earth and we will not let that happen any [Applause] longer much has been said over the last three months about Mexico and Canada but we have very large deficits with both of them but even more importantly they’ve allowed fentol to come into our country at levels never seen before killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young beautiful people destroying families nobody’s ever seen anything like it they are in effect receiving subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars we pay subsidies to Canada and to Mexico of hundreds of billions of dollars and the United States will not be doing that any longer we’re not going to do it any longer thanks to our America First policies we’re putting into place we have had $1.7 trillion dollar of new investment in America in just the past few weeks the combination of the election and our economic policies that people of SoftBank one of the most brilliant anywhere in the world announced a $200 billion investment open Ai and Oracle Larry Ellison announced $500 billion investment which they wouldn’t have done if Kamala had won Apple announced $500 billion investment Tim Cook called me he said I cannot spend it fast enough it’s going to be much higher than that I believe they’ll be building their plants here instead of in China and just yesterday Taiwan semiconductor the biggest in the world most powerful in the world has a tremendous amount 97% of the market announced a $165 billion investment to build the most powerful chips on earth right here in the USA and we’re not giving them any money your chips sack is a horrible horrible thing we give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn’t mean a thing they take our money and they don’t spend it all that meant to them were giving them no money all that was important to them was they didn’t want to pay the Tariff so they came in their building and many other companies are coming we don’t have to give them money we just want to protect our businesses and our people and they will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America so it’s very amazing you should get rid of the chip act and whatever is left over Mr Speaker you should use it to reduce debt or any other reason you want to our new trade policy will also be great for the American Farmer I love the farmer who will now be selling into our home Market the USA because nobody is going to be able to compete with you because those goods that come in from other comp countries and companies they’re un really really in a bad position in so many different ways they’re uninspected they may be very dirty and disgusting and they come in and they pour in and they hurt our American farmers the tariffs will go on Agricultural Product coming into America and our our Farmers starting on April 2nd it may be a little bit of an adjustment period we had that before when I made the deal with China $50 billion of purchases and I said just bear with me and they did they did probably have to bear with me again and this will be even better that was great the problem with it was that Biden didn’t enforce it he didn’t enforce it $50 billion of purchases and we would were doing great but Biden did not enforce it and it hurt our Farmers but our farmers are going to have a field day right now so to our Farmers have a lot of fun I love you too I love you too all going to happen and I have also imposed a 25% tariff on forign aluminum copper Lumber and steel because if we don’t have as an example steel and lots of other things we don’t have a military and frankly won’t have we just won’t have a country very long here today is a proud American Steel worker fantastic person from decada Alabama Jeff dard has been working at the same steel plant for 27 years in a job that has allowed him to serve as the captain of his local volunteer fire department raised seven children with his beautiful wife Nicole and over the years provide a loving home for more than 40 foster children so great Jeff thank you thank you Jeff stories like Jeffs remind us that tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs they’re about protecting the soul of our country tariffs are about making America Rich again and making America great again and it’s happening and it will happen rather quickly there’ll be a little disturbance but we’re okay with that it won’t be much no you’re not oh and look and look where Biden took us very low the lowest we’ve ever been Jeff I want to thank you very much and I also want to recognize another person who has devoted herself to Foster Care Community she worked so hard on it a very loving person our magnificent first lady of the United States melania’s work has yielded incredible results helping prepare our nation’s Future Leaders as they enter the workforce our first lady is joined by two impressive young women very impressive Haley Ferguson who benefited from the first ladies fostering the future initiative and is poised to complete her education and become a teacher and Ellison Barry who became a victim of an illicit deep fake image produced by a pier with Ellison’s help the Senate just passed the take it down act and this is so important thank you very much John John th thank you stand up John thank you John thank you all very much thank you and thank you to John Thun and the Senate great job to criminalize the publication of such images online is terrible terrible thing and once it passes the house I look forward to signing that bill into law thank you and I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind cuz nobody gets treated worse than I do on line nobody that’s great thank you very much to the Senate thank you but if we truly care about protecting Americans children no step is more crucial than securing America’s borders over the past four years 21 million people poured into the United States many of them were murderers human traffickers gang members and other criminals from the streets of dangerous cities all throughout the world because of Joe Biden’s