How-To Tutorials - Game Development

The next step would be to play around with Layer Modes which, I believe, is one of the most exciting aspects of graphic design. Let's leave layer “lower shine” for awhile and let's get back to layer “upper shine”, and change its layer mode to make it look more appealing and following a scheme in accordance to the color of the sphere. To do this, let's select “upper shine” layer on the Layers Window and right above the Opacity Slider is a dropdown menu containing lots of interesting layer modes, each having its own distinct advantages. You can play around and choose whichever suits your vision the best. I chose Overlay for that matter. Ever since I've started GIMPing, this layer mode has been my best friend for a couple of years already, it works like a charm most of the time.  I wonder though why on some applications, applying the overlay layer mode does different results.  As in the case of Photoshop, the closest I could get with GIMP's overlay is the Screen mode.  You've got to play around a bit and see which works best for you. Do the same thing for the “lower shine” layer, choosing Overlay as the layer mode.  Then, whenever you see fit, you can duplicate the layers to achieve a multiplied effect of the mode. I did that because it felt that something was still missing in the luminous aspect of the shine. So I selected each layer, duplicated them both and voila. To duplicate a layer, you can either right click on the layer name and choose Duplicate Layer from the choices or just press the Duplicate Button on the bottom part of the Layers Window. Duplicated Layers Next, we'll add additional highlights to better emulate specular reflections. And again, we're exploiting the Ellipse Select Tool and another new technique called Feathering. I don't know exactly the definition of feathering in CG, but as far as my experience goes, feathering is a technique from sets of tools where you soften the edges of a selection creating a subtle transition and blurred edges. Create a new layer at the top of the layer stack and call it “blurred shine”, then give it a Layer Fill Type of Transparency, just like what we did with the previous layers.  And with layer 'blurred shine” active, let's create an elliptical selection on the upper left hand part of the sphere, just where the sharp shine has been cast. Creating the Specular Selection With the selection active, right click on the Image Window and choose Select > Feather, then input a value for the feather and the unit to be used. I used 50 pixels. You might have noticed now that the selection seemed to have become smaller, and that's alright, that means you've done it right.  And with the marching ants still active, grab the Bucket Fill Tool over at the Toolbox Window or press SHIFT + B to activate it. Change your foreground color to something close to white or simply pure white, then with the Bucket Fill Tool active, click on the active selection. Tadaaaa! You just created a replica of a specular highlight, though not so close enough. What's great about feathering selections as opposed to applying a blur filter is that you only blur the selection border and not the entire selection. So, say, you have a picture of yourself and you wanted your face fade out smoothly on a vast landscape that you have photographed. Simply create a selection around your face, then apply a Feather to that selection, invert the selection and delete the outer parts, thus leaving only your face and the landscape behind (supposing you have your picture on a separate layer above the landscape layer.) Feathering the Selection Applying the Color with the Bucket Fill Whew, that was pretty quick, isn't it? I hope you agree with me on that.  If so, let's create another one, though smaller and placed just on the left of the blurred shine.  Create a new layer for this new blurred shine and name it “small blurred shine”.  Follow the same procedure for the feathering and color-filling. I used the same feather value for the smaller selection (even though it obviously is smaller), just so it almost affects the center of the selection, blurring the whole selection already, which is what I like for this part. And then, just like what we did with the upper and lower shine respectively, we'll change the Layer Modes to Overlay and duplicate the layers as we see fit.  Doing so results in this image: Blurred Shines Overlay Our sphere now looks a lot better than it had been when we first added its color. However, the shading still looks a bit flat and volumeless. To deal with that, we'll simulate the strength with which the light diffused our sphere object, creating deeper shadows on the opposite side of the light source. Duplication of layers is not only a matter of multiplying the effects of layer effects or such, but it can also be a good way to trace your changes, or better yet, as safe backups where working on the duplicate doesn't affect the original one and you can go back each time to the untouched layer anytime you want to see the differences that have been made.  But be careful though, the more layers and contents of each layer you have, the more computing memory will be consumed and will eventually cause a system slow down. Let's select the “sphere” layer and duplicate in once.  Automatically, the duplicate layer which is now named “sphere copy” becomes the active layer.  Right Click on “sphere copy” layer and choose Alpha to Selection to create a selection out of the fully opaque sphere. Next step is to shrink the selection such that we create a smaller elliptical selection inside the sphere.  To do this, right click on the Image Window and choose Select > Shrink.  Then on the pop up window that appears, type in an appropriate value for the shrinking. I chose 50 pixels. Shrinking the Selection Shrinked Selection Remember how we moved the selection last time? I believe you do. To translate/move our selection, grab the Ellipse Select Tool and activate the selection by clicking on it (clicking the middle portion of the selection makes this easier) until you see your cursor change into crossed arrows, this means you have just activated the move tool for the selection. And since the light is coming from the upper left direction, we would want to move the selection over to the location where the specular reflections are and where the lightest shading is.  Thats because later on, we'll be using this same selection to create shadows on the opposite side of the shade.  Now go ahead and drag the selection over to the upper left portion of the sphere.

