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| abstract:The tutorial shows in easy steps, how to sharpen the edges of your model and how to create a very simple texture by using multiple materials. We assume, that you have basic knowledge about the blender user interface. But we still provide enough background information, so that even blender newbies can follow the process. The tutorial works for blender 2.49b and Jass-2 |
intended audience:
- Creators of “sculpted prims” for Second Life and similar environments
- Blender noobs (no/low level skills)
prerequisites (*):
- download: jass-2 (binary distribution, contains blender-2.49b, python-2.6.4, primstar-1.0.0 and more)
related tutorials:
- Blender primer (First steps in blender)
- Sculpted Prims I
- Sculpted Prims III
Separate Downloads:
(*) If Jass-2 is not an option for you, you can download the prerequisites separately:
Transcription
Hello and welcome again! We will now proceed with our top-hat and optimize its shape. Then we are going to try an easy way to texturise it. We will create a simple black surface, and add a colored band to it. But let us begin by examining what we already have by now. We see that the top-edge of the hat is not well defined, so we want to sharpen it a bit. The same is true for the edge between the brim and the body. We can do this by using the Crease-function.
To understand how crease works, let us Look at this simple plane for a moment. I will select the left-half of it and rotate it along the x-axis. As you can see, the plane gets bended in a smooth way and the surface moves-away from the control points. So we can immediately see, that the control-points are not always located right on the surface of the object. Right now their influence on the surface is weak to keep the surface very smooth and organic.
With the crease-function we can change the amount of this influence and thus we can create sharper edges. It is important to know that crease only works on edges, and never on single vertices. So you need to select at least one edge, before you can apply crease. Let us select one single edge, and then enable Crease.
You find Crease under:
mesh -> edges -> crease-subsurf
As a short-cut you also can press SHIFT-”e”, to enable it. A dashed-line appears. You can enlarge or shorten this line by moving the mouse. The longer the line is, the stronger the edges pull on the surface until it touches the edges. You can select any set of edges and adjust the crease value for each edge differently. You can of course select many edges at once, and set their crease-value in one single operation.
Turning back to our hat we will want to apply the Crease-option along the top-edge and along the lower edge between the brim and the hat-body. So let us try that out-now.
- go to edit-mode.
- Then select the top edge-loop: Press the alt-key then right-click on an arbitrary edge of the loop.
- After the edge-loop is selected, press SHIFT-”E” and then enlarge the appearing handle until the edge looks clean-cut.
- After you have adjusted the top of the hat, we can proceed with the brim. Again select the appropriate edge-loop. Then invoke the crease function, and sharpen the edge exactly as you did before.
- At the end let us compress the hat along-one-axis to give it a more vivid touch.
The basic model is completed by now. So let us give a first try on texturizing. Well, this is a very complex topic. But we will choose a simple approach here and proceed in small steps only.
With blender you will first need to learn how to work with materials. Which in first place means, you must know how to create materials and how to assign them to your objects. So please always remember, that Working with materials
is the key to create textures for your models in blender.
And Here we go:
- Select your object and ensure that you have selected draw-type “solid”, or draw-type “shaded”. Then you can immediately see the effects of your material settings.
- Now go to the shading-panel. You can do this by pressing F5.
- In the Links-and-pipeline tab, find the label: “Link to Object”.
- There click on add-new, to create and automatically assign a new material to your model.
As soon as your first material is created, a multitude of new buttons appears. But you can ignore most of these buttons for now. We will get back to them later. Right now your material has been automatically named material. Since this is not very meaningfull, please rename the material to something more recognizable, like “hat-base” for example. That will save you a lot of time when you want to look-up your material again later.
Now we will modify the material to serve our purpose:
- In the material tab click on the color-selector and use the upcoming color-picker window to turn the color from light grey to very dark grey. Just click on an appropriate area in the color-picker, then move the mouse out of the color-picker without any further clicking. Note that you should see a dark-grey sphere in the preview window. And also your object should have turned very dark.
- By now the entire object has been assigned to the-same material. Let us now take care about the hat-band, and let us make it red.
- For this purpose we will first create a second material. Look-up again the label: “link to object” then click on the up-and-down arrow keys and Add a new material.
- Rename this material to: hat-band.
- Then change the material-color to a light red.
By now we have created 2 separate materials. You can switch the material for the entire object by simply selecting the appropriate material here. Right now the hat-band material is also applied to the whole object when it is selected. But we want to apply it only to a few faces, and keep the majority of faces assigned to the base material. So how can we make this assignment ?
ok, this is done as follows:
- let us select the base material again, to make the entire object black.
