SSimpossible's Blender Tutorials

These Blender Tutorials are... Moving

2011-01-29T10:22:00.000-05:00

Hey, everyone! I've recently bought a domain name and have put up a website under it, and that website is where I will be posting from here on out. I've just uploaded the second (and final) part of the firework tutorial there, so go check it out! I still have quite a few things to add to it, but it's coming along pretty nicely so far.

So, I guess this is most likely the last post you will ever see on this blog. All of my tutorials will now be posted here: http://www.benamend.com/

Tell me of any ways you think my new site could be improved, as I want to make it as good as possible for the viewers/readers.

And I think that's it. I'll still be visiting this blog occasionally to check a few things (i.e., my artwork, as I want to have a similar setup on my site in that way), but other than that, I believe I'm finished posting here. Thanks for reading the tutorials all this time, and I hope you'll continue to do so on my website.

How to Create Fireworks in Blender 2.5 - Part 1

2011-01-23T15:26:00.001-05:00

Hello, everyone! Sorry it took so long for me to release this tutorial, as I was experiencing technical difficulties. What technical difficulties you ask? Well, notice how there's no video tutorial accompanying this text tutorial. My video recording software isn't working, and until it does, or I can find a better one, you won't be seeing any new video tutorials on my site. I'm sorry to disappoint some of you, and I'm sure that some time soon I'll get it up and running again.

With all of that aside for now, I've decided to release the text tutorial anyway so you could have something to follow on my site, even though it's not video.

Let's get started now so I don't bore you with some long introduction :P This part will cover making the trail that the firework leaves behind as it's being shot into the air.

First, delete the default cube (X), and add an Icosphere (Shift A - Mesh - Icosphere). Press Tab to go into Edit Mode, and press A to deselect everything. Now press B and drag a box around all of the vertices except the bottom 5, as shown below.

Now delete those as well, and select everything else by pressing A again. Now type S - Z - 0 to scale these vertices along the Z axis 0 degrees. This will make our shape completely flat. Now press Shift - Ctrl - Alt - C, and select 'Geometry to Origin'. This will move our mesh to it's origin point. If you tab back out into Object Mode, you should have a 2-D Pentagon.

You may be wondering why I'm using this for the trail emitter instead of a plane, and I'm not really sure why, but it gives better results. Plus, it's only 4 additional faces ;) Now press S and scale the object down so that it's really, really tiny. I don't have a precise measurement for this, and it doesn't particularly matter. If the finished trail looks good to you, then you did it right.

Now, make sure you're on frame 1 (check the bottom of the screen), and press I, then choose Location on the menu. This will insert a keyframe on frame 1.

Move ahead to frame 20, move your object up (to about one third of the way to where you want it to stop moving and explode) and insert another keyframe. Do the same for frames 40, and 60. Now if you go back to frame 1 and press Alt A, your object should move upward within the time period of those 60 frames.

Now let's move on to the actual trail. For this, we'll give it a particle system. Drag the panel on the right out a little bit so you can see the particles button, then add a new particle system and name it 'Trail'.

Now set the Amount to 10,000, the End to 60, the Lifetime to 30, the Random Lifetime to 1, and the Random (under the Velocity panel) to 0.2. This will make it so that our object emits 10,000 particles total, stops emitting particles at frame 60, the particles will die out in the general area of 30 frames after they have been emitted, and they will be slightly randomized so it doesn't look so perfect and unnatural.

Now under the Render panel, uncheck the box next to 'Emitter'. This will make it so that when you render, it won't display the object that is emitting the particles.

If you were to render now on, say, frame 40, you'd get something like this (I set my background color to black):

Obviously, this isn't going to work. It looks really terrible, and doesn't resemble a firework trail in the least. Let's change that. The particle system is currently using material 1, so let's add a material for it to use. Click on the Materials button, and add a new material. Name this one Trail as well. Change the type to Halo, raise the Add to maximum, and set the Size to 0.025.

Now if we render, we should get this:

It is lacking a little punch, but we'll fix that by adding glow in the next part of this tutorial. That's all for this part, though! I'll try to get the next part out as soon as possible, but it may be a while since I'm very busy at the time. If you have any questions, comments, or problems, post them below or send me an email at ben.amend@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

Fireworks

2011-01-12T22:23:00.001-05:00

Well, no one's responded to my previous post as far as tutorial requests go, so I've thought of something. As soon as I can, I'm going to re-create the firework tutorial. I'll include a video and text tutorial (in the same post), and this tutorial will be much better than the last one, and it will give much more satisfying results :D

Since I couldn't get the video to upload right, here are a few images of it:

Poll Results

2011-01-08T13:17:00.001-05:00

Well, the poll has closed, and here are the results:

I prefer video tutorials: 12%
I like text tutorials: 37%
I like both: 50%
Other: 0%

Oh, and don't ask me why an extra 1% was somehow left out... obviously 12 + 37 is not 50; I guess the poll was just rounding it up?

Anyway, towards the beginning, video was winning over. Both still had the majority of the votes, but over yesterday and last night, text won over. Now that doesn't mean I'll stop recording video tutorials. Like I said, I'll be trying to do a little of both. All I need now are tutorial requests. Anyone?

Current Conclusion

2011-01-06T16:26:00.000-05:00

Okay; so I've put up the poll a few days ago to ask whether people prefer video tutorials or text tutorials. Today is your last day to vote, so go and do it if you haven't yet.

However, 75% of the votes have gone towards the Both option, and 25% has been Video Tutorials.

Unless this has changed by tomorrow morning, I am going to attempt to create video tutorials, and write a text tutorial to go with it. This appears to be the best conclusion to all of this, but I may not be able to keep it up due to time restraints (as text tutorials do take a lot longer to create than video).