In the previous article I've written ( Creating Convincing Images with Blender Internal Renderer-part1), I discussed about creating convincing 3D still images through color manipulation, proper shadowing, minimal lighting, and a bit of post-processing, all using but one application – Blender. This time, the article you're about to read will give us some thoughts on how to mimic a 3D scene with the use of some basic 2D tools. Here again, I would stress that nothing beats a properly planned image, that applies to all genres you can think of. Some might think it's a waste of precious time to start sitting and planning without having a concrete output at the end of the thought process. But believe me, the ideas you planned will be far more powerful and beautiful than those ideas you just had, when you were just messing around and playing with the tool directly. In this article, I wouldn't be teaching you how to paint since I'm not good at it, rather I'll be leading you through a series of steps on how to digitally sketch/draw your scenes, give them subtle color shifts, add fake lighting, and apply filter effects to further emulate how 3D does its job. Primarily, this all leads you into a guide on how I create my digital drawings (though I admit they're not the best of its kind), but somehow I'm very proud, I eventually gave life to them from concept stage to digital art stage. It might be a bit daunting at first, but as you go along the series, you'll notice it gets simpler.  However, some might get confused as to how this applies to other applications since we're focusing on The GIMP in this article. That's not a problem at all once you are familiar with your own tool; it will just be a matter of working around the tools and options. I have been using The GIMP for a long time already, and as far as I can remember, I haven't complained on its shortcomings since those shortcomings are only but bits of features which I wouldn't be need at all.  So to those of you who have been and are using other image editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, Corel, etc., you're welcome to wander around and feel free to interpret some GIMP tools to that of yours.  It's all the same after all, just a tad bit difference on the interface. Just like what Jeremy Birn has said on one of his books: “Being an expert user of a 3D Program, bit itself, does not make the user into an artist more than learning to run a Word Processor makes someone into a good writer.” Additionally, one vital skill you have to develop is the skill of observation, which I myself ham yet to master. Methods Used Basic Drawing Selection Addition, Subtraction, Intersection Gradient Coloring Color Mixing Layering Layer Modes Layer Management Using Filters Requirements Latest version of The GIMP (download at http://www.gimp.org/downloads) Basic knowledge of image editing programs with layering capabilities Patience Let's Get Started! I would already assume you have the latest version of GIMP installed on your system and is running properly, otherwise, fix the problem or ask help from the forum (http://www.gimptalk.com). I'm also assuming you have all your previous tasks done before sitting down and going over this article (which I'm pretty much positive you are). And then lastly, be patient. Sketch it out The very first thing we're going to do is to sketch our ideas for the image, much like a single panel of a storyboard. It doesn't matter how good you draw it as long as you understand it yourself and you know what's going on in the drawing. This time, you can already visualize and create a picture of your final output and it's great if you did, if not, it's fine still. The important thing is we have laid down our scene one way or another. You can take your time sketching out your scenes and adding details to them like how many objects are seen, how many are in focus, what colors do they represent, how are your characters' facial expressions, what is the size of your image, etc. So just in case we forgot how it's going to look like in the end, we have a reference to call upon and that is your initial sketch. This way, you'll also be affected by the persistence of vision where after hours and hours (yay!) of looking on your sketch, you somehow see an afterimage of what you are about to create, and that's a good thing! I'm not good at sketching so please bear with my drawing: After this, it's now time to open up The GIMP and begin the actual fun part! First Run After executing GIMP, this should (and most likely) be the initial screen that's going to be displayed on your screen: The GIMP Initial Screen We don't want Wilbur (GIMP's Mascot) to be glaring at us from a blank empty window all the time, do we? And right now we could go ahead and add a canvas with which we'll be adding our aesthetic elements into, but before that you might want to inspect your application and tool preferences just to make sure you have set everything right. Activate the window with the menu bar at the top (since we currently have three windows to choose from), and then locate Edit > Preferences, as seen below: Locating GIMP's Preferences GIMP Preferences Everything you see here should be self-explanatory, if it isn't, just leave it for the moment and check the manual later, since I'm pretty much sure that thing you didn't understand on the Preferences must be something we will not use here.  So go ahead and save whatever changes you did and sometimes, GIMP might ask you to restart the application for the changes to take effect, then do what she says and we should be back on the black canvas shortly after application restart. By now, we should be having three windows, the main Toolbox Window (located on the left), the main Image Window (located on the middle), and the Layers Window (located on the right).  If, by any chance, the Layer Window is not there, go ahead and activate the Image Window and go to Windows > Layers or press CTRL + L to bring up the Layer Window. Showing the Layers Window Creating the Canvas Now that everything's set up, we'll go ahead and add a properly-sized canvas that we'll paint on, which will be the entire universe for our creation at a later stage. Let's go and create than now by going to File > New or by pressing CTRL+ N. A window will pop up asking you to edit and confirm the image settings for the canvas you're creating. You can choose from a variety of templates to use or you can manually input sizes (which we are going to do).  