- Then go to edit mode, And also go to the edit-buttons-panel. You can use F9 for this.
- Under link and materials, find the material button. Right below the material button you should now see the text:”1 Mat 1″.This means, that exactly one material is assigned to the object and this material has the material-index 1.
- Select a row of faces on the hat. Move the faces along z, until they are located where you want the band to appear later.
- In the material selector select “hat-band”. The selected faces now should become red. And the before mentioned text should have changed to:”2 Mat 2″This consequently means: We now have 2 materials assigned to the object and the second material with material-index 2 is currently assigned to the selected vertices.
The model has now been assigned to 2 different materials. One material for the hat itself using a dark-grey color. The other material used for the band using a light red color. In edit-mode we have selected a subset of faces for the band, and assigned the hat-band material to these faces.
Now we are almost ready to make our first texture out of this model. In fact we could bake the texture right-now, but We will make another preparation for convenience. So please go to object mode now. Ensure that you do this, because otherwise you will end up with a wrong UV-map. ok. So we are in object-mode now ? Your hat might look very dark at this moment. Ignore that for now.
- Open the editing buttons-screen by clicking on F9. Then locate the Mesh tab.
- There create a new UV texture by clicking on: New.
- rename the new texture to: “texture”.
- Now enable the buttons: “set active UV-texture”, and “set rendering UV-texture”.
By now you have created a copy of the sculptie map. You will use this copy for your texturing purposes. The good thing about this approach is, that you never mess up your sculptmap with your texture. You can switch between your sculptmap and your texture by selecting the appropriate active UV-texture.
- Please go back to edit mode now.
- There select all vertices. If you don’t select all vertices here you will not be able to proceed with the next step.
- Go to the UV-editor, and there create a new image of size 64 times 64. Just click on: image, new. Then enter width and height. Please use 64 times 64 for now, even if you think that this is a very low resolution texture. We will come back to this issue in the next tutorial of this series.
- Please rename the just created image to : “texture”, so that it later becomes easier to locate it in the list of images.
And now finally we can bake the texture as follows: Click on
Render -> Bake render meshes -> texture-only.
You will end up with a mostly black image containing a red horizontal stripe. This is your very first and very primitive texture for your sculptie. Save this texture to your hard disk and examine how it appears on your object in second life. After you have uploaded the surface-texture, just drag it onto your sculptie. It should correctly wrap around the object.
If you think that something is wrong, then please
- check in the texture tab that you have enabled default-mapping.
- Also look at the repeats per face. Ensure that their values are set to 1 in U and in V.
- And check, that the offsets have been set to 0.
- You should also set the color of your sculptie to white. Otherwise you will get a mixture between the SL color settings and your texture.
- Please also check that full-bright is disabled for now.
Now take a closer look at the sculptie. You can see that indeed the red band is now visible. But it does not appear where we placed it in blender. Also the sharpened edges at the top and at the brim are not visible.
Please remember, that we have changed the model when we applied the crease-function and we also moved the vertices for the band along the z-axis. Hence We have to re-bake the sculpt-map of the current model. Take care to select the sculptie texture, before you bake the sculptmap. Otherwise you will overwrite the previously created surface-texture of your sculptie. And now finally, the band appears at the correct location.
We are now at the end of the second sculptie tutorial. I have shown you
- how you can use the Crease-function to make sharp edges.
- After we have finished the basic model
- i have given you a very light-weighted introduction into blender’s material system
- and how you can use it to create textures based on multiple materials.
In the next tutorial We will proceed by introducing some more fancy texturing techniques including shadow-maps and procedural textures. Until then, stay tuned and have fun.
See you later!
I couldn’t follow this at all after 4.00 seconds, due to the updated version 2.62 I’m using. I hope someone else shares your working method and has a relavent texture tutorial. This is totally hopeless as the layout is so diffrent.
Pleae use this collection if you work on blender 2,59 or newer: http://blog.machinimatrix.org/category/sculpted-prims/basic-tutorial/
hi!,I really like your writing so so much! proportion we be in contact extra approximately your post on AOL? I need an expert in this space to resolve my problem. May be that is you! Looking forward to look you.
