Part of the Complete Blender Creator course on Udemy, see here for a special GitHub offer. The full course is part of this Kickstarter campaign which was 1000% funded.
Click here to find out more about the course, and how we build these assets step-by-step.
These are just the files from the course, not the actual tutorial videos. At the time of writing this course has several hours of high-quality videos.
You're welcome to download, fork or do whatever else legal with all the files!
Enjoy yourselves.
Ben Tristem & Michael Bridges
- You are going to make several models.
- We’ll be making both high poly and low poly versions of out assets.
- We will emphasise how critical naming is when working with a larger project like this.
- You will be able to create your own mapping, with these we can make the illusion of detail.
- We’ll be constantly checking our model externally
- This will be focused mainly on an interior environment.
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Create assets to be exported straight into an external program, like a game engine.
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Creating our own textures, and other maps from high detail models and apply them to a low poly version.
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Only modelling the interior of the Gothic Church.
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You can use this technique within Blender itself too for optimisation.
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I am going to be testing my model externally as I go. I will use Unity to do this.
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I will be keeping my scene simple, primarily for teaching purposes!
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I encourage you to add more detail, experiment and have fun. Wouldn’t the scene look much more interesting with a chess set in it.
- Plan your project, define it’s scope and your goals- important to prevent scope slip!
- Gather your reference material, if possible explore real world locations to get a feeling. Scour the web for images for you references too.
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See how our scene looks and feels walking around it. Using the Fly / Walk Mode.
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Show you how to see the scene in Unity.
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Understand I am using Unity to keep the iterations quick and simple at this early stage.
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Anything external to Blender, you can watch to see how it works and is coming across.
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Better understanding of external programs.
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Join in, if you have Unity installed and are interested in learning more about this prototyping method.
- Learn how to use light portals.
- Understand the limitations of their use.
- See that they dramatically increase quality and are especially useful for indoor environments.
- They aren’t used externally to Blender.
- No long ask what does UV stand for?!
- Overview the mapping in upcoming lectures
- Understand that we will be creating these maps from scratch, and then using them again to speed up further workflow.
- X,Y and Z are used for the Co-ordinates.
- UV are like the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ co-ordinates of an image.
- UV mapping is the process of projecting a 2D image to a 3D model's surface.
- They create the illusion of surface detail by mapping part of an image to the geometry on our model.
- They can be applied automatically, great for basic models. Generating a UV map gives best results.
- Diffuse Map: The base colour of the geometry.
- Bump Maps: Tell the shader how to react with light.
- Learn how to use the multi resolution modifier.
- See it is great for multiple resolutions of a model.
- Learn to control how sharp edges.
- Understand that this is best apply to a base mesh that is the final low-poly version.
- See a potential issue you may encounter when you use any form of subsurface division.
- Finish off the solution to the previous challenge.
- Learn how to copy attributes of a mesh object.
- See this is great when you have lots of components, for e.g. need the same material.
- Understand it’s a destructive operation e.g. copying materials will overwrite a meshes current materials.
- Understand what unwrapping is.
- Learn about seems.
- See the different default unwrapping options.
- Remember a UV map, is a projection of a 3D mesh to a 2D image.
- Unwrapping give us control over any maps we want to place on our model.
- This is because it maps the mesh co-ordinates to the image.
- Essential when using assets outside Blender
- Unwrapping isn’t necessary to apply maps to a mesh in Blender
- We can let blender ‘guess’ how to apply a map.
- However if you want control over how something looks it is essential.
- Understand that resolution will control the level of detail at a particular distance.
- Realise when a texture is too large or too small.
- Learn about the power of two (POT) and why and when it is important.
- Computers work with 1s and 0s, or Binary.
- A lot of external programs like POT textures.
- They aren’t necessary but are a good standard to adhere too, especially when working with external programs.
- Don’t have to be ‘square’, providing side length is a POT.
- Mathematically they’ll be 2 to the power of n or 2^n. eg. 2^5 = 32
- If you have been around computers for a while you’ll recognise this sequence: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512,1024, 2048, etc.
- Reinforce your naming structure.
- See that I am using: OBJ_SIZE_TYPE.png
- Learn the order to do things in.
- Be using Blender Render.
- Making your UV map more uniform, minimising distortion and optimising image use.
- Understand the use of margins
- Learn more about seams and their placement.
- Paint onto your model!
- Be creating the diffuse map from scratch
- Defuse map is for the colour changes in a model, not necessarily surface detail.
- Learn what pinning is.
- See how to reset a UV map if things go wrong.
- Experience sticky selection mode.
- Keeping UV Editor and 3D Editor in Sync.
- Look at the other types of unwrapping.
- Learn how to layer textures using Blender Render.
- Understand this is a great way of checking out an effect quickly and simply
- Have a glimpse at what other maps can do!
- Understand that Blender Render (BR) and Cycles are fundamentally different.
- See how to work with only one material.
- Realise you might have to create separate BR and Cycles materials.
- See how to use B&W image as a bump map.
- Normal and height maps are both bump maps.
- See the again illusion of surface detail!
- Understanding what a tiling texture is.
- We’ll be aiming for a basic texture
- Create a tiled texture for the walls of our Church.
- Understand getting it looking right will take time.
- Use existing mesh data to create new mesh data.
- Understand remaking meshes can take a lot of time, but is often part of the workflow especially with organic models.
- Fix your model, If you have the same problem as me.
- See the solution to the last video
- There is multiple repetition, so only the highlights are shown.
- Use and understand how the knife tool works.
- Create uneven geometry by chopping up our existing mesh.
- See multiple ways to cut down the polygon count in your scene.
- Understand that the speed of your computer will dictate how complex a scene can be before it starts to become unmanageable.
- See that these are used to change the underlaying geometry.
- Understand that they are grey scale images, If you used a colour image it will just use the average of RGB- converting it to greyscale.
- They aren’t not suited to things like generating a final brick wall. V High Poly count needed for resolution match.
- They're very useful for applying detail e.g. scales on a lizard/fish or dragon. Great for generating geometry and then optimising or for larger items, like terrain.
- Use your displacement map to alter geometry.
- Realise that you need geometry to modify.
- Use the displacement in Blender Render.
- Then use the Displacement Modifier in the same manner.
- Understand they are a type of bump map.
- Gain a greater understanding of how normals work.
- They contain direction information not height information.
- Contain direction information not height information.
- The RGB colour channels define the direction of a normal.
- XYZ components are defined with Red, Green, Blue.
- When creating normal maps they are affected by whether or not the mesh object * has smooth shading turned on.
- Normal direction is very important otherwise the map will be useless.
- Create a normal map for our pillar detail.
- Add some more geometric detail to the brick work and create a normal map of that.
—— Videos in this section of the full Udemy course...