Before that, change the unit for coordinate display to inches just so we could have a better visual reference of how big our drawing canvass will be. Then on the Width input box, type 9 (for nine inches), and for the Height input box, type 6 (for six inches) respectively. This, however, is a very subjective portion, since you can just have any size you prefer, I just chose nine inches by six inches for the purposes of this article. Clicking the Advanced Options drop-down menu will reveal more options for you.  But right now, we'll never deal with that, just the width and height are sufficient for what we'll be need. When you're done setting up the dimensions and settings, click OK to confirm (is there a chance we could chance the OK buttons to “Alright” buttons, which sounds, uhmmm, better). Creating a New Image At this moment, we should be seeing a blank canvas with the dimensions that we've set awhile back. Then just at the right window (Layers Window), you'll notice there's already one layer present as compared to the default which is none. So everytime we add a new layer (which is very vital), we'll be referencing them over to the Layers Window. Since the creation of the layering system in image editors, it has been a blast to organize elements of an image and apply special effects on them as necessary. We can imagine layers as transparent sheets overlaying each other to form one final image; one transparent sheet can have a landscape drawn, another sheet contains trees and vegetation, and another sheet (which is above the tree sheets) is our main character. So together, we see a character with trees on a landscape in one. But as far as traditional layering is concerned, digital layering has been far more superior in terms of flexibility and the amount of modes we can experiment with. New Image with Layer This time might be a good idea to save our file natively, by that I mean save it in a format that is recognizable only by GIMP and that is lossless in format, so whether we save it a couple of times as such, no image compression happens and the image quality is not compromised. However, the native format is only related to GIMP and is not known elsewhere, so uploading such file to your website will show no image at all because it isn't recognized by the browser. In order to make it generally compatible, we export our image to known formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc. depending on your need. Saving an image file on its native format preserves all the options we have like selections, paths, layers, layer modes, palettes, and many more. This native format that GIMP uses is known as .XCF which stands for “eXperimental Computing Facility”. Throughout this article, we'll save our files mainly in .xcf format and later on, when our tasks are done and we call our image finished, that's the time we export it to a readable and viewable format. Let's go ahead and save our file by going to File > Save, or by pressing CTRL + S. This brings up a window that we can type our filename into and browse and create the location for our files. Type whatever filename you wish and append the “.xcf” file extension at the end of the filename, or you can choose “GIMP xcf image” from a list on the lower half of the window. Saving an Image as XCF

Throughout the years that have passed since the emergence of Computer Graphics, many aspiring artists tried convincingly to recreate the real world through works of applied art, some of which include oil painting, charcoal painting, matte painting, and even the most basic ones like pastel and/or crayon drawings has already made it through the artistic universe of realism. Albeit the fact that recreating the real world is like reinventing the wheel (which some artists might argue with), it is not an easy task to involve yourself into. It takes a lot of practice, perseverance, and personality to make it through.  But one lesson I have learned from the art world is to consciously and subconsciously observe the world around you. Pay attention to details. Observe how a plant behaves at different environmental conditions, look how a paper's texture is changed when wet, or probably observe how water in a river distorts the underlying objects. These are just some of the things that you can observe around you, and there are a million more or even an infinite number of things you can observe in your lifetime. In the advent of 3D as part of the numerous studies involved in Computer Graphics, a lot of effort has been made into developing tools and applications that emulate real-world environment.  It has become an unstated norm that the more realistic looking an image is, the greater the impact it has on viewers.  That, in turn, is partly true, but the real essence into creating stunning images is to know how it would look beautiful amidst the criteria that are present.  It is not a general requirement that all your images must look hyper realistic, you just have to know and judge how it would look good, after all that's what CG is all about.  And believe it or not, cheating the eye is an essential tool of the trade. In 3D rendering context, there are a number of ways on how to achieve realism in your scenes, but intuitively, the use of external renderers and advanced raytracers does help a lot in the setup and makes the creation process a bit lighter as compared to manually setting up lights, shaders, etc.  But that comes at a rendering time tradeoff.  Unfortunately though, I won't be taking you to the steps on how to setup your scenes for use in external renderers, but instead I'll walk you through the steps on how to achieve slightly similar effects as to that of externals with the use of the native renderer or the internal renderer as some might call it. Hopefully in this short article, I can describe to you numerous ways on how to achieve good-looking and realistic images with some nifty tools, workarounds from within Blender and use the Blender Internal Renderer to achieve these effects. So, let's all get a cup of tea, a comfortable couch, and hop in! On a nutshell, what makes an image look real? Shading, Materials, Shadows, Textures, Transparency, Reflection, Refraction, Highlights, Contrast, Color Balance, DoF, Lens Effects, Geometry (bevels), Subtlety, Environment, Staging, Composite Nodes, Story.. Before Anything Else... Beyond anything that will be discussed here, nothing beats a properly planned and well-imagined scene.  