But we'll see how it works out. Expect a new tutorial some time this week!

Addressing the Readers

2011-01-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! I've been looking at my pageviews lately, and I've noticed that my video tutorials aren't getting very many views. Technically, I'm not sure if this is because the people reading my blog prefer text over video, or if they think I do a poor job at the video tutorials (if you think so, please state it below; I don't want to keep recording these tutorials if people don't want to watch them). So, I've started a poll to the right of this post -->

I'd like it if all of you voted, but I know that's not going to happen. Just keep in mind that all you have to do is click an option; nothing else required. I'd really appreciate it if this worked out, because I'd like to know what format my viewers want the tutorials delivered in: text, or video.

Thanks for reading this post, and thanks for voting!

How to Create Fireworks in Blender

2010-12-31T23:27:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone (depending on when you're reading this and what time zone you're in :P)! This tutorial was a bit rushed, so if you think I left anything out or if you had any problems, let me know in the comments below. Enjoy!

Christmas Present

2010-12-20T22:42:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays, everyone! In light of that, I've whipped up a little something and decided to upload it here. I know it's not the best idea when it comes to Christmas related things, but I wanted to do something that hadn't already been taken/made into a tutorial, so here it is!

How to Create an Ocean in Blender

2010-12-20T18:29:00.000-05:00

Well, it appears as though a solution has been found for the video tutorials; I know this isn't holiday related as I wanted it to be, but I haven't recorded any tutorials on that topic as I haven't been able to upload any, so I stopped recording the tutorials. However, I'll try to get a tutorial posted that's Christmas related as soon as possible (in the remaining 4 days left since I want to release it before Christmas). Sorry about that, though :D

Sketch Effect Update

2010-12-18T17:09:00.000-05:00

I just updated my sketch effect tutorial; to anti-alias your image, click on the render tab, then enable Full Sampling (under Anti-Aliasing). I've modified the original post, too. Believe me, this gives much smoother results :D

Before:

After:

How to Make a Slightly Abstract Desktop Background in 60 Seconds

2010-12-16T13:19:00.000-05:00

Well, it takes 60 seconds if you know what you're doing :D I'll be using Blender 2.55 beta for this tutorial.

The final result of this tutorial:

So let's get started!

First, press 0 on your number pad to go into camera view, then delete the default cube by pressing X. Add an Icosphere (Shift A - Mesh - Icosphere), and on the panel to the left, set the Subdivisions to 4.

On the panel to the right (Make sure you're in the Render tab), set the camera dimensions to match that of your desktop size.

Now in the 3D viewport, scale the sphere up (S) so that it's larger than your camera; move it if you need to (G).

Now go into the World tab, and change the background color to black.

Now go into the Materials tab, and give your Sphere a new material. Change the type to Halo.

Change the diffuse color to whatever color you want, and drag the Add value all the way up.

Now enable the Rings option, and make it sort of a lighter version of your color. So basically:

If you chose Blue, use Turquoise for the ring color
Red = Orange
Green = Yellow
Purple = Pink
etc...

You can sort of approximate for those colors.

That's it! Render it out, and see what you've got! Thanks for reading this short tutorial, and post any questions, comments, or problems below. Remember, I need more tutorial requests, as I'm running out of ideas that haven't already been taken.

Tutorial Requests

2010-12-15T18:47:00.001-05:00

Anyone have any Blender tutorial requests? I have a couple ideas, but I need to think them through a little more before doing anything with them. In the mean time, fire away :D

The Basics of Terragen 2 - Part 6

2010-12-15T00:55:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! This will be the final part in the Terragen 2 tutorial series (then I'm back to making more Blender tutorials! But I need tutorial requests :D), and this will cover both Water and Objects.

This is the final result of all of the tutorials combined (with higher detail settings and different render dimensions):

So let's get started! Begin by first selecting the big Water button at the top, then adding a Lake water object.

Just about the only thing we need to change on our water is the water level, which we can adjust by changing the Water Level slider.

But how high do we put the water? This can be answered by hovering your cursor over the 3D Preview (where you want your water to be, more specifically) and look at the number next to the letter 'y' on the small panel beneath the window; then type that number into the water level value.

That's it on the water! That was short, wasn't it? Yeah, that's why I've incorporated Objects into this final part, too. So let's add some in! If you look at the first part of this tutorial (that can be found here) I suggested you download the two additional plant packs at the bottom of the page; well, this is where I'll be using them. Let's start by clicking on the Objects button up at the top in the toolbar.

If you click on Add Object you get 2 choices; whether you want to add an Object, or a Population. An object is just one single object, whereas a population is a group of objects. We're going to add a population, so hover over Population and choose tgo Reader. Locate your plant that you want to include; in my case, I'll be using the Grand Fir tree from XFrog.

You'll notice that when you add the population, nothing show up. This is because you need to define the center of the population by hovering over the spot you want it to be in in the 3D Preview, right clicking, and selecting Copy Coordinates. Paste the coordinates in the Area Centre spot in the properties panel.

Now our population is set, but we may need to change a few of the other settings. In the Distribution tab, you may want to adjust the Object Spacing. This defines the amount of space between each object. In the Object Scale tab, you might want to adjust the size of your objects. I won't go over those, as they're fairly self explanatory. Once you want to test out your settings, do a quick render to see how it looks. Once you've finally settled upon something you're happy with, click the big Populate Now button at the bottom of the properties panel.

Now I'll give you a real treat; let's add a planet :D

A box should appear in your 3D Preview; click on it, then use the arrows (or 3D manipulator) to move it around.

