In Modeling Lab 4, Eon's gray models are ready for color. He opens the paint tool in Nomad Sculpt and counts down — "3, 2, 1, go!" — then paints a star, learns how to dial in exactly the shade he wants, and finishes with one of the coolest things you can build in 3D: a size comparison of planets and stars, ending with a giant so big it blocks the whole camera.
Choosing a color the smart way
Eon wants his star to be "yellowish... orange." But picking a color isn't just tapping the first one you see. He learns that a color is really three things at once, and you can slide each one:
- the hue — is it yellow, orange, red?
- how saturated it is — how strong or "loud" the color is
- how bright it is — how light or dark
When his orange comes out "too bright" and "too saturated," he doesn't start over. He just nudges the sliders: "you can go dark, or you can desaturate it." A tiny push and the color goes from cartoon-loud to exactly this color. That's the secret pros use — they don't hunt for the perfect swatch, they adjust one they're close to.
And there's a bigger art lesson tucked in here: "if you want to do modeling, you need to learn and draw inspiration from everyday life." The best colors are observed, not guessed. Want a real-looking star? Look at a real sunset.
Brush size: cover fast or draw fine
Once the color is set, Eon meets the radius — how wide the paintbrush is. He plays with both ends:
Crank the radius huge and a single stroke paints almost the whole model at once ("Oh my god!"). Shrink it tiny and you can draw a thin little line — like adding a small detail by hand.
He also hits a real-artist problem: a couple of spots get missed. The fix isn't more brush — it's panning the view a little to bring the model to the center where he can reach the gap. Same brush, better angle.
Naming your objects so you can find them
For his next idea — a size comparison video — Eon needs to grab specific models out of the scene. Instead of moving things around by hand, he learns you can just select an object from the list. But there's a catch: some are still named things like "UV sphere," which tells you nothing.
So he renames them: one becomes the rainbow gas giant, one becomes the pyramid, and a plain sphere gets a wild name — Betelgeuse (he first hears it as "be juice"!). Naming feels boring, but it's what lets you instantly select the right object later. He even learns a handy trick: double-tap an object's name to zoom the camera straight to it.
The giant that ate the camera
Now the payoff. Eon lines up Earth, the pyramid, the rainbow gas giant, the Sun, and Betelgeuse — and uses the gizmo (the little move arrows) to slide each one into place, smallest on the right, "sorting them in a certain order" so nothing blocks the shot.
Then comes the wow moment. Next to the biggest object, the pyramid vanishes — "you can't even see the pyramid anymore" — and even Earth disappears. "That's brilliant," he says. That is the whole point of a size comparison: when you put a tiny thing next to a truly enormous one, the small thing basically disappears. Real astronomers make these exact charts to show how stars dwarf the planets.
Bonus: looking it up with AI
What is "Betelgeuse," anyway? Eon doesn't pretend to know. He pauses and asks an AI, and learns it's a massive red supergiant star in the Orion constellation, near the end of its life and headed for a supernova so bright we might see it from Earth. Then he says something genuinely wise:
"You don't need to memorize a lot of things. You just vaguely need to know it, and you can check using AI — like a fuzzy search."
Knowing where to look beats memorizing everything. (Next time: a super-massive black hole!)
Try it
Open any drawing or 3D app with a color picker and find the saturation and brightness sliders. Pick a color you like, then make it more saturated, then less, then darker, then brighter — watch the same hue completely change mood. Then try Eon's size game with real objects: put a tiny LEGO brick next to a basketball, step back, and look. When something is big enough, the little thing almost disappears — just like Earth next to Betelgeuse.