I cannot stress enough how important it is to begin everything with deep and careful planning.  Be it just a ball on a table or a flying scaled bear with a head of a tarsier and legs that of a mouse (?), it is very vital to plan beforehand.  Believe me, once you've planned everything right, you're almost done with your work (which I didn't believe then until I did give it a try).  And of course, with your touch of artistic flavors, a simple scene could just be the grandest one that history has ever seen. This article, by any means, does not technically teach you how to model subjects for your scene nor does it detail the concepts behind lighting (which is an article on its own and probably beyond my knowledge) nor does it teach you “the way” to do things but instead it will lead you through a process by which you will be able to understand your scene better and the concepts behind. I would also be leading you through a series of steps using the same scene we've setup from the beginning and hopefully by the end of the day, we could achieve something that comprises what has been discussed here so far. I have blabbered too much already, haven't I? Yeah.  Ok, on to the real thing. Before you begin the proceeding steps, it is a must (it really really is) to go grab your copy of Blender over at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/. The version I used for this tutorial is 2.49a (which should be the latest one being offered at Blender.org [as of this writing]). Scene Setup With every historical and memorable piece, it is a vital part of your 3d journey to setup something on your scene.  I couldn't imagine how a 3D artist could pass on a work with a blank animated scene, hyper minimal I might say. To start off, fire up Blender or your favorite 3D App for that matter and get your scene ready with your models, objects, subjects, or whatever you call them, just get them there inside your scene so we could have something to look at for now, won't we? On the image below (finally, a graphic one!), you could see a sample scene I've setup and a quick render of the said scene. The first image shows my scene with the model, two spheres, a plane, a lamp, and a camera. The second image shows the rendered version.   You'll notice that the image looks dull and lifeless, that is because it lacks the proper visual elements necessary for creating a convincing scene.  The current setup is all set to default, with the objects having no material data but just the premade ones set by Blender and the light’s settings set as they were by default. Shading and Materials To address some issues, we need to identify first what needs to be corrected.  The first thing we might want to do is to add some initial materials to the objects we have just so we could clearly distinguish their roles in the scene and to add some life to the somewhat dry set we have here.  To do so, select one object at a time and add a material. Let’s first select the main character of the scene (or any subject you wish for that matter) by clicking RMB (Right Mouse Button) on the character object, then under the Buttons Window, select Shading (F5), then click the Material Buttons tab, and click on “Add New” to add a new material to our object. Adding a New Material After doing so, more options will show up and this is where the real fun begins. The only thing we’ll be doing for now is to add some basic color and shading to our objects just so we could deviate from the standard gray default.  You’ll notice on the image below that I’ve edited quite a few options.  That’s what we only want for now, let’s leave the other settings as they are and we’ll get back to it as soon as we need to. Character Initial Material Settings   Big Sphere Initial Material Settings Small sphere Initial Material Settings   Ground Initial Material Settings If we do a test render now, here’s how it will look like: Render With Colors Still not so convincing, but somehow we managed to add a level of variety to our scene as compared to the initial render we’ve made.  Looking at the latest render we did, you’ll notice that the character with the two spheres still seem to be floating in space, creating no interaction whatsoever with the ground plane below it. Another thing would be the lack of diffuse color on some parts of the objects, thus creating a pitch black color which, as in this case, doesn’t seem to look good at all since we’re trying to achieve a well-lit, natural environment as much as possible. A quick and easy solution to this issue would be to enable Ambient Occlusion under the World Settings tab. This will tell Blender to create a fake global illumination effect as though you have added a bunch of lights to create the occlusion.  This would be a case similar to adding a dome of spot lights, with each light having a low energy level, creating a subtle AO effect. But for the purposes of this article, we’d be settling for Ambient Occlusion since it is faster to setup and eliminates the additional need for further tweaking. We access the AO (Ambient Occlusion) menu via the World Buttons tab under Shading (F5) menu then clicking the Amb Occ subtab.  Activate Ambient Occlusion then click on Use Falloff and edit the default strength of 1.00 to 0.70, doing so will create further diffusion on darker areas that have been hidden from the occlusion process.  Next would be to click Pixel Cache, I don’t know much technically what this does but what I know from experience is this speeds up the occlusion calculation.   Ambient Occlusion Settings Below, you’ll see the effects of AO as applied to the scene.  Notice the subtle diffusion of color and shadows and the interaction of the objects and the plane ground through the occlusion process.  So far we’ve only used a single lamp as fill light, but later on we’ll be adding further light sources to create a better effect. Render with Ambient Occlusion Whew, we’ve been doing something lately, haven’t we? So far what we did was to create a scene and a render image that will give us a better view of what it’s going to look like.  Next stop, we’ll be creating a base light setup to further create shadows and better looking diffusion. Soon we go!