There are other settings for the planets, but I'm not that familiar with most of them, and I'm happy with the defaults anyway.

That's it for the final part! I hope you've enjoyed looking at this whole series, and if you have any questions, comments, or problems you've encountered, feel free to post them below or email me at ben.amend@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

The Basics of Terragen 2 - Part 5

2010-12-14T19:22:00.000-05:00

Hey, everyone! In this part of the Terragen series, I'll be covering two things that can dramatically change the overall feel of your landscape: Lighting & Atmosphere

This is the final result of this part of the tutorial:

So let's get started! Begin by clicking the big Lighting button in the toolbar at the top.

We'll first put our sun into a better position. The only 2 settings we'll be using on our sun are the Heading and Elevation. Adjusting the heading will basically rotate the sun around the camera, and the elevation will determine how high the sun is, to give a sunset/sunrise feel to it. Let's tweak those until we get the results we want. When you're rotating the sun, you'll notice a little white cross come into view. This resembles the sun, and I'll use it as a guideline to positioning my sun where I want it to be.

After I adjusted those settings, here's what I came up with:

Well, that pretty much sums up the lighting part! Now let's move on to some of the atmosphere settings. First off, you'll notice that if you render (I'm not going to, for time's sake) there's some really ugly noise all over the darker parts of your image. To fix this, first go to the Atmosphere tab in the toolbar, then go to the Quality tab in the Properties panel, and finally raise the Number of Samples value. I'll keep mine at about 45 for now, but typically I won't render a final image unless the atmospheric samples are at least 55 (64 is the maximum).

There are two more things I want to do with the atmosphere settings; first, go back to the Main tab and increase the redsky decay to 3 or 4 (unless your scene isn't a sunrise/sunset). this will add a little more red to the sky, and make it much more believable.

Now for the other thing: Clouds! You can't have a perfectly clear sky (well, you can, but not often :P), so let's add a few clouds in there to make the image much more interesting. Back up above the outline, click on Add Cloud Layer and select the 3D Volumetric option.

Begin by first changing the Edge Sharpness to 10, and the Cloud Density to 0.03.

Next, go to to the Density Fractal Shader by clicking on the + sign next to it, then choosing Go to Density Fractal.

On the new window that opens up, press the Random Seed button repeatedly until you're happy with the scattering of the clouds.

Now close out of that window, and under the Tweaks tab, enable Flatter Base and adjust the Base Wispiness and the Base Softness values to your taste.

Now let's add one more cloud layer; make this a high level cirrus. The only thing you need to do to this layer is to tweak the random seed again until you think it looks right.

That's it! I hope you enjoyed this part of the Terragen 2 series, and if you have any questions, comments, or problems related to this tutorial, please post them below or email me at ben.amend@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

The Basics of Terragen 2 - Part 4

2010-12-14T14:33:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! In this tutorial, I'll be covering the materials of our landscape, or Shaders as they are (inaccurately) termed in Terragen 2. I'll be using the same landscape that I used in our last tutorial on Rendering (you can find that here).

This is the final result of this tutorial (rendered, obviously):

So let's get right into it!

Begin by clicking the big Shaders button on the toolbar at the top.

In the outline, you'll see something that says Base colours. This is, as it states, the base color of our landscape; it's the color that's being displayed when we render our scene. Some people use it, and some don't. In this case, I won't; click on Add Layer and choose Surface Layer from the menu.

In the 3D viewport, your whole landscape will be shrouded in white. Or at least, it looks like white; it's actually just a light gray. We're going to make this layer our dirt (every landscape should have at least a tiny bit of dirt; it looks more natural), so name it dirt in the box next to the word Name.

Next, choose a color for your layer by selecting the box with the gray color in it, and changing it to a dark brown.

Now click on the + button next to the Color Function box, and go to Create New Shader - Color Shader - Power Fractal v3. This will add color variation, and break up the dirt a little more to make it look a lot more realistic.

Now that the dirt's done, we can add on another surface layer; so let's do that. Add another Surface Layer, and name it Grass. Select a green color in the color box, and give your grass a Power Fractal v3 shader as well.

But there are two problems here; one is, we want to be able to see some of our dirt poking through the grass (I know it sounds like it should be the other way around, but I know what I'm doing :D), so go to the Effects tab in the properties panel, and enable Intersect Underlying.

If we take a look at our 3D Preview window, we should see something like this:

As you can see, the dirt is breaking through the grass based on slope angles; this is especially handy when creating a snow-capped mountain (or even just a mountain completely covered in snow) and you want the rock underneath to poke through.

Let's add another Surface Layer; name it Rock, and select a dark grey color from the color box. Give this one a power fractal shader as well. You'll notice that the rock is covering the entire mountain, but we only want it to cover a certain portion of it, and starting at a certain point in elevation. This can be fixed by going into Altitude Constraints and selecting Limit Minimum Altitude.

The Minimum altitude determines what height we should limit the rock to, and the Min alt fuzzy zone is what controls how sharply we want the grass and the rock to blend together. In my case, the defaults work fine (surprise, surprise! That's a first :D), but you may need to tweak the altitude a little bit until you're happy with it.

As you can see, the rock now only starts at a certain altitude, instead of covering the entire mountain. I'm going to add a snow layer on top, but I won't describe everything I do with it, as I'll be using the Intersect Underlying option and the Limit Minimum Altitude as well, and I just covered these two aspects.