insane and very dangerous open border policies they are now strongly embedded in our country but we are getting them out and getting them out [Applause] fast and I want to thank Tom homman and Christie I want to thank you and Paul of border patrol I want to thank you what a job they’ve all done everybody border patrol ice law enforcement and general is incredible we have to take care of our law enforcement have to last year a brilliant 22-year-old nursing student named leak and Riley the best in her class admired by everybody went out for a jog on the campus of the University of Georgia that morning Laken was viciously attacked assaulted beaten brutalized and horrifically murdered Laken was stolen from us by a Savage illegal alien gang member who was arrested while trespassing across Biden’s open Southern border and then set loose into the United States under the heartless policies of that failed Administration it was indeed a failed Administration he had then been arrested and released in a Democrat run Sanctuary City a disaster before ending the life of this beautiful young angel with us this evening are lakan’s beloved mother Allison and her sister Lauren last year I told laken’s grieving parents that we would ensure their daughter would not have died in vain that’s why the very first bill I signed into law as your 47th president mandates the Detention of all dangerous criminal aliens who threaten Public Safety it’s very strong powerful act it’s called the lakan Riley act so Allison and Laura America will never ever forget our beautiful leak hope [Applause] [Applause] Riley thank you very much since taking office my Administration has launched the sweeping border and immigration Crackdown in American history and we quickly achieve the lowest numbers of illegal border crosses ever recorded thank you the media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation we must have legislation to secure the Border but it turned out that all we really needed was a new president thank you Joe Biden didn’t just open our borders he flew illegal aliens over them to overwhelm our schools hospitals and communities throughout the country entire towns like Aurora Colorado and Springfield Ohio buckled under the weight of the migrant occupation and corruption like nobody’s ever seen before beautiful towns destroyed now just as I promised in my inaugural address we are achieving the great liberation of America but there still is much work to be done here tonight is a woman I have gotten to know Alexis Nary from Houston wonderful woman last June Alexis’s 12-year-old daughter her precious Joselyn walked to a nearby convenience store she was kidnapped tied up assaulted for two hours under a bridge and horrifically murdered arrested and charge with this heinous crime are two illegal alien monsters from Venezuela released into America by the last Administration through their ridiculous open border the death of this beautiful 12-year-old girl and the agony of her mother and family touched our entire nation greatly Alexis I promised that we would always remember your daughter your magnificent daughter and earlier tonight I signed an order keeping my word to you one thing I have learned about Joselyn is that she loved animals so much she loved nature across Galveston Bay from where Joselyn lived in Houston you will find a magnificent National Wildlife Refuge a pristine peaceful 34,000 acre Sanctuary for all of God’s creatures on the edge of the Gulf of America Alexis moments ago I formerly renamed that refuge in loving memory of your beautiful daughter Joselyn so Mr Vice President if you would May I have the order [Applause] [Applause] thank you very much all three Savages charged with Joselyn and leak’s murders were members of the Venezuelan prison gang the toughest gang they say in the world known as trendy aragua two weeks ago I officially designated this gang along with MS13 and the bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations they are now officially in the same category as Isis and that’s not good for them countless thousands of these terrorists were welcomed into the US by the Biden Administration but now every last one will be rounded up and forcibly removed from our country or if they’re too dangerous put in jails standing trial in this country because we don’t want them to come back ever with us this evening is a warrior on the front lines of that battle border patrol agent Roberto Ortiz great guy in January Roberto and another agent were patrolling by the Rio Grand near an area known as cartel Island doesn’t sound too nice to me when heavily armed gunmen started shooting at them Roberto saw that his partner was totally exposed great danger and he leapt into action returning fire and providing crucial seconds for his fellow agent to seek safe safety just and just barely I have some of the prints of that event and it was not good Agent Ortiz We Salute You for Your Great courage and uh be a line of fire that you took and for The Bravery that you showed we honor you and we will always honor you thank you Roberto very much thank you Roberto and I actually got to know him on my many calls to the Border he’s a great great gentleman the territory to the immediate south of our border is now dominated entirely by criminal cartels that murder rape torture and exercise total control they have total control over a whole nation posing a grave threat to our national security the cartels are Waging War in America and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels which we are here five nights ago Mexican authorities because of our tariff policies being imposed on them think of this handed over to US 29 of the biggest cartel leaders in their country that has never happened before they want to make us Happ happy first time ever but we need Mexico and Canada to do much more than they’ve done and they have to stop the Fentanyl and drugs pouring into the USA they’re going to stop it I have sent Congress a detailed funding request laying out