Textures In your journey as a 3d artist, you might have encountered several (if not all) astounding works of art.  And through close inspection, you’ll notice that we barely see them without textures.  That is because textures are one of the most important aspect of 3d, but still, this doesn’t apply to all.  But adding textures to your characters, props, environment, etc. will greatly add to the aesthetic factor of your image that you wouldn’t believe it would. There are a number of ways to add texture to your objects in 3D such as UV mapping techniques, projections, 2D painting, etc.  All of these depend entirely on what kind of render are you trying to achieve.  But for the sake of this article, we’ll try to achieve some nice looking textures without having to worry about the complex tasks involved with it.  And with this, we’ll be using the ever famous and useful procedural textures to create seamless and continuously looking texture mapped over the surface of our models. More information about Procedural Textures can be found on http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-233/procedural-textures/. Now let’s add some textures, shall we? Let’s select the character model in our scene then go to the Texture tab on the rightmost part of the Material Buttons window and click Add New to add a new texture. Adding a New Texture After having added a new texture, additional windows appear allowing us to further modify how the currently added texture will affect our material.  Name this first texture as “bump” and the mapping options can be seen below. Bump Texture Mapping Settings   Bump Texture Settings Add another texture below the “bump” texture and call it “stain”.  The settings can be seen below. Stain Texture Mapping Settings   Stain Texture Settings We could have added more overlaying textures, but this will do for now just so we could see how the textures have affected our material so far.  Rendering now will only lead us to the image below. Dirtier And Better :) This time might be a good idea to change our framing and staging so we could look at it at a better perspective.  Changing the camera angle and increasing the ground plane’s scale and some adjustments on the spheres, I achieved something like this: New Camera Angle For an even better interaction from within the scene, we will adjust some material settings to simulate hard and reflective surfaces.  It’s a little unfair to give our main character some good materials while neglecting the other stuff we have.  So let’s just get on, and add some decent materials as replacement to the initial materials that both the spheres have had before. Go on and select the larger sphere and edit the current material we have so it would match that of the settings as seen in the image below. You’ll notice I added a Color Ramp to each of the materials, this is to slightly give the color a color transition as would be seen in the natural world, in addition to the current diffuse it already has. The vital part of the shading process of the Spheres is the reflectivity and mirror options as you can see in the following table:     Ray Mirror Freshnel Green Sphere 0.12 0.76 Blue Sphere 0.21 0.99     Green Sphere Material Settings   Blue Sphere Material Settings Our render would now look like this: Reflections to Simulate Mirror Effect and Smoothness To nearly finalize this part, we now deal with adding a texture to the world and varying the colors that would affect the Occlusion effect. To do so, let’s first change the Horizon and Zenith color of our World and change the Ambient Occlusion diffuse energy to the color we’ve just set by changing from “Plain” to “Sky Color”, as seen below. World Settings Rendering now will lead us to: New World Settings Render Notice the subtle difference between the previous render and the latest one where the slight bluish hue is more distinguishable. And then lastly, since we've already added some decent reflective material over to our spheres, it would be best if we can also see some environment being reflected over, to add to the already existent character as one of the objects being reflected. To do this, we're going to add a texture to our World.  This is one nifty tool in simulating an environment since we don't have to do the hard work in manually creating the objects that are going to be reflected.  Not only does it save us a lot of time but also the ease by which we can alter these environment is already a big advantage that we have at our hands. So to do this, let's go ahead and go to our Shading (F5) and select World Buttons.  Scroll to the far left side and you'll see tabs labeled “Texture and Input” and “Map To”, both of these tabs are essential in setting up our World texture so pay close attention to them. Below is an image that further shows you what we need to set up (sorry for the sudden theme change). World Texture You might have already guessed what we should do next, if not, I'll continue on.  After heading over to the “Texture and Input” and “Map To” tabs, let's first focus on what's active by default, that is, “Texture and Input”.  In this part, we'll only need a few things to get started.  First is to click “Add New” to add a new texture datablock to our blender scene, after which, let's edit the name of our texture and name it “environment”, then change the coordinates from “View” to “AngMap” to use a 360 degree angular coordinate, you'll see why in awhile. Adding a World Texture After applying these initial settings, we'll go ahead and proceed to the actual texturing process, which, as far as the World is concerned is just a very quick process.  I suppose you're still on the same Buttons window that we're on last time.  Click on the Texture button or press F6 on your function keys. Bam! Another set of Windows.  You'll see here that the texture we named “environment” awhile back is now reflected over to one of the texture slots, just like what we previously did with texturing the character we have.  But this time, instead of choosing procedural textures like Clouds, Voronoi, Noise, etc., we'll now be dealing with an image texture, as in our case, an HDRi (High Dynamic Range Image).  Our purpose in using an HDR image is to simulate the wide range of intensity levels (brightness and darkness) that is seen in reality and apply these settings over to our world, thus reflected upon by our objects.  As in our case, we'll be using high dynamic range images as light probes which are oriented 360 degrees and that's the very reason why we chose “AngMap” as our World texture coordinate. More info about HDRi can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging and you can download Light Probe Images over at Paul Debevec's collection at http://www.debevec.org/Probes.  Save your downloaded light probe images somewhere you can easily identify them with.  I couldn't stress enough how file organization can greatly help you in your career.  You could just imagine how frustrating it is to find assets among a thousand you already have, without properly placing them in their right places, this counts for every project you have as well . So to open up our Light Probe Image as texture to our World, click the drop down menu and choose “Image” as your texture type.  This tells Blender to use an image instead of the default procedural textures.  Then head to the far right side to locate the Image tab with a Load button on it.  Let's skip the Map Image tab for now. Image as Texture Type Loading an Image Texture Browse over at your downloaded HDR image (which should have an extension of .hdr) and confirm.  Now that the image is loaded, let's leave the default settings as they are since we wouldn't be using them that much.  You'll see on the far left Preview just how wonderful looking our image is.  But rendering your scene right now would yield to nothing but the same previous render we've had.  So if you're itching to get this image right at our scene (which I am too), go back to your World Settings and head over to the “Map To” tab just beside “Texture and Input” then deselect “Blend” and select “Hori” instead.  Kabam! Now we're all set! World Texture Mapping options And now, the moment we've all been eagerly waiting for, the Render! Yup, go ahead and render and it would (luckily) look like the image below. Render with HDRi Environment Then finally, on the next and last part of this article, we'll look on how we can even further add realism to our scene by simulating camera lenses and further enhancing the tone of the image with Composite Nodes.  