And that's all! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and if you have any questions, comments, or encountered any problems while following this tutorial, post them in the comments below or send me an email at ben.amend@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

The Basics of Terragen 2 - Part 3

2010-12-13T19:04:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! This tutorial will focus on another, and rather important aspect of Terragen 2: rendering. You may think, why devote an entire tutorial on just rendering? This is because there's more to rendering than just pressing a button and letting it work. You'll need to change some settings, and these will vary depending on your scene. Let's get started now.

I'll be using this landscape here that I generated:

If you don't know how to do this, please go to my previous tutorial here

Now click on the big Render button on the toolbar at the top

Your 3D Preview should have changed now; the lighting should be more accurate, and you should be able to see the sky, too.

In other words, when you click on render, you get a preview of your render, and not just the landscape as you had before while you were generating the terrain. You should notice two options in the Outline on the left: Full Render and Quick Render. The full render is just what it says; the full render. The quick render is supposed to be smaller and show less detail so it renders faster. The quick render should only be used for preview renderings, not the final image.

Let's do a quick render, first off. Click on the Quick Render option, and a bunch of options will appear on the Properties panel below.

We won't be focusing on any of these particular settings, as the defaults are just fine. Keep in mind that some of the features are limited if you have the free edition, though (like I do). Let's just render this and see what it looks like.

You'll notice that when you begin the render, you'll see this little dots begin to cover the screen. This is just the Global Illumination taking effect (if you want to learn more about GI, here's the wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination).

This is my result with the quick renderer:

As you can see, it's not very detailed. In fact, it doesn't look much different than what we see in our 3D Preview. So let's try out the Full Render now.

Click on the Full Render button in the outline. Set your camera dimensions as you wish; I'll be keeping mine at the default, though. Typically I'd raise the Detail setting to 0.8, but since I'm making these tutorials, and I need fast renders (:D), I'll keep it at 0.5.

Here's my result with the Full Render:

As you can see, the detail is a lot higher, the image is a lot bigger, and the overall quality is a lot nicer.

The render settings I talked about that would depend on your scene are controlled with the Atmosphere, so they will be covered in a later tutorial, which I will release as soon as possible. However, a more important feature is what I will be writing on next: the Shaders. These (though termed incorrectly) control the color and texture of your land (think of it as a material in other software, such as Blender).

That's it! Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, comments, or problems, post them below, or email me at ben.amend@gmail.com

The Basics of Terragen 2 - Part 2

2010-12-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! In the last tutorial, I demonstrated the basics of the navigation controls, and a small breakdown of what exactly everything was that you were seeing. Well, now we're going to actually generate a landscape!

If you missed the previous tutorial, you can find it here

So, jumping right into this, you'll see in the outline that there is already a default "Heightfield shader 01". If we click the + button next to it, we'll see that a "Heightfield generate 01" is connected to it. We won't be using these currently, but later on in this tutorial, I'll show you a very interesting function you can use them for.

Since we don't need these at the time, click the - button to minimize the smaller outline. Let's start by first clicking on Add Terrain, and selecting Power Fractal from the menu.

You should now get a pretty cool looking result in your 3D Preview window, and if you wait a minute or so, you should get something like this:

This looks really good already, but we can tweak it more by changing the Noise Basis in the Properties panel, by going to the Tweak Noise tab. There's an option that says "Noise flavour", and if you click on the drop-down menu next to it, 5 different choices are displayed. For now, we'll choose Perlin Billows, and you'll notice the update in your 3D Preview.

The land now looks more billowy, and it creates the illusion of something similar to rolling hills or worn-down mountains. All of the other settings are fairly self-explanatory, but one that I use a lot is the Random Seed button. Think of the seed value as a random value; every number that is inserted into the seed value box will randomly scatter the terrain. This is good if you're not happy with what is currently there, and you want to regenerate it randomly.

Now that we know a little bit about the Power Fractal, let's move on to another type of terrain (which is my favorite). On the outline, select your Fractal terrain 01, and press the Delete key to delete it. Add another terrain, but this time, choose Alpine Fractal.

You'll notice it says (slow) next to it; this is because the Alpine Fractal is slower than the power fractal. Basically, the Alpine Fractal combines layers of sediment to produce a much more realistic mountain result than the Power Fractal. You'll also notice that there are less settings on the Alpine Fractal than there were on the Power Fractal. Because the alpine is more realistic, and based on the way land is formed, you don't have as much control over it, as you would ruin the results if you did, and might as well have just used a power fractal.

That being said, let's take one last look at the Add Terrain option. You'll notice an option for opening heightfields. Basically, you can create your own heightfield in a separate program, and open it to use as displacement in your Terragen 2 landscape. I haven't had much luck with this though, as I haven't found enough information to learn how to do it.

Now for the thing I said I'd show you earlier; something interesting you can do with the default heightfield shader. Add a new terrain (I'm going to add an Alpine Fractal, but if you add a Power Fractal, this will still work. It's up to you), and then click on the Move button with the arrow pointing upward. This will move the new terrain above our default heightfield, and you'll notice (if you move your camera forward a little bit) that the area inside the white square is all flat, but everything else has mountains (or hills). This is a very cool feature, and you can do a multitude of things with it.

And that's all for this tutorial! Thanks for reading, and if you had any problems, or have any questions or comments, post them in the comments below.

The next tutorial in this series will be on rendering, so you can actually see your landscape in it's environment with the right settings to create an amazing render.

The Basics of Terragen 2 - Part 1

2010-12-12T15:03:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! In this tutorial I'll be teaching you the basics of landscape generation in Terragen 2. This will be a series, as there's too much to cover in one tutorial.

Terragen 2 is a landscape generator, and it produces extremely realistic results. If you take a quick look at my CG Artwork section on this blog, you'll see a few landscapes that I have made using this program.

