Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Whilst preparing this tutorial series. Blender has gone to a new LTS version. I will be using Blender 2.93 LTS going forward. Our focus is still on newbies to Blender, and maybe those who want to expand their use of their Ubuntu system into new areas. Thank you to Javier Samudio (@JavierSam) for his help with this series. You can find him at: javiersam@blogspot.com Since we are working in Ubuntu Linux, our project will be a penguin. We will be making some common mistakes for you to make as well. Please follow along, just reading and looking at the pretty pictures will not grant you a skill. Fire up Blender and let’s start! Now, the way we showed you last issue is not the only way to do things. There are more. I need you to select “object mode” and change it to “sculpt mode” in the top-left of your display. You will now see that the icons along the left-hand side have changed to blue, red, and yellow blobs. The method to the madness is that blue represents additive editing, red represents subtractive editing, and yellow represents transformation. Hover over each one to get a ‘tooltip’.
Sculpt mode immediately ‘feels’ different, but the operation is the same. (Mostly). So obviously we need to use the yellow tools to get a pear-shape or egg-shape for our penguin base (body). (The details I leave to you, I just want you to use the program to see how awesome open source software can be!). The three tools that seem to fit the bill identify themselves as the “grab”, “elastic deform”, and “snake hook”. Since we discussed methods in the last issue, I am just going to say, click on grab, pick a spot more-or-less centre top, and while holding the primary mouse button, drag upwards. However, the brush size is tiny, and you will get only a horn, change the radius from 50px to 500px by dragging the slider that says “Radius” to the right. I get quite a nice egg-shape, but when I rotate my clay (middle mouse button and move), it wobbles like jelly. This is great for freehand, but not quite what we want. That said, I want a symmetrical character that views the same from every angle and you may not, so just enjoy your creation. So let us try the next tool down, elastic deform. Feel free to click on the grid on the right to change your view to orthographic, or bonus points if you can remember the shortcut key. With the brush still at maximum, repeat the process. That is actually a nice egg-shape. Now we rotate the egg and you cannot see that it is rotating, this is good, as it indicates uniformity. So this is the tool we need. For completeness sake, repeat the process with the snake hook. Did it work for you? What was the outcome? Actually all three worked for me on some level, but not my vision. (Angry birds-type of penguin, I think my reference is called “bomb”, so feel fee to search the interwebs for angry birds character or names, and you should see the image I am referring to).
Tip: never sculpt from one angle only, switch views and rotate often, as things can go VERY wrong if you do not. Since we are on the subject of reference material, you may have seen tutorials online – and if you have not, may I recommend “borncg” on Youtube - you will sometimes see they have a picture in the top-right. This is not overlaid on the video, rather it is built into Blender. You can replace the panel with your “Scene collection” to display a reference image you stole off the interwebs. To go about this, look for the treeview icon on the right just above the “Scene collection” and expand it with the little downward arrow. As it goes away when you move the mouse, I have to include a complete screen screenshot. Once you click on the second option, then you will click on the word “Image”, to the right, then on “Open”, and browse to your image to have it displayed there. If you have an older version of Blender, you can simply click on “open” on the right. If this is not your style, or if you have multiple monitors, you can always ‘alt-tab’ to the image, or have it open on another screen. This tip is for when you are on your laptop, like I am at the moment, and you have fifteen minutes spare (because you don’t smoke) scenario.
There is another way too, via add-ons, but I do not want to complicate things for newbies yet, as you need to switch from sculpt to object mode and import it as a background image. Rule of thumb: If you can get away with a basic shape instead of sculpting, do it. Tip: If you cannot find what you are looking for in a search engine, open Inkscape or Gravit designer, and quickly mock-up what you plan to do, export that as an image, and use it as your reference. (Just remember to block Gravit designer in your firewall so you don’t end up with nag screens). In blender, you can enable symmetry on an axis, so that things are mirrored, making it easier when you need to create two of a thing, like eyes, or arms and legs, and you can find it on the top-right, next to the little ‘butterfly’ looking icon. The X, Y and Z there are the axes on which you wish to mirror. (I may not have covered that in the first three articles, I am human too, I make mistakes, no-one knows that better than my wife, she reminds me of them every day. *wink*). If you plan on making changes to the “pear” or “egg”, I suggest you mirror them when sculpting as it makes things more uniform.
**For the folks who want a bit more on the Sculpting side there’s a few more things you can do after you have the “egg” form: • Click and drag on the object and it will be sculpted. Among the most useful brushes are: Clay Strips, Inflate, Crease, Pinch and Grab. But there are many more, including some fairly new ones, such as the Cloth brush. • With the “blue” tools, you generally add volume to the model (and by pressing Ctrl, you remove volume). • In addition, the Smooth tool is used to smooth the sculpting. It is very useful that by pressing Shift at any point in the sculpting process, the Smooth tool can be temporarily accessed. • I also find it interesting to say that you can switch between Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode to, for example, modify the object with the Pose brush or to smooth it with the Smooth brush in Sculpt Mode and then switch back to Edit Mode to continue with traditional modelling. • Finally, for somewhat more advanced tasks, the Multiresolution modifier, Dynamic topology (Dyntopo) or Remesh can be used.