Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Having a lousy model is not something that you want for your models, of course, but, as a good friend of mine (and experienced 3D artist) told me: “you can save a lousy model with good texturing.”
This month, I will try to explain the very basics of texturing (the truth is that I know the very basics). There are a lot of books out there describing texturing techniques—as textures are a very important matter for 3D modeling.
Low poly is a polygon mesh in 3D computer graphics that has a relatively small number of polygons. We usually use low poly models for performance reasons, in real-time applications such as games.
High poly models are usually used for animated movies or high detail pictures, in conditions, in general, where we don't have real-time performance restrictions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_poly)
I will give you an example to make it more clear what textures are and what they are capable of.
In the image below, we have a sphere with a plane, and illuminated by 3 lights.
Next, we have the same objects, but this time with textures and image mapping to create the surface filling on earth.
Next, we have the same objects with different textures on them.
And, finally, we have ball of aluminum foil garbage on a beach (very sad).
For the last picture I used an image for the sand, and, for the foil, the cloud texture with some normal map displacement.
But enough with the examples. Let’s load our snowman.blend file.
Select the three spheres (body) of our snowman, and press Ctrl+J to Join the three meshes to one. Name it “body” under the object tab.
Now, go to the material tab and press the New button to create a material for the body of our snowman.
Name the material with a unique name—for example, “body_Material”.
Next, press the tab next to the material tab called Textures.
Press New to create a new texture. Name it body_Texture, or whatever you like.
Find a picture of snow to use as a texture. There is a very interesting site that I use a lot at http://www.cgtextures.com. You can register and have access to thousands of images that you can use as a texture (with the free registration you can download up to 15MB of images per month. Download the low resolution images and you will be just fine). For our snowman, I downloaded the image Snow0041_5_S.jpg.
Under the type button, select image or movie. Then press Open under the Image section, and navigate to your file system to select your image.
Under the Mapping section, select Sphere for the Projection and leave Coordinates as it is (Generated).
Under the Influence section, tick on Emit and put the value -0.800 to light up your image a little, and, under Geometry, tick Normal and enter 4 for value to give a hard surface feeling. Leave the rest to default, or experiment with them to see what you get (remember that experimenting is one of the three things that you need to master blender, the other two are practice!).
Now, for the ground, here’s what I have done (of course, you can use an image instead). I created a texture from the type Clouds, adjusting some of the settings.
with these settings: Finish the snowman by creating and applying textures to the rest of the meshes (hands, nose, mouth, etc.)
Feel free to send me your creations of the snowman project at blender5d@gmail.com, and I'll present the best here at Full Circle Magazine.
Next month, I'll introduce you to the Cycles render engine—a very powerful renderer that has been included with the blender distribution ever since version 2.64. Also, we will start a new project. Send me your ideas.
For this month, I have a game called Dead Cyborg created by Endre Barath (http://www.deadcyborg.com). Another game created with the blender game engine. Enjoy!