Terragen 2 has both a pro version and a free version, and in this tutorial I will be using the free version. The restrictions in the free edition are:

1.) You can't use any of what you make for commercial purposes
2.) Your maximum render size is 800 by 600
3.) You have a limitation on detail amounts and anti-aliasing
4.) You can't use more than 3 object populations (we'll go into that later)
5.) You can't animate (it would take forever to render an animation anyway. A 5 minute animation could take up to a year to render, depending on the quality and size)

You may think these are all horrible restrictions, but I can't afford the pro edition, and I still enjoy using the free.

I know this isn't related to blender at all, but blender tutorials will still be released, it's not the end of the world (not that I get a ton of page views, anyway), and this is, after all, free software.

It can be downloaded here. I also strongly recommend you download the two additional plant packs at the bottom, as those are incredibly helpful at times (as land does tend to look a little better with some form of foliage covering it). While you're at the site, take a look at the gallery; believe me, you won't regret it :D

Assuming that you have installed Terragen 2, let's get started! Open it up, and a little splash screen will pop up. Unless you want to buy the software, click on Use Free Edition (obviously :P)

As you can see, the interface looks a bit complex at first (maybe not quite as complex as blender looked when you first opened it, though ;), but it doesn't take long to get used to it. I learned how to use Terragen 2 in about 7 hours (not straight, though) simply by messing around and looking at other tutorials for it. Let's start with the interface now:

As you can see, there are 5 main sections in the interface.

1.) 3D Viewport - This is where you can see the product of your work; the aspects that are displayed in it vary depending on what you're doing to the landscape

2.) Node Configuration - I'm sure you've heard of Blender's compositing nodes by now (unless you've never used blender before); and it's other nodes: materials and textures. This is similar in a way, except that this time, the nodes control the entire scene. As you can see, it has multiple different categories in it: Atmosphere, Cameras, Lighting, Objects, Renderers, Shaders, Terrain, and Water. There are several nodes that can be used to control those specific elements. Of course, a lot of things you can do with the nodes, you can do in the properties panel on the left. But there are some advantages to the node set up, and we'll delve into these later.

3.) Properties - This is where most of the magic is; the properties panel is what you use to do almost anything to your landscape.

4.) Outliner - The outliner is exactly the same as it is in Blender; it simply displays a list of everything involved in your scene, with a small amount of interactivity.

5.) Toolbar - Whatever option you choose on the toolbar will display its properties in the Properties window, as covered above.

Of course, there are multiple other options in Terragen 2, but these were the major parts of it.

Let's move on to the navigation controls. The main one you'll want to know is rotating your view. This is done by dragging your middle mouse button, just like you'd do in blender to achieve the same effect. You can also zoom out, but it's actually reverse; when you scroll your mouse wheel in, you zoom out, and vice versa. These a re the only two shortcuts I use, as I rely on the navigation panel for the rest of it. This is located in the upper right corner of your 3D viewport:

As you've probably noticed, these controls are fairly straightforward, so I don't need to go into too much detail on them.

Another thing is, if you move your view around a little, and like the new position, you need to copy the location to the current render camera. If you don't press this button, when you render, it will render the position you were originally in before moving, so be sure to press that button.

And that's it for the interface! I hope you enjoyed this quick little tutorial, and I'll be releasing one on how to generate an actual landscape next (probably within the next hour or so). Thanks for reading!

How to use the Ivy Generator with Blender 2.5

2010-12-11T14:10:00.000-05:00

Hello, everyone! In this tutorial, I will be teaching you how to use the Ivy Generator with Blender 2.5. The Ivy Generator is a separate application, not an add-on in Blender, so here's the link: http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/

This is the final result of this tutorial (with a few tweaks and post-processing):

The installation process is fairly straightforward, but when you're trying to open the application, it might get a little confusing. Once you've installed it, and extracted the files so they are no longer in a zipped folder, what you need to do is go into the 'bin' directory, and the application is right there. I recommend creating a desktop or taskbar shortcut so you don't have to relocate it wherever it was that you installed it.

However, there's still one more thing you need to install, and that's this folder of textures located as shown below:

Just scroll to the bottom to find them (don't mind the strange fact that these textures take up more space on your computer than the Ivy Generator did :P)

I'm basically going to re-create a tutorial made by Tim Ellis on the Ivy Generator (you can find it right underneath the textures above), but as there have been some changes between 2.49 and 2.5, that tutorial doesn't work any more (at least, the materials part doesn't). So I'm going to fix that problem, make your render times 3 times faster than they would have been if you followed the other tutorial, and show you the basics of the generator as well.

So let's get started!

First, open up the scene you want to generate Ivy on. In this case, I have this pillar here that I will be generating my ivy on.

What we need to do is select the object(s) that we want our ivy to cover (don't mind my lighting setup)

Next, click on File at the top, hover over Export, and select Wavefront (.obj). You will be confronted with a window that is almost the exact same as when you save a file (so you should be familiar with most of the settings on it). On the lower left, enable Selection Only, Normals, and Triangulate.

Now choose the location you want to export your object file, and then confirm it. Now open up the Ivy Generator.

The controls may be a little confusing at first; they are as followed:

Dragging the left mouse button will rotate your view; sort of like what it would be like if you rotated the camera in Blender while in camera view.

Dragging the right mouse button will zoom you in and out.

Holding shift and dragging the left mouse button will rotate your view around the object

Holding control and dragging the left mouse button will pan your view (like it would if you held down shift and dragged the middle mouse button in Blender)

Now click on the option Import obj + mtl, and locate your object file. At first, you won't see anything, but all you have to do is slightly adjust your view using any of the given controls above and it will refresh the viewport.