exactly how we will eliminate these threats to protect our homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history larger even than current record holder president Dwight D Eisenhower a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders Americans expect Congress to send me this funding without delay so I can sign it into law so Mr Speaker John Thun both of you I I hope you’re going to be able to do that Mr speaker thank you Mr leader thank you thank you very much and let’s get it to me I’ll sign it so fast you won’t even believe [Applause] it and as we reclaim our sovereignty we must also bring back Law and Order to our cities and towns in recent years our justice system has been turned upside down by radical left lunatics many jurisdictions virtually seized enforcing the law against dangerous repeat offenders while weaponizing law enforcement against political opponents like me my Administration has acted swiftly and decisively to restore Fair equal and partial justice under the Constitutional rule of law starting at the FBI and the doj Pam good luck cash wherever you may be good luck good luck Pam Bond good luck so important going to do a great job cash thank you thank you cas [Applause] they’ve already started very strong they’re going to do a fantastic job you’re going to be very proud of them we’re also once again giving our police officers the support protection and respect they so dearly deserve they have to get it they have such a hard dangerous job but we’re going to make it less dangerous the problem is the bad guys don’t respect the law but they’re starting to respect it and they soon will respect it this also includes our great fire departments throughout the country our firemen and women are unbelievable people and I will never forget them and besides that they voted for me in record numbers so I have no chance one year ago this month 31-year-old New York police officer Jonathan Diller unbelievably wonderful person and a great officer was gunned down at a traffic stop on Long Island I went to his funeral The Vicious criminal charged with his murder had 21 prior arrests and they were rough arrests too he was a real bad one the thug in the seat next to him had 14 prior arrests and went by the name of killer he was killer he killed other people they say a lot of them I attended officer Diller’s service and when I met his wife and one-year-old son Ryan it was very inspirational actually his Widow’s name is Stephanie and she is here tonight Stephanie thank you very much Stephanie thank you very [Applause] Stephanie we’re going to make sure that Ryan knows his dad was a true hero New York’s finest and we’re going to get these cold blooded killers and repeat offenders off our streets and we’re going to do it fast got to stop it they get out with 28 arrests they push people into subway trains they hit people over the head back of the head with baseball bats we got to get them out of here I’ve already signed an executive order requiring a mandatory death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer and tonight I’m asking Congress to pass that policy into permanent law I’m also asking for a new crime Bill getting tough on repeat offenders while enhancing protections for America’s police officers so they can do their jobs without fear of their lives being totally destroyed they don’t want to be killed we’re not going to let them be killed joining us in the gallery tonight is a young man who truly loves our police his name is DJ Daniel he is 15 years old and he has always dreamed of becoming a police officer but in 2018 DJ was diagnosed with brain cancer the doctors gave him 5 months at most to live that was more than six years ago since that time DJ and his dad have been on a quest to make his dream come true and DJ has been sworn in as an honorary law enforcement officer actually a number of times peace the police love him the police departments love him and tonight DJ we’re going to do you the biggest honor of them all I am asking our new secret service director Sean Curran to officially make you an agent of the United States Secret Service he thank you DJ DJ’s doctors believe his cancer likely came from a chemical he was exposed to when he was younger since 1975 rates of child cancer have increased by more than 40% reversing this trend is one of the top priorities for our new presidential commission to make a America healthy again chaired by our new secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy [Applause] Jr Within the name Kennedy you would have thought everybody over here would have been Che how quickly they forget our goal is to get toxins out of our environment poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong as an example not long ago and you can’t even believe these numbers one in 10,000 children had autism one in 10,000 and now it’s one and 36 there’s something wrong 1 in 36 think of that so we’re going to find out what it is and there’s nobody better than Bobby and all of the people that are working with you you have the best to uh figure out what is going on okay Bobby good luck it’s a very important job thank you good thank you my Administration is also working to protect our children from toxic ideologies in our schools a few years ago January Little John and her husband discovered that their daughter’s school had secretly socially transitioned their 13-year-old little girl teachers and administrators conspired to deceive January and her husband while encouraging her daughter to use a new name and pronouns they them pronoun actually all without telling January who is here tonight and is now a courageous Advocate against this form of child abuse January thank you thank you thank you very much thank you stories like this are why shortly after taking office I signed an executive order Banning public schools from indoctrinating our children with transgender ideology I also signed an order to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our Youth and now I want Congress