Drawing lines with Lines3D Before VectorVision was integrated, Papervision3D already had a Lines3D class for drawing 3D lines. Two differences between drawing lines with VectorShape3D and Lines3D are: Whereas VectorShape3D enables you to easily draw rectangles, circles, and ellipses, Lines3D does not have built-in methods to do such things. Lines3D creates lines with a Vertex3D as the start and end point, resulting in 3D projection of the vertices that make the line. On the other hand, VectorShape3D lets you draw a 2D shape, which you then can rotate in order to achieve a 3D perspective. Let's take a look at how to create straight as well as curved lines with Lines3D, and how to add interactivity. The following class will serve as a template for the Lines3D examples to come: package{ import flash.events.Event; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.Lines3D; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Line3D; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Vertex3D; import org.papervision3d.materials.special.LineMaterial; import org.papervision3d.view.BasicView; public class Lines3DTemplate extends BasicView { private var lines:Lines3D; private var easeOut:Number = 0.6; private var reachX:Number = 0.5 private var reachY:Number = 0.5 private var reachZ:Number = 0.5; public function Lines3DTemplate () { super(stage.stageWidth,stage.stageHeight); stage.frameRate = 40; init(); startRendering(); } private function init():void { //code to be added } override protected function onRenderTick(e:Event=null):void { var xDist:Number = mouseX - stage.stageWidth * 0.5; var yDist:Number = mouseY - stage.stageHeight * 0.5; camera.x += (xDist - camera.x * reachX) * easeOut; camera.y += (yDist - camera.y * reachY) * easeOut; camera.z += (-mouseY * 2 - camera.z ) * reachZ; super.onRenderTick(); } }} Let's first examine what happens when we draw a line using the Lines3D class. How drawing with Lines3D works Each line is defined by a start and an end point, both being 3D vertices. The vertices are converted into 2D space coordinates. The lineTo() method of the Flash drawing API is then used to render the line. To create a line with the Lines3D class, we need to take these steps in the following order: Create line material with the LineMaterial class. The material defines the look of the line. Create a Lines3D instance, which is a do3D that will be used to store and render the lines. Use the Line3D class to instantiate a line. Add the line to the Lines3D instance with the addLine() method. Equivalent to how Particle instances need to be added in Particles using theaddParticle() method, we add Line3D instances to a Lines3D instance in order to render them. Lines3D has the following three methods to add Line3D instances: addLine() ad dNewLine() ad dNewSegmentedLine() Let's have a look at what they do and create some lines. Straight lines All t he following code should be added inside the init() method. First we create line material. var blueMaterial:LineMaterial = new LineMaterial(0x0000FF); You can pass two optional parameters as shown in the next table:   Parameter Data type Default value Description 1 color Number 0xFF0000 Defines the color of the line material using a 24 bit hexadecimal color value. 2 alpha Number 1 Sets the transparency of the material.