The functions are also a little confusing, but after you mess with them for a while, they'll start to make more sense. For now, the only thing I'm going to tweak is the size. I'll just raise it a little, as my ivy is a bit too small. Once you've tweaked all the settings you want, double click anywhere on your object. This will assign a root point for the ivy to grow from; a little green box will appear where you clicked.

Now click the big Grow button on the right, and you get to watch your ivy grow! Keep in mind that the more ivy you have, the higher your poly count will be, so don't go too far. Sometimes, the ivy will stop growing on its own, but most of the time you have to click the Grow button again to stop it.

If you're not happy with your ivy, stop the growth by clicking Grow again, and double clicking somewhere else. However, if you're happy with your growth, click on Birth to create the actual geometry.

Now all you have to do is export your file by clicking the Export obj+mtl, and choose your file location again.

Just a quick notice, if you've double clicked somewhere, and you've started the growth, but don't see anything, it means the ivy is growing on the inside of your mesh. To fix this, all you need to do is press the Flip Normals button up at the top (by the import and export options).

Now open up blender again, and load your previous scene (the one you exported into an object file before the ivy generation). All you need to do now is import the ivy object file, and you should get something like this (in my case, I actually had more ivy than I wanted):

You may be thinking, that doesn't look anything like ivy. Well, you're right. That's because the ivy leaves are simply triangulated planes (planes with two triangles on each). We need to assign them their textures in order to get them to be rendered as actual ivy leaves. If you rendered now, you'd get this.

It looks terrible. There are no ivy leaves, just grey planes, as I said above. What we need to do is use the textures that we downloaded earlier, and insert them into the right materials.

We'll start with the leaf_adult material that you'll find if you go to the materials panel. Go into the textures panel, and rename the current texture Color_A (A stands for adult, in this case). Press the button to open an image, and locate the textures you downloaded earlier (created generously by Tim Ellis), and open efeu1.jpg. Make sure that under the Mapping tab, the coordinates are set to UV. Now scroll down to the bottom and enable Color under the Specular category.

Now add a new texture, and name it Normal_A. Make it an image texture with UV coordinates, and open the image efeu1_Norm.jpg. Under Diffuse, turn off Color, and under Geometry, enable Normal. Then, under Image Sampling, enable Normal Map and set the type to Tangent.

Now add another texture, and name it Specular_A. Set the type to image, and the coordinates to UV. Load the texture efeu1_rough.jpg. Disable Color under the Diffuse category, and enable Intensity under the Specular category. Set the value to -1.

Now add another texture, and name it Mask_A. Set the type to image, load the image efeu1_trans.jpg, and set the coordinates to UV. Under Diffuse, disable Color and enable Alpha. Set the Alpha value to -1, and enable RGB to Intensity.

Now add one more texture, and name it Bump_A. Change the type to Image, load the image efeu1_Bump.jpg, and set the coordinates to UV. Disable Color under the Diffuse section, and enable Normal under the Geometry tab.

Now go back to the Materials tab, change the diffuse type to Oren-Nayar, lower the Specularity to 0.057, and set the Hardness to 100.

Under the Shadow panel, enable Resieve Transp, so the leaf texture will cast a shadow, and not the whole plain. And last but not least, enable transparency, and lower the alpha to 0. The rendertime saver was here, as Tim Ellis had enabled RayTransparency in his tutorial. It probably would have worked in 2.49, but it doesn't in 2.5, and you get really bad results and a longer rendertime if you change the type to RayTransparency. That's why we kept it on ZTransparency.

Now simply repeat these steps for the other two materials (leaving out the transparency stuff on the branch material), and render it! That's it, and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

If you rendered now, you should get a result like this:

If you have any questions, comments, or you encountered any problems while following this tutorial, post them in the comments below, or email me at ben.amend@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

How to Create a Glazed Doughnut in Blender

2010-12-09T18:47:00.001-05:00

Hello, everyone! In this tutorial, I'll be teaching you how to create a glazed doughnut in blender (yum!)

This is the final result of the tutorial:

This tutorial will teach you how to:

Create a realistic doughnut mesh
Create a realistic (and tasty looking) doughnut material, with no UV Mapping or image textures
Use color bands effectively

So let's get started! I'll be using Blender version 2.55 beta, which can be downloaded here: Blender 2.55 beta

Begin by pressing X to delete the default cube, and Shift A to add a Torus.

On the toolbar to the left, change the Minor Radius to 0.65. This will make the doughnut a lot thicker, and the doughnut hole a lot smaller.

Next, under the Shading title, click on Smooth. This will make it so that the doughnut doesn't look so blocky and sharp.

Now on the right, go to the Modifiers tab (the one that looks like a wrench), click on Add Modifier, and select Multiresolution from the menu.

On the modifier, click the Subdivide button several times. I've set my subdivisions to 4; whatever you set yours to depends on how much your computer can handle (and yes, mine can handle more than that ;). This is adding more vertices and smoothing them out, to make the overall mesh much smoother. After you've subdivided, enable the Optimal Display option. The optimal display will make it so that when you render, it only renders the faces of the mesh that you can see directly from your point of view, and doesn't render the ones on the back that you can't see. This speeds up render time and 3D viewport interactivity.

Now click on the Textures button (the button that looks like a checkerboard), and add a new texture. Name it Displace. Naming something isn't necessary, but it helps when you have multiple objects, materials, textures, etc. in your scene.

You'll notice that it creates a Clouds texture by default; that's okay, but we need to raise the Depth to 6 (the maximum depth value). The higher you put the depth, the more detail the texture has.

Now go back to the Modifiers panel, and add a Displace modifier.