to pass a bill permanently Banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body this is a big lie and our mage message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you because we’re getting wokeness out of our schools and out of our military and it’s already out and it’s out of our society we don’t want it wokeness is trouble wokeness is bad it’s gone it’s gone and we feel so much better for it don’t we don’t we feel better our service members won’t be activists and ideologues they will be Fighters and warriors they will fight for our country and Pete congratulations Secretary of Defense congratulations and he’s not big into the woke movement I can tell you I know him well I am pleased to report that in January the US Army had its single best recruiting month in 15 years and that all armed services are having among the best recruiting results ever in the history of our services what a difference and you know it was just a few months ago where the results were exactly the opposite we couldn’t recruit anywhere we couldn’t recruit now we’re having the best results just about that we’ve ever had what a tremendous turnaround it’s really a beautiful thing to see people love our country again it’s very simple they love our country and they love being in our military again so it’s a great thing and thank you very much great job we’re joined tonight by a young man Jason Hartley who knows the weight of that Call of Duty Jason’s father grandfather and great-grandfather all wore the uniform Jason tragically lost his dad who was also a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy when he was just a boy and now he wants to carry on the family Legacy of service Jason is a senior in high school a six-letter Varsity athlete a really good athlete they say a brilliant student with a 4.46 that’s good GPA and his greatest dream is to attend the US Military Academy at West Point and J Jason that’s a very big deal getting in that’s a hard one to get into but I’m pleased to inform you that your application has been accepted you will soon be joining the core of K [Applause] thank you Jason you’re going to be on the long Gray Line Jason as commanderin-chief my focus is on building the most powerful military of the future as a first step I’m asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland all made in the USA and Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago but the technology just wasn’t there not even close but now we have the technology it’s incredible actually and other places have they have it Israel has it other places have it and the United States should have it too right Tim right they should have it too so I want to thank you but it’s a very very important this is a very dangerous world we should have it we want to be protected and we’re going to protect our citizens like never before to boost our defense industrial base we are also going to resurrect the American ship building industry including commercial ship building and military ship building and for that purpose I am announcing tonight that we will create a new office of ship building in the White House and offer special tax incentives to bring this industry home to America where it belongs we used to make so many ships we don’t make them anymore very much but we’re going to make them very fast very soon it will have a huge impact to further enhance our national security my Administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal and we’ve already started doing it just today a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal and lots of other things having to do with the Panama Canal and a couple of other canals the Panama Canal was built by Americans for Americans not for others but others could use it but it was built a tremendous of American blood and treasure 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal they died of malaria they died of snake bites and mosquito is not a nice place to work they paid them very highly to go there knowing there was a 25% chance that they would die the most expensive project also that was ever built in our country’s history if you bring it up to modern-day costs it was given away by The Carter Administration for $1 but that agreement has been violated very severely we didn’t give it to China we gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back now we have Marco Rubio in charge good luck Marco now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong oh Marco’s been amazing and he’s going to do a great job think of it he got a 100 votes you know he was approved with actually 99 but the 100th was this gentleman and I feel very certain so let’s assume he got a 100 votes and I’m either very very happy about that or I’m very concerned about it but he’s already proven I mean he’s a great gentleman he’s respected by everybody and we appreciate your voting for Marco he’s going to do a fantastic job thank you thank you he’s doing a great job great job and I also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland we strongly support your right to determine your own future and if you choose we welcome you into the United States of America we need Greenland for National Security and even International Security and we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it but we need it really for international World security and I think we’re going to get it one way or the other we’re going to get it we will keep you safe we will make you rich and together we will take Greenland to Heights like you have never thought possible before it’s a very small population but very very large piece of land and very very important for military security America is once again standing strong against the forces of radical Islamic terrorism three and a half years ago Isis terrorists killed 13 American Service members and countless others in the abig gate bombing during the disastrous and incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan not that they were withdrawing it was the way they withdrew perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country tonight I am pleased to announce that we have just apprehended the top terrorist responsible for that atrocity and he is right now on his way here to face the Swift sword of American Justice [Applause] and I want to thank especially the government of Pakistan for helping arrest this monster this was a very momentous day for those 13 families who I actually got to know very well most of them whose children were murdered and the many people that were so badly over 42 people so badly injured on that fateful day in Afghanistan what a horrible day such incompetence we shown that when Putin saw what happened I guess he said wow maybe this is my chance that’s how bad it was should have never happened grossly incompetent people I spoke to many of the parents and loved ones and they’re all in our hearts tonight just spoke to them on the phone we had a big call every one of them called and everybody was on the line and they did nothing but cry with happiness they were very happy as happy as you can be under those circumstances their child brother sister son daughter was killed for no reason whatsoever in the Middle East we’re bringing back back our hostages from Gaza in my first term we achieved one of the most groundbreaking peace agreements in Generations the Abraham Accords and now we’re going to build build on that Foundation to create a more peaceful and prosperous future for the entire region a lot of things are happening in the Middle East people have been talking about that so much lately with everything going on with Ukraine and Russia but a lot of things are happening in the Middle East a rough neighborhood actually I’m also working tirelessly to end the Savage conflict in Ukraine millions of ukrainians and Russians have been needlessly killed or wounded in this horrific and brutal conflict with no end in sight the United States has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine’s defense with no security with no [Applause] anything do you want to keep it going for another 5 years yeah yeah you you would say pocah hun says yes 2,000 people are being killed every single week more than that they’re Russian young people they’re Ukrainian young people they’re not Americans but I wanted to stop meanwhile Europe has has sadly spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they have spent on defending Ukraine by far think of that they’ve spent more buying Russian oil and gas than they have defending and we’ve spent perhaps $350 billion like taking candy from a baby that’s what happened and they’ve spent a hundred billion dollar what a difference that is and we have an ocean separating us and they don’t but we’re getting along very well with them and lots of good things are happening Biden has authorized more money in this fight than Europe has spent by billions and billions of dollars it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t have stopped it and said at some point Come On Let’s equalize you got to be equal to us but that didn’t happen earlier today I received an important letter from president zalinski of Ukraine the reads Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer nobody wants peace more than the ukrainians he said my team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts we do really value how much America has done to help Ukraine maintained its sovereignty and Independence regarding the agreement on minerals and security Ukraine is ready to sign it at any time that is convenient for you I appreciate that he sent this letter just got it a little while ago simultaneously we’ve had serious discussions with Russia and have receive strong signals that they are ready for peace wouldn’t that be beautiful wouldn’t that be beautiful wouldn’t that be beautiful it’s time to stop this madness it’s time to Halt The Killing it’s time to end the senseless War if you want to end Wars you have to talk to both sides nearly four years ago amid Rising tensions a history teacher named Mark Fogle was detained in Russia and sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony rough stuff the previous administration barely lifted a finger to help him they knew he was innocent but they had no idea where to begin but last summer I promised his 95-year-old mother Maline that we would bring her boy safely back home after 22 days in office I did just that and they are here tonight right to Mark and his great mom we are delighted to have you safe and sound and with us as fate would have it Mark Fogle was born in a small rural town in Butler Pennsylvania have you heard of it where his mother has lived for for the past 78 years I just happened to go there last July 13th for a rally that was not pleasant and that is where I met his beautiful Mom right before I walked onto that stage and I told her I would not forget what she said about her son and I never did did I never forgot less than 10 minutes later at that same rally gunfire rang out and a sick and deranged assassin unloaded eight bullets from his snipers perch into a crowd of many thousands of people my life was saved by a fraction of an inch but some were not so lucky Corey comparator was a firefighter a veteran a Christian a husband a devoted father and above all a protector when the sound of gunshots pierced the air was a horrible sound Cory knew instantly what it was and what to do he threw himself on top of his wife and daughters and shielded them from the bullets with his own body Corey was hit really hard you know the story from there he sacrificed his life to save theirs two others very fine people were also seriously hit but thankfully with the help of two great country doctors we thought they were gone and they were saved so those doctors had great talent were joined by Corey’s wife Helen who was his high school sweetheart and their two beloved daughters Allison and kayy thank you [Applause] to Helen Allison and Kaylee Corey is looking down on his three beautiful ladies right now and