The instructions say to compress the hat. How is that done?
compress along one axis. means “scale along the axis”, so i scaled it along y-axis: on the keyboard press:
“s y”
that’s it. Sorry, i should have mentioned that. But honestly the effect is not overwhelming anyways and it is definitively not essential to do that “compression”… Did i realy say “compress along the axis…” ? I better change that
The instructions state: “At the end let us compress the hat along-one-axis to give it a more vivid touch.” It doesn’t say how to do this.
Hello, can you ask for a tutorial on building stairs in the house, thank you very much.
Thank you all learned to just think it was necessary =))
I’m having problems loading the videos, I keep getting an error on certain lines.. I watched them earlier today without issue and now I can’t load any of them
is this a glitch?
i just tested it and i have no issues.
what do you mean with “an error on certain lines” ?
Hello, and where lessons are gone = (
just click again after the O2-teaser has finished. then you get the tutorial.
cheers
IN this example, we backed while the object was in edit mode. In the first tutorial, we baked in object mode. Does it matter?
thx
no, it does not matter. There is only one caveat with baking in object mode: Sometimes the displayed image is NOT the image to witch the sculptmap will be baked. So it may appear as if nothing has happened. But as soon as you go to edit mode, the baked map appears.
So it is usually safe (but no necessary) to bake in edit mode so you can see what wil be baked.
Hi, Gaia
Got a suggestion for using the text-to-speech program. You may need to misspell some words to get the program to output them properly. “Prim” and “brim” come out as “prime” and “brime”. By spelling them “prehm” or similar you can force the phonetic egine to pronounce those words properly. Some programs also handle UTF-8 phonetic alphabet, so prim is spelled with the “i dipth” symbol (13th down on this page http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/pk.htm ) instead of the “i flat” as in “prime”. Hope that helps.
Hi, first thanks for putting up these tutorials.
Alas, I’m more than a bit confused. I’m a noob. Never done any blender or 3D modelling before, so I’m aiming to get some sculpty basics before trying out mesh imports into SL.
I read the stuff on sculpties in the wiki, and I think I understood that okay. I did your blender intro and someone else’s for good measure, so the viewport shifting, vertex selection and basic modelling is coming along fine. But textures – aaaargh. I’ve done the first three tutorials – it’s taken quite a while, many hours with lots of repetition needed. Now I’ve got to the fourth tutorial, and it’s clearly all gone horribly wrong.
I’m asking the questions here, because when I look back, my main issues stem from this tutorial – especially following the sentence, “In fact we could bake the texture right-now, but we will make another preparation for convenience.”
What are doing when you create this new UV texture and why is it convenient? Actually what did it do when Primstar created the first one called sculptie? How does that relate to the images created in the UV/Image editor? Why has what you call a convenience here seemed to have become an essential by tutorial IV or have I misunderstood that too?
My second issue comes where you say you will explain why you only used a 64 by 64 texture in the next tutorial, but I can’t find it. In tutorial IV you say I might want to create a new texture 512 by 512, but you don’t. I don’t know why you went for 64 by 64 texture, why I might want to create a 512 by 512 one, nor why you left it as it was. Help!
My final area of texture puzzlement is about 2D texture mapping. If I create an “old fashioned” prim, ie not scultpty or mesh, I want to pin a 2D texture to it. I either use the prim’s inbuilt default UV Map or planar. Is that superseded here, or is it just an area you haven’t covered yet? If you need to do it, at what stage would you? Would you tweak it after all the ambient occlusion and bump mapping stuff?
I feel like I have missed out an entire tutorial between 3 and 4 rather than a few points, and all this confusion means that when you get complex in tutorial 4 (maybe not to you but it’s complex enough for me) there comes a point where it all turns to gobbledegook.
I think the more of a noob you are, the more “whats” and “whys” you need, but if you are converting from another technology, you mostly need the “hows” (which you do remarkably clearly). Any pointers to my issues would be food to a starving man.
By the way, can I say how much I appreciate the summaries at the start and end of each tutorial. The more context I get the better I like it.
Hi Gaia,
I’m am following your fantastic tutorials and I seem to be having a problem with the material portion. I must pressed something and now I can no longer see the texture map on the right side (blank). Is there a way to enable that again?
Thanks very much for offering these comprehensive tutorials for all of us!
Lauryn
select your object, go to edit mode, return to object mode. the sculptmap should be visible again.