Click on the box underneath the Texture title, and select our Displace texture we made just a second ago.

You should now see a result as shown above; this obviously doesn't look anything like a doughnut. The problem is, the displacement is too strong. All we have to do is lower the strength down to about 0.05. You should now see something like this:

We have simply added a tiny amount of detail to make the doughnut look a little more realistic. But there's still one underlying problem; and that's that the doughnut is still too perfect because we need to add more displacement, but on a larger scale. In other words, now that we've added some of the smaller bumps, we need to deform it. A lot.

Start this by going into Top View by pressing 7 on your number pad, then 5 to go into orthographic view. Before we switched to orthographic, we were in Perspective View. This means that there's a vanishing point, hence the closer something is to your viewpoint, the larger is is, and the farther, the smaller. This can be inconvenient while editing our mesh, so switching over to Orthographic View will make it much easier.

Press Tab to enter Edit Mode, then A to deselect everything.

Now press the O key to turn on Proportional Editing. This way, if we select a couple Vertices (B for Box Select, then click and drag) and move them around (G), other vertices within a set radius (defined by the circle that appears when you move them) will follow it, but they will be drawn less and less the closer they are to the outer rim. You can adjust the size of the circle by scrolling with your mouse wheel.

Just do this continuously until you think your doughnut is deformed enough. Remember, if you want it to look realistic, it needs to have a relatively large amount of deformation, as doughnuts often get squashed up against the edges of the box and against other doughnuts.

Remember, since we're working in 3 dimensions, we need to go to the front and side views as well (Front - Numpad 1 Side - Numpad 3). By now your doughnut should be well deformed, so now we're going to give it another displacement modifier. But before we do that, we need to apply our current modifiers. Do this by clicking Apply on both of the modifiers we've added.

Now add your new displacement modifier, and select the Displace texture again. But this time, go back into the textures panel, and change the Depth to 0, and the Size to 0.5. Back on the modifier, change the Strength to 0.05 again.

Now out doughnut's looking good, but it's too tall, so press S - Z to scale it down along the Z axis.

That's it for the mesh; now we need to move on to the materials. Click on the Materials button on the right (the checkered sphere), and add a new material. Name it Doughnut.

First things first, set the diffuse Intensity to 1. This will ensure that our material won't render darker than it actually is. Put the Specular at 0.24, and the Hardness at 55. This adjusts how much light our doughnut reflects, and how widely it reflects it.

Next, raise the Emit value to 0.1 (this will make it so that the doughnut is emitting a small amount of light), and enable Mirror. Under the Mirror panel, set the reflectivity to 0.12, and the Fresnel to 1.8. The Fresnel decides how much of the material is showing through the reflection.

You should now see something like this in your Material Preview Window:

Now go into the Textures tab, and add a new texture. Name it Warp. This texture will warp all of the other textures we're going to add. Scroll down to the bottom, and disable Color, and enable Warp. Set the warp value to 0.46.

Now under the Mapping panel, click on the boxes beneath Flat and change them all to Z. You won't see any difference on the boxes, but this makes it so that the blend texture is going vertically instead of horizontally. Make sure you do this with all three of them.

Scroll back up to the top, click on the channel underneath the texture we just added, and add a new texture there. Name it Color, and change the type to Blend.

Under the Colors panel, enable Ramp. We've just now added a color ramp; with this, we can control the colors in the blend texture, and how sharp the transitions are. Click on the color band to the far left (you can't see it, but it's there), and click on the black box underneath it. Raise the Alpha value to 1.

Now we can go in and adjust the colors, and add new ones as needed. To add a new color band, simply click on the Add option right above the color ramp. You can then change it's color, and move it around the ramp accordingly. I won't go through every color band, but this is my result shown below. Keep in mind that the colors you're seeing in the texture preview window aren't accurate; just pay attention to the way you see them on the actual ramp.

I lowered the alpha value on the really light spot in the middle simply because I couldn't seem to get the color right, so I had to adjust both the color and the alpha values to get the result I wanted.

Now at the bottom again, enable Displace, and raise that value to 0.13, then raise the Normal value to 5 (but don't actually enable the normal). This will use the color ramp to displace our mesh even more. Also, if you're using 2.56a or newer, make sure you enable 'Old Bump Mapping'. Any texture we add where we use the Normal slider, enable this or you may experience a few problems with your textures.

Now add a new texture, change the type to Voronoi, and name it Bump 1. Now enable the Ramp option again, to allow us to work with the color bands, and switch the color bands around, so that the black is on the left, and the white is on the right.

Now scroll down to the bottom, disable Color and enable Normal (normal, to sum it up quickly, means 'bump'), and set the normal value to 0.25.

Now add another texture and name it Bump 2. Lower the Depth to 1, raise the Size to 1.55, and enable Ramp so we can work with the color bands yet again. This time, drag the black one up really close to the white one. This will sharpen it.

At the bottom, keep Color enabled, and also enable Normal. Drop the color value to 0.065, and drop the Normal value to -0.5.

Now add one more texture (last one; hang in there!), and name it Bump 3. Put the Depth at 0, and the Size at 0.65. Enable the color ramp again, and drag the white a little closer to the left, and drag the black a lot closer to the white, as shown below.

Enable Normal, and raise the value to 0.84. Lower the Color value to 0.18.

That's it! If you take a look now at your Material Preview Window, you should see something like this:

If you render now, you should get something like this (results will greatly differ depending on what sort of lighting setup you have):

If you wanted to take this image a little farther, I'd recommend you enable Subsurface Scattering (SSS). I had to tweak the settings on it a bit, but in the end it turned out.

