Ecastasy's Eggtastic Blender Tutorial

Would you like to render your own egg designs? You've come to the right place!
Welcome to another EGG-citing tutorial where I will be walking you through the process using Blender 4.0
Blender is a free 3D program, that is open to all to use! No trial needed! 
Blender 4.0 has some great features that we will go over in this tutorial, that should give you speedy results without a ton of effort. All you have to do is hook up a new texture hit render and you're done! The egg outline is already composited into the final render result.

So let's get started!

1. Go to Blender's Homepage and select download from either area on their homepage.

This will take you to a download page where you can select your OS of choice and download the installer.

2. Run the installer on your PC to install Blender.

3. Download the Egg Scene I've set up! [1]

4. Double-click the file to open, it should look like this on your desktop.

5. It will open to this workspace view in Blender.

1. Is the main 3D viewport window.
2. Is where you can see your flat egg texture preview
3. Is your material editor, where you can either upload your file or drag and drop your flat egg texture file into Blender.

If you hold down middle mouse button and move your mouse around, you will pan around the various 2D workspaces windows. Scrolling the middle mouse wheel will zoom you in and out. Holding middle mouse button and shift will pan you around the main viewport window (the 3D space).

6. There are various ways to upload your flat egg textures into blender, but for ease of use, we'll stick with the easiest method. You can drag and drop your flat egg texture from your desktop and over into the flat egg texture preview window.

Once you dragged it in, the flat texture preview window should be updated with your new texture! We will want to swap the texture over in the material editor. So select the node where it says "Upload Egg Texture here" and click the picture icon. (See 1 marked below in image)

This will open a drop down menu of all the textures in your scene! Select the newly uploaded texture. In my case it's "EggStarTexture". (See 2 marked below in image)

You've officially swapped your egg texture!

8. When you are iterating, you don't need to multiple versions of the same file, if you don't want too. Simply save over the image file you are working on, hover your mouse over the flat egg texture preview, and hit Alt+R, and it will automatically refresh/update your image.

8. Let's render! You can either hit F12 on your keyboard to hotkey render or navigate to the 'Render' menu option at the top of the program window. Open the drop down and hit 'Render Image'

9. A render window will pop up with your complete egg result! Black outline included!

9a. If you want changes to your texture, go make your changes in your art program of choice, save over your file and hit "Alt+R" in your flat image texture preview window, or upload a new image all together! Hit Render again! Immediate quick results with minimal futzing :)

10. If you are happy with your render, hit the image button at the top of the Render Preview Window, and Save/Save as your result! Enjoy!

These are the save options I tend to go with :) the most important part is on the right hand side where it says color management, make sure it says 'Follow Scene' before saving!

Happy Egg Rendering!

Bonus Learnings

If you want to see your texture on the egg. Hit the "Shiny Orb" button in the upper right of your 3D viewport window, to turn on Viewport Shading.

If you want to learn about other ways to load in textures...

1a. Let's go over uploading your flat egg texture into the existing node. Since this file is packed to include the files you need, it's a tiny bit different. You will want to select solid white box of files icon, and it will ask to unpack the example texture. Just hit the first option and the icon will revert to a solid white folder, and it will have created a file with the Egg test texture somewhere on your computer (it put mine on the desktop). You can delete that unpacked file/folder, you don't need it.

Now select the solid white folder icon, and it will open up the directory window, navigate to your texture you want to test.

Once your texture is loaded in, let's swap our flat image texture preview over to the new one. Navigate over to our flat texture image preview window, and select the picture icon which will open a drop down menu of various images being used in the scene.

Navigate to your newly loaded image. In my case it's going to be EggStarTexture.

You've officially swapped your egg texture!  

1b. Let's go over dragging and dropping your flat egg texture into blender's material window. Similar to dragging it into the flat texture preview window :)

With blender open, you can simply grab your texture image from wherever it is on your PC and drag it over into the material editor window.

This will automatically create a new image texture node.

You can grab the 'Upload Egg Texture Here' grouping and move that out of the way, or better yet, just delete it. Then grab the little dot by color on your new image node, and drag it over into the 'Base Color' dot in the Principled BDSF shader, so that a new line connects between the two nodes.

Once your texture is loaded in, you can go ahead and swap your flat image texture preview the same way we talked about above!

You've officially swapped your egg texture!