blender tutorials (text and video) for sculpties and more ...

LOD, Texturing, Basic creation, precise builds, ...
We have created a few tutorials for sculptie creation and beyond
using Domino Marama's "sculpted prim scripts".

The URLs are (in logical order):

VIDEO OVERVIEW PAGE:
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/

1.) INSTALLING BLENDER
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/12/the-blender-installation-guide/

2.) THE BLENDER PRIMER
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/08/24/the-blender-primer/

3.) SCULPTED PRIMS
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-sculptie-creation/

4.) SURFACE TEXTURES FOR SCULPTED PRIMS
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures/

5.) TEXTURIZING WITH MULTIPLE IMAGES
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/09/01/texturizing-with-multiple-images/

6.) THE BLENDER NODE EDITOR (Part I: Introduction)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/09/blender-node-editor-intro/


7.) HIGH PRECISION SCULPTED PRIMS (LOD)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/04/precision_sculpties_lod/


8.) THE ARCH EXAMPLE (precision sculpties with blender)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/16/the-arch-example/

9.) FROM PLANE TO CUBE (crisp edges with no effort)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/09/23/from-plane-to-cube-with-no-effort/

10.) SCULPTED PRIMS FOR THE BLENDER PURIST
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/14/sculpted-prims-for-the-blender-purist/

11.) FROM NURBS TO SCULPTIE
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/08/10/from-nurbs-to-sculptie/

12.) CREATE A CUBE WITH MULTIRES

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/04/25/cubes/#more-531/

13.) CREATE A CLOSED CYLINDER WITH SUBSURF AND CREASE

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/04/28/cylinders/#more-539/

14.) IMAGES WITH ALPHA CHANNEL
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/06/03/images-with-alpha-channel/

15.) 2 IN 1 (multiple objects in one sculpty)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/08/14/2-in-1-multiple-objects-with-one-single-sculpty/

16.) I-Beams (Create sharp edges using Oblongs)
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/09/07/892/

The Blog contains both videos and textual version of the tutorials.
We appreciate any feedback and ... any suggestions for improving and for
more tutorials are very welcome.

have fun

These are great, thanks! I am Blender-phobic and these tutorials have made the sculpty process much clearer.

Awesome! Great work on the videos!

Thanks, Greats videos tutorials, but where download the example file of the tutorials did you used in blender ? file name : sculpty_tutorial

Maybe this was missleading. We planned to make a zip file, which contains everything we used in the tutorial, but then at some point we decided, it does not make too much sense.

The .blend file doesn't give any further clue to the process and the helmet is not an artwork at all. The texture is just the foto of any standard helmet, massively blurred and recolored so that no copyright problem would ever occur. The 3D model was smashed together in just the time it took to make the tutorial (a 2 minutes work i remember). The clue is, that the process works with just any 3D model, which was created from a sculpt mesh. And i believe, you even can apply the process to arbitrary meshes meanwhile. But i never tested it yet. if you want to better understand the workflow, just

SPACE -> add -> mesh -> Sculpt Mesh

then proceed with the sphere, or the torus. forget the bending and sculpting, just go on with creating the uv map and later in the texturing tutorial apply your own textures to the sphere or torus.

in fact you can create your sculpted prim torus in less then 30 seconds. If you still want the .blend file, i can send it to you, but as i said, it is really clueless.

You can also IM me, if you want more details.

cheers

WOW, Thank you so much! I Had no clue how to advance to the texturing my sculpties from blender till seeing your video.

Hi,

Thanks for the tutorial very nice but i can't seem to get the sculpty i made to cut in four right like in the second video on texturing it.I see that i may need to DL something extra from graphicall.org.What is it i need to get from there?is that another pimped version of blender?

Thanks

The builds of Blender on graphical.org are later than the 2.45 release used for these tutorials. With a later build you gain the multires feature on sculpties, which lets you preview different levels of detail as you work. The workflow in these later builds is different than shown in these tutorials as the face select mode is now incorporated with edit mode.

The splitting of the UV map is done by selecting the faces for each quarter seperately. The unwrap features usually work with selected faces only. Once you have selected a quarter, unwrap, scale and move the UV points as shown in the video. You can find more information on UV unwrapping on the blender wiki

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Unwrapping_a_Mesh

Tip: Using "Set smooth" and adding a subsurf modifier can improve the texture baking for some models. 3 or 4 render levels of subsurf will usually eliminate the black triangles.

hi!

Thank you for the quick response,im new to blender,actually just started yesterday rofl,so this is all new to me so sorry if i ask silly questions.I have already got a sculpty made and tested inworld and it worked fine,i think the texturing is really the harder part now.can i use the capsule unwrapper for this?Thanls again and ill check out the wiki as well,i will have a textured sculpty on SL tonight

Thanx for the tutorials, I start using blender with this
I had some problems to understand because there are some audio distorsion. English is not my language, so was a little difficult in some parts

The method shown in the 2nd tutorial of adding another UV map is only needed if you are using an image based texture. If you are just using blender materials then you should just bake to the default UV map that is created when you add a sculpt mesh. This is a far better map than what you would get with the capsule unwrapper.

ok,i was gonna open it in cs3 actually cause i can use that much better than blender,like they did in the second tutorial,but i am having real problems getting it cut hehe.