So that's all! You've just learned how to create a relatively tasty looking doughnut in Blender! You may want to mess with a few things; typically the cleaner the mesh, the more tasty it looks, so try different levels of detail and see what you come up with.

If you encountered any problems, or have any questions or comments, post them below. If I haven't responded for a while, send me an email here: ben.amend@gmail.com

How to Create a Sketch Effect in Blender 2.55

2010-12-02T18:20:00.000-05:00

Well, since I can't get my video tutorials to upload anywhere else, and my website is still in progress (yes, I got a website with my own domain name), I figured I'd make a few more text tutorials here. This tutorial will teach you how to create a sketch effect in Blender. Here is the final result of this tutorial:

In this tutorial, we will be relying on the compositing nodes do do the majority of the work for us. The only thing we'll be doing outside of the compositing nodes is putting together our scene. I'm assuming you have at least enough knowledge to compile a simple scene (like the one I did above), but even if you don't, this effect will still work fine on the default cube ;)

So, we'll start by selecting Compositing from the drop down menu on the toolbar at the top.

Next, enable the Use Nodes option at the bottom of the compositing window. This should show two nodes: A Render Layer node, and a Composite node. Press Shift-A, and add an Viewer node (Output - Viewer). I like to drag the viewer node to the upper right corner, the composite node to the lower right, and the render layer node to the upper left. This will leave plenty of space in between for our additional nodes. Next, connect the image output on the render layer node to the composite node and the viewer node (Simply left-click and drag), then enable the Backdrop option, which is right next to the Use Nodes option we used just a second ago. You should now have a setup that looks something like this (if you're just seeing a black box in the background, try rendering the image, and it should appear as a background in the node window):

Now that that's out of the way, we can work on the actual effect. Start by adding a Filter node (Filter - Filter), and connecting the render layer output to the input on our new node. From this point on, it's up to you whether you want to reconnect any new nodes you add to the viewer node; just keep in mind that whatever is connected to the Viewer node is what will be shown in the background. On your filter node, change the type from Soften to Sharpen. However, you'll notice that it doesn't really sharpen quite as much as we want it to. To increase the amount (since the factor on the node won't go any higher than 1), duplicate the node and connect it to your previous Sharpen node, then set the factor of the new one to 0.05. The higher you raise it, the more detail will be shown. I usually like to keep mine relatively low, though.

Next, we'll add a Math node. Connect the newest Sharpen node to the first Value slot on the math node, then set the second value to 0. Next, choose Greater Than on the drop down menu. This will isolate anything that isn't part of the actual effect; it's basically what the render would look like if you used the sharpen effect, but you couldn't see the rest of the scene. If you connect the Math node to the Viewer node, you should see something like this:

If we wanted, we could stop right then and there and say that the effect was complete. It looks pretty good, but I think it can still be improved, so I'm going to continue on with that. Add a Blur node (Filter - Blur), and connect the value output of our Math node to the input of our blur node. Next, change the blur type from Flat to Fast Gaussian. Then raise the numbers on both the X and the Y values to 2.

Now add a Mix node (Color - Mix) and connect the output of the blur node to the Fac value of our mix node, then connect the Value output on the math node to the second input on the mix node. Change the node type from Mix to Screen, and by clicking on the little color box, choose a darker grey. How dark you make this grey is up to you and how light you want your 'pencil' to be.

Finally, connect the output of the Mix node to the input on the Composite node, and you're done! I've also added a vignette effect, but I won't go over that as it's not a necessary part of the tutorial.

Here is the final node setup (vignette included):

And here is a link to the .blend file (this was made in blender version 2.55 beta): Sketch Effect .blend

If you had trouble with any part of the tutorial (or downloading the .blend), then feel free to post a comment below. Thanks for reading!

*UPDATE* I figured out how to anti-alias the effect; go into the render panel, and under Anti-Aliasing, enable Full Sample. That's it :D *UPDATE*

Technically Second Video Tutorial

2010-10-16T19:24:00.000-04:00

Hello, everyone! This is technically my second video tutorial; I recorded a first one on a different topic, but it was 18 minutes, so I couldn't find a place to upload it. I'll redo it sometime soon and divide it into two parts. As it is, here's a tutorial. Sorry about the subject; I tried to a different one after this, as I wanted to do a tut where the viewer never had to leave blender and go into a separate program, but it was getting too late in the day, so I've stuck with this one for now. In other words, ignore the 'This is SSimpossible again' as it's only again to me, and not to you ;) So I guess this tutorial was more of a test; just something for me to practice, and a way for you to possibly get used to my terrible voice.

P.S. Sorry for all the mistakes
P.P.S. I noticed there was a strange glitch at the end where the cursor remained the same as the one in SketchUp; oops...

A Little Help?

2010-10-16T14:39:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone! I've recorded my first video tutorial, but it's 18 minutes long. That means I can't upload it on youtube, and vimeo's never worked for me. For some reason when I try to upload videos to it, it just doesn't do anything! The Recording is an avi file; does anyone know how I can get it up somewhere so people can follow it?! I can't upload it directly to my blog either; it'll compress it too badly...

Video Tutorials

2010-10-14T16:56:00.000-04:00

What do you think? Should I start writing video tutorials? They take up a lot less of my time, so I would have huge delays like this if I did them. I need input on this before it'll happen, though. If I do, I'll start by re-doing the Magnifying glass tutorial, this time completing it. And I won't have so many tutorial parts either.

Apologies

2010-09-29T15:37:00.001-04:00

Sorry everyone, but the magnifying glass effect part 2 won't be coming out for a few more days. I hope I didn't disappoint anyone, and I'll try to get it posted as soon as possible.