The main part of this article is dedicated to a library called VectorVision that was incorporated into Papervision3D. After discussing the classes of this library, we will take a look at the Lines3D class in the next part that also enables you to draw 3D lines. This class was already a part of Papervision3D before VectorVision was incorporated. VectorVision: 3D vector text and drawing VectorVision is a library written in ActionScript that allows you to render vector graphics in Papervision3D and add a 3D perspective to them. The project started as a separate library that you could download and use as an add-on. However, it was fully integrated in Papervision3D in June 2008. Being able to use vector shapes and text theoretically means that you could draw any kind of vector graphic and give it a 3D perspective. This article will focus on the features that are implemented in Papervision3D: Creating 3D vector text Drawing 3D vector shapes such as lines, circles, and rectangles Keep in mind that 3D letters can be seen as vector shapes too, just like lines, circles, and rectangles. The above distinction is made based on how VectorVision is implemented in Papervision3D. Some classes specifically deal with creating 3D text, whereas others enable you to create vector shapes. Creating a template class for the 3D text examples Because the 3D text examples we are about to see have a lot in common, we will use a template class that looks as follows: package{ import flash.events.Event; import org.papervision3d.materials.special.Letter3DMaterial; import org.papervision3d.typography.Font3D; import org.papervision3d.typography.Text3D; import org.papervision3d.typography.fonts.HelveticaBold; import org.papervision3d.view.BasicView; public class Text3DTemplate extends BasicView { private var material:Letter3DMaterial; private var font3D:Font3D; private var text3D:Text3D; private var easeOut:Number = 0.6; private var reachX:Number = 0.5 private var reachY:Number = 0.5 private var reachZ:Number = 0.5; public function Text3DTemplate() { stage.frameRate = 40; init(); startRendering(); } private function init():void { //code to be added } override protected function onRenderTick(event:Event = null):void { var xDist:Number = mouseX - stage.stageWidth * 0.5; var yDist:Number = mouseY - stage.stageHeight * 0.5; camera.x += (xDist - camera.x * reachX) * easeOut; camera.y += (yDist - camera.y * reachY) * easeOut; camera.z += (-mouseY * 2 - camera.z ) * reachZ; super.onRenderTick(); } }} We added some class properties that are used in the render method, where we added code to move the camera when the mouse moves. Also, we imported four classes and added three class properties that will enable us to create 3D text. How to create and add 3D text Let's see how we can create 3D vector text that looks crisp and clear. The general process of creating and displaying 3D text looks as follows: Create material with Letter3DMaterial. Create a Font3D instance. Create a Text3D instance, passing the text, font, and material to it, and add it to the scene or to another do3D. We will create an example that demonstrates several features of Text3D: Multiline Alignment Outlines All the following code should be added inside the init() method. Before we instantiate the classes that we need in order to display 3D text, we assign a text string to a local variable. var text:String = "Multiline 3D textnwith letter spacing,nline spacing,nand alignment ;-)"; Now, let's create a text material, font, and text. First we instantiate Letter3DMaterial, which resides in the org.papervision3d.materials.special package: material = new Letter3DMaterial(0x000000); The constructor of this class takes two optional parameters:

Modeling: the ear Ask just about any beginning modeler (and many experienced ones) and they'll tell you that the ear is a challenge! There are so many turns and folds in the human ear that it poses a modeling nightmare. But, that being said, it is also an excellent exercise in clean modeling. The ear alone, once successfully tackled, will make you a better modeler all around. The way we are going to go about this is much the same way we got started with the edgeloops: Position your 3D Cursor at the center of the ear from both the Front and the Side views Add a new plane with Spacebar > Add > Plane Extrude along the outer shape of the ear We are working strictly from the Side View for the first bit. Use the same process of extruding and moving to do the top, inside portion of the ear: Watch your topology closely, it can become very messy, very fast! Continue for the bottom: The next step is to rotate your view around with your MMB to a nice angle and Extrude out along the X-axis: Select the main loop of the ear E > Region Before placing the new faces, hit X to lock the movement to the X-axis. From here it's just a matter of shaping the ear by moving vertices around to get the proper depth and definition on the ear. It will also save you some time editing if: Select the whole ear by hovering your mouse over it and hitting L Hit R > Z to rotate along the Z-axis Then do the same along the Y-axis, R > Y This will just better position the ear. Connecting the ear to the head can be a bit of challenge, due to the much higher number of vertices it is made up of in comparison to parts of the head. This can be solved by using some cleaver modeling techniques. Let's start by extruding in the outside edge of the ear to create the back side: Now is where it gets tricky, best to just follow the screenshot: You will notice that I have used the direction of my edges coming in from the eye to increase my face count, thus making it easier to connect the ear. One of the general rules of thumb when it comes to good topology is to stay away from triangles. We want to keep our mesh comprised of strictly quads, or faces with four sides to them. Once again, we can use the same techniques seen before, and some of the tricks we just used on the ear to connect the back of the ear to the head: You will notice that I have disabled the mirror modifier's display while in Edit Mode, this makes working on the inside of the head much easier. This can be done via the modifier panel. Final: tweaking And that's it! After connecting the ear to the head the model is essentially finished. At this point it is a good idea to give your whole model the once over, checking it out from all different angles, perspective vs. orthographic modes, etc. If you find yourself needing to tweak the proportions (almost always do) a really easy way to do it is by using the Proportional Editing tool, which can be accessed by hitting O. This allows you to move the mesh around with a fall-off, basically a