Hi Jass, this tutorial is nice and well detailed. I made an upper part of a boot from cylinder, multires. I made a flat out of a cylinder, closed top and bottom edges by pressing s-y-0 and then pressed G and draged it down to make it look like a box and then wrapd it to make a round. the shape came out really well in blender. so i baked it and uploaded to sl and it didn’t appear correctly. the top and the bottom edge of the lower leg part (the top and bottom ends of the cylinder which i joined pressing s-y-0) got a thin cover.. it looked like a holowd container, like a beer can. I tried again and again but nothing helped. I am frustrated. please help
maybe you have got an “intrinsic” rotation of your object. maybe it has been rotated in object mode AND in edit mode ? That sometimes yields unexpected vertex shifts in the final model. An image would help. You can sen it to me in Second Life if you like. Or attach it here (you need to be registered to attach images)
At the end of this tutorial, when you rebaked the sculptie texture…what happened to the one that was already saved in the current Blender file? Did we just copy over the already baked sculptie that was still sitting in the image window? I see now a multicolored sculptie in the image window, but this time, it has the grid that had been in the texture bake. This grid was not in the original baked sculpty? Its the grid that makes me worry that I actually baked the sculpty over the baked texture, even though I seleced the sculpty before I re baked
hi,
i have a problem in the baking textures only part.
i did exactly as the tutorial from the beginning, and the sculpmaps turnout nicely, but when i make the texture map, the whole square turns red, instead of just a band and black background. plz help ;;
i love your tutorials though, they are very comprehensive !
Hello Gaia.
As usual thanks for the great tutorial.
I can follow them without problems but I am experiencing a issue: I bake the mesh in Edit mode with all vertex selected , then I save it as .tga.
The problem occur when I open again this mesh : the proportion are not respected. Why? I tried to open it with ADD-MESH- and picking the file from my hd and I tried also FILE-IMPORT – SL (tga)
TY in advance ^^
i recently revisted this tutorial when trying to create another quick tophat when I ran into a problem-when i select the faces for the hat band and try to move them into position it is moving the connected vertices/edges/faces; i tried resetting to the default factory settings and proportional editing is off-what setting or what am i doing thats causing this?
hello! Great tutorial.
I have a question.
I have a hat band image that I took from one of my photos.
I have made it into a tiled image. Can I use this as a material
rather than just a plain solid color.
I cant find a method to make a material from a image on my hard drive.
Thanks
Wrench
yes, you can.
add a new texture to the texture stack.
set texture type to “image”
bake (full bake)
You can see how it works in more detail in one of the older texturing tutorials. I think this one will give you most you need. Just apply it to only ONE image…:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/09/01/texturizing-with-multiple-images/
Great Tutorials Gaia!! love them and they are helping me alot. I am having trouble with adding the second texture for the hat band. For some reason when I add the second material, and select the section to add it too, it does not assign it as MAT 2. Any Suggestions as to what I could be doing wrong?
just an idea:
- in edit mode select a couple of faces (take care, just unconnected vertices or one edge loop won’t do it. You must be sure to have faces selected!)
- then instead of scrolling through the horizontal ” < x Mat y > ” list, use the one with the arrow up/down button above it and just select one of the available materials from that list. It should work.
- Then click on the “Assign” button. I am unsure if that is really necessary though.
Take care when you later work in the material section. One annoying “feature” of blender is that it reassigns all faces to an edited material if:
- you are in the shading panel
- you have your object selected
- you change to another material
If you want to avoid this reassigning, you need to deselect all objects before you go to the shading panel. I have not yet found a way to pin and lock the materials to the faces.
parabens, seus conecimentos sobre o brender, me deixa impressionado, vou começar a estudar pelos seus trabalhos aqui, assim serei um bom construtor sl, com sculpts
please, can you tell me
for multi parts sculpties.
I make a first sculptie, then a second one, parent, posision them, then back each part for Second life
but when try to make the scripts; it is told me that only have ones map …
why? I baked the two!
when I look carefully, indeed there is only one map. the first one backed. Why the second does not back?
May I ask you the solution? Of course I have python and blender 2.45
thanks jean
if you create a copy of your sculptie, the sculptmap is not automatically copied, but it is linked. So you have 2 objects, but only one sculptmap. This is done on purpose. Consider a chair with 4 legs. All legs made out of the same sculptie, so it makes pretty much sense to have only one sculüptmap in this scenario.
However if your sculptie copies get edited you will want to bake separate sculptmaps. For this you must manually assign new sculptie textures to your individual objects:
- go to edit mode
- in the UV editor create a new image (of same size as the current sculptmap)
Now subsequent bakes create the sculptmaps as you expected.
Does that make sense for you ?
Oh wow. :O I can’t wait for the rest of the tutorials!