he is cheering you on he loves you he is cheering you on Corey was taken from us much too soon but his Destiny was to leave us all with a shining example of the selfless devotion of a true American Patriot it was love like cories that built our country and it’s love like cories that is going to make our country more Majestic than ever before I believe that my life was saved that day in Butler for a very good reason I was saved by God to make America great again I believe that thank you very much from the Patriots of Lexington and Concord to the heroes of Gettysburg and Normandy from the Warriors who crossed the Delaware to the Trailblazers who climbed the Rockies and from the Legends who soared at Kittyhawk to the astronauts who touched the moon Americans have always been the people who defied all Arts transcended all dangers made the most extraordinary sacrifices and did whatever it took to defend our children our country and our freedom and as we have seen in this chamber tonight that same strength Faith love and spirit is still alive and thriving in the hearts of the American people despite the best efforts of those who would try to censor us silence us break us destroy us Americans are today a proud free Sovereign and independent nation that will always be free and we will fight for it till death we will never let anything happen to our Beloved Country because we are a country of doers dreamers Fighters and survivors our ancestors crossed a vast ocean strowed into the unknown Wilderness and carve their fortunes from The Rock and soil of a perilous and very very dangerous Frontier they chased our destiny across a boundless continent they built the rail roads laid the highways and graced the world with American Marvels like the Empire State Building the mighty Hoover Dam and the Towering Golden Gate Bridge they lit the world with electricity Broke Free of the force of gravity fired up the engines of American industry and vanquished the Communists fascists and marxists all over the world and gave us countless modern wonders sculptured out of iron glass and steel we stand on the shoulders of these Pioneers who won and built the Modern Age these workers who poured their sweat into the skylines of our cities these Warriors who shed their blood on fields of battle and gave everything they had for our rights and for our freedom now it is our time to take up the righteous cause of American Liberty and it is our turn to take America’s Destiny into our own hands and begin the most thrilling days in the history of our country this will be our greatest ERA with God’s help over the next four years we are going to lead this nation even higher and we are going to forge the freest most advanced most dynamic IC and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth we are going to create the highest quality of life build the safest and wealthiest and healthiest and most vital communities anywhere in the world we are going to conquer the vast frontiers of Science and we are going to lead Humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond and through it all we are going to ReDiscover the Unstoppable power of the American Spirit and we are going to renew unlimited promise of the American dream every single day we will stand up and we will fight fight fight for the country our citizens believe in and for the country our people deserve my fellow Americans get ready for an incredible future because the Golden Age of America has only just begun it will be like nothing that has ever been seen before thank you God bless you and God bless America [Applause] thank you very much great job thank you great honor thank you thank you get this place going uhhuh it’s great honor thank you thank you pres thank you very thank you very much appreciate it thank you see you such young people well I’m trying to break that thank [Music] Youk thank you very much appreciate thank you again thank you again don’t forget so good it’s good so good sir best [Applause] terrific one of your best thanks again Mr thanks for the phone call last night know [Music] I’m thank you everybody best spe ever president Roger Williams thanks for the call I love Roger Williams thank you you don’t have to introduce yourself I know you better than you do right my great baseball great job you’re doing America is back thank you so much welome back in Pennsylvania anytime s they stood for they stood for they stood for another country that was phenomenal it’s hard to believe isn’t it that was that was fantastic thank you good job [Music] Mr good how you doing shake his hand earlier get a picture shaking his hand or anything you’re good thank you very much let’s do thank you thank you I love you it was so good you rocked it Mr President we’re with you 100% Crush really good congratulations bestch President that was a great that was awesome bless let’s go get down you get down good luck everybody good job thank you for mentioning God needs to help us thank you great speech great speech thanks for taking my call thank you for you really triggered those people tremendous Mr President thank you thank you so much thanks for the beneficial ownership in this week thanks for love our thank you you earned this night thank you very much apprciate thank you man proud of you thank you Mr President thank [Music] you thank you I did indeed you better believe good end home run you great jobed it Mr President thank you everybody you did great thank you good job thank you see Slam Dunk you’re doing good thank you sir you did amazing for usual thank you I’ll see you thank you thank you love you Mr President thank you everybody look at this beautiful new Congress Washington we’ve never met I was Mike one of Mike leech’s best friends he thinks very highly tremendous did thank you home R run home R thank you very much looking good look at him to talk about some buildings some public buildings you let me know I will thank Sir Mr Pres czy

    By Amjad Izhar
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