I've used Blender some... but the selection of the halvesand inside of the helmet in the second tutorial have me stumped. I've watched the video several times. Something is just not working.

I can select half of an object only in vertex edit. What am I missing...

I'm reading through the Blender site but I'm not seeing anything that shows how to make that selection.

Help!
Edit=================================6/23/08
I have since learned how to handle these selections. There are some additional key and mouse combinations to be used.

Selections can be made using Ctrl-LMB as a lasso. Hold Ctrl down, click and drag around a selection. Blender draws a freehand 'lasso' selection. Points inside are selected. Used with the 'Occlude background geometry' button (only visible in object EDIT mode - with vertex, edge and face buttons - no Ctrl-Tab choice) it allows one to select points on only one side (visible) of an object. Note: this does not work perfectly and sometimes selects odd vertexs, so be careful.

Use Ctrl-Shift-LMB to deselect vertices, similar to above.

One can lasso or click individual vertex, edge, or face with these key-MB conbinations.

Using the Occlude button stops B-RMB selection and B-LMB deselection, which is what stumped me.

Why is it I don't see these things in the important key lists?

you can select them in edit mode. then when you switch to UV mode those remain selected. Just unwrap then. If you are also selecting the inside verticies when trying to only grab the outer ones you need to check that last box in the row that lets you choose between selecting points , lines , or faces. The fourth box is for hiding non foremost points/edges/faces from being selected.

Thank you for this hint. I am going to use this in our next tutorial

About the triangles: We think, the black triangles originaly came from the fact, that the first ring of vertices near the poles has been collapsed to one single point. So the first ring of faces near the poles is in fact made of "quads with 2 vertices at the same point" (mathematically spoken, this are triangles). That may break the texture calculation, which seems to split each quad into 2 triangles before rendering. And that can't be done at the pole faces, so one of the rendered triangles keeps black for each face.

As a consequence, the triangles also disappear, when you select the poles and press "smooth" once. This will create small holes at the poles, the whole mesh now consists of true quads, hence the triangles in the rendered texture disappear.

Cannot get video to play.

no, the links are ok. Maybe blip.tv had a temporary failure ?
And do you have the flash plugin in your pc ?
you also can try to "Play episode as windows media (.wmv)"
There is a select button right below the video canvas...

I hope that helps. good luck

It appears to be a problem with this system. I have the same antivirus running at my shop and it plays fine.

Tried all the choices, nada. Well I know it is me not Blip.TV
thanks

Switching to vertex edit mode and selecting works.

How you made the movie without changing out of UV Faces Select... I'm not sure. But it got me. I thought there was some selection method I did not know about.

Still I appreciate the tutorial. I have not found this information in a usable form any where else.

Also in Blender 2.46 on Vista I do not seem to be able to get the select to work as the Blender manual says. Quote: "...in solid, shaded, or textured viewing mode, there is an additional icon at the bottom right of the viewport that will allow you to select "Hidden" vertices."

With a bounding box select I cannot select anything with that button selected. If I use the right-click to select it pretty much works as I understand it should. So, the slection you do in Video 2 to select the front half of the helment simply does not work for me.

The comment that Alan left on the site is true for me. Some of the audio was very difficult to understand. I feel sorry for those with English as a second language.

Thanks, for both tutorials.

I just checked with blender-2.45 factory settings.

0.) x -> RETURN
1.) SPACE -> add -> mesh -> sculpt mesh
2.) Split the window in 2, on the right side choose UV-Image editor
3.) on the left side choose the UV face select mode (in 2.46 this is obsolete)
3.) on the left side select faces using "right click", "SHIFT + right click" or
bounding box select ("b" and it works as shown in the video.[/QUOTE]

You are right, the voices suck I meanwhile created textual versions of the tutorials to get at least something to work with. See the initial entry of this Thread. There i published the pointers to our Blog.
BTW the use of virtual voices is a huge time saving factor. We can change the wording on the fly, so we can post process and correct content with no hustle. And the textual versions of the tutorial came out on a finger snap Well, we consider to make a voice over with our real voices...
Anyways, we have been promised, that we get much better virtual voices soon. Let's hope, that this becomes true

I have also had some luck with cranking up the 'margin' setting in the bake tab to eliminate the triangles, also try baking at different resolutions.

-Whyroc

I'm trying to go through the video but having a few issues. In the first video it instructs you to use the connected mode, select some of the vertices at the bottom of the sphere, and then move them up using g and z. This however is not working for me. In order to move them up at all I have to actually turn connected mode off and then use g and z to move them up. Otherwise it cause me to morph the whole bottom of the sphere. After that though it tells you to use Page up and Page down to change the deformation range. This also does not work for me. Is there another way to do it or am I just missing something? What am I doing wrong?

I'm new to blender so be nice.

I too got stuck here with the same issue. help please?

I just rechecked with 2.45... 'b' does not work in UV Face Select... This may be a Vista thing.

However Ctrl-LMB does work for LASSO select. (I read more of the new manual...)

Is 2.46 stable? Have you had any problems with it? Is it worth the upgrade time?

Thanks for your help!

I would give it a try. You also can install both versions in parallel.
I started using blender-2.46 since Release candidate 3.
I am using it only for sculpties so far, but it works as expected for what i am doing.
What i really like is, that "UV-face select" mode has been dropped.
So you really save many mode switches during your work