magnet, such that anything within the radius will move with your selection. Here is the final model: Conclusion Thank you all for reading this and I hope you have found it helpful in your head modeling endeavours. At this point, the best thing you can do is...do it all over again! Repetition in any kind of modeling always helps, but it's particularly true with head modeling. Also, always use references to help you along. You may hear some people telling you not to use references, that it makes your work stale and unoriginal. This is absolutely not true (assuming you're not just copying down the image and calling it your own...). References are an excellent resource, for everything from proportion, to perspective, to anatomy, etc. If used properly, it will show in your work, they really do help. From here, just keep hacking away at it, thanks for reading and best of luck! Happy blending! If you have read this article you may be interested to view : Modeling, Shading, Texturing, Lighting, and Compositing a Soda Can in Blender 2.49: Part 1 Modeling, Shading, Texturing, Lighting, and Compositing a Soda Can in Blender 2.49: Part 2 Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 1 Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 2 Creating an Underwater Scene in Blender- Part 3 Creating Convincing Images with Blender Internal Renderer-part1 Creating Convincing Images with Blender Internal Renderer-part2 Textures in Blender

In this two-part tutorial by Jonathan Williamson, we are going to look at how to model a character head in Blender. Along with basic modeling tools we will also focus heavily on good topology and how to create a clean mesh that will deform well during animation. This tutorial will take you through the whole process from setting up a background image as a reference, to laying out the topology, to tweaking the final model proportions and mesh structure. First Steps: workspace and references Before we get started with Blender character modeling, the first thing we want to do is make our workspace more efficient. The way I like to do this is to simply split my view down the center, putting the resulting left viewport in front view (numpad 1) and the right viewport in side view (numpad 3). If you're not familiar with how to split your view, please reference this short video tutorial. This allows us to work from both sides of the model at the same time without having to switch our view constantly. It also gives us more views of the model to help with accuracy and proportion. Now that we have our workspace setup, let's go ahead and bring in our background image for reference. Today we are going to use a simple, rough drawing of mine that has a front and side view. Anytime you are working from references (which should be almost always!) try to get as many angles as possible. This is particularly important when we work from photo references. Here is the drawing: To place the reference into the background of your workspace: Go to View > Background Image Click Use and Load to navigate to your image. Do this with both viewports. The next step is to adjust the X and Y positions to line up your image, it's best to align the center of the head from both views with the Central Axis point (where each of the three axis' meet.) Modeling: mirroring and structure With our workspace and references set up it's time to start modeling. The first thing we want to do is add a mirror modifier to the default cube so that we only have to work on one side of the model; anything we do will be mirrored across the central axis. But, before we do that, we need to add a central loop of vertices to our cube, along with deleting one half. This way we don't mirror our cube on top of itself. You can do this by: Going into Edit Mode with Tab Hit Control + R to activate the Loop Cut tool. Cut a new loop, vertically, along the cube by clicking the MMB when you see the purple line with your mouse hovered over the cube. From the Front View, make sure everything is deselected with A and then select the left-most vertices and hit X > Delete Vertices The last thing we need to do before we start modeling is adding a mirror modifier for symmetry: Go to the Edit Buttons (F9) and click Add Modifier > Mirror Click Do Clipping We are now ready to really get down to business! Modeling: edgeloop structure The single most important thing to remember while modeling a character head is the structure of your mesh. This is referred to as "topology." Edgeloops, or continuous lines or circles of edges, are the primary concern with topology. Proper edgeloops allow your model to deform well during animation; they also make tweaking and detailing your model much easier! To get started: Select the back side of the cube X > Delete Vertices We do this because we want to work from a single face. What we are going to be doing is laying out a series of edgeloops to map out the structure we want for the mesh. Let's start at the chin by moving our remaining face with G to line up with the reference from both view. Due to the variations in our drawing it is going to be necessary to compensate between the views from time to time. What we are now going to do is use the Extrude tool to lay out our loops. To do this: Select the two outside vertices with Shift + RMB Hit E > Only Edges to extrude. Extruding will automatically place you into grab mode, which allows you to place the newly created edge where you want it. In this case, along the jaw bone. You can use Rotate, Scale and Grab to help you position the edges. When you're done you should have something like this: We can continue using this same technique to get the following for the top of the head: As you can see, we are starting to define the structure of the mesh and the shape of the head, much as a traditional artist would use reference lines to sketch out a head. Before we go too much further, we need to go ahead and map out the eye, as it is one of the most important areas of the head, and it's topology is essential the rest of the mesh. To do this we are going to add a circle from the Front View: From the Front View, left click in the center of the eye to position the 3D Cursor Hit Spacebar > Add > Mesh > Circle Use 8 Vertices and a Radius of 0.500 Next you want to use your translate tools (grab, rotate, scale) to postion each of the vertices to fit the shape of the eye socket: Now with everything selected (A): Hit E > Only Edges Then immediately hit S to scale in. Use this same technique for around the nose and the mouth: That's it for the structure, this will then allow us to connect all the areas and not have to worry so much about getting the topology right as we have just laid out the major areas.