Simple Modeling School

[Cherppow]

Hey hey,

I'd like to start a thread that encourages people to try out modeling and maybe even get interested in it. A place where people can ask questions about 3D, share modeling tips and of course post fan-art models. You don't have to be a 3d-guru to be able to create usable and enjoyable models. Everyone can do it! All you need is a little patience, imagination and a bucket of tools. To the start here I've made a small tutorial to those who've never tried creating 3D before, but who are interested in trying it out.



 *****

Lesson 1: Tools
 This is the dull part. Tools are important, however. Every artist has his/her tools. Our tools will be the computer programs. There is a good list of different modeling and painting programs in Guide to 2D/3D Contribution-thread. You can choose the programs which suit you the best. However, for the examples here I'll be using Blender and Gimp; They're free, cross-platform programs that can handle plenty of different tasks.

1.1 Setting up Blender
 Download and install Blender for your operating system. Check installation guide if needed. After installation Blender is ready to run.

1.2 Setting up Gimp
 Download GimpToolKit (GTK+) and Gimp, both available at www.gimp.org. Install the GTK first, then install Gimp.

1.3 Setting up Blender2crystal
 If we are to export our models to PlaneShift, we're going to need an exporter. PlaneShift uses Crystal Space 3D engine, and their preferred Blender exporter is Blender2crystal, so I recommend that one. Blender2crystal requires Python to function correctly, so download and install it. In addition, Windows users should download the XML package for Python. Finally, download and install Blender2cystal. More precise installation instructions for the exporter can be found at Blender2crystal installation page.

*edit*
1.4 Setting up CEL and CS
 The new version of blender2crystal exporter requires Crystal Space (CS) and Crystal Entity Layer (CEL) to function properly. I warmly recommend downloading them using the link on blender2crystal homepage. They provide a pre-compiled version of these software that have been tested with the exporter, so installation is quite easy, and it will save you of a lot of trouble later on, in the exporting phase. The link points to a zip package, currently named "pycelstart-7.8.zip". Download it to a temp directory, and unzip it's contents to a directory where you want your Crystal Space installed. Note that it will create an additional pycelstart7.8\ directory upon unzip. Personally I installed it in c:\program files\. Finally we need to set CRYSTAL and CEL environment variables. These simply hold the path to the corresponding programs. On WinXP open Control panel-System-Advanced-Environment Variables. Add a new system variable, called CRYSTAL, and give it a value "c:\program files\pycelstart7.8\cs" (or where you unpacked the zip). Remember to add the cs\ subdirectory to the end. Then add another environment variable, this time with name CEL and value "c:\program files\pycelstart7.8\cel". Click ok, and you're ready to go. Again check blender2crystal homepage for better instructions.

End of Lesson 1: Tools


 *****


Lesson 2: Getting started with Blender
 Start Blender. Feel free to play around a bit at first, let your curiosity take control. You can return to the starting point at any time using ctrl+x. You'll propably feel a bit disoriented at first (I know I do), the controls feel weird and you don't seem to be able to do much at all. Don't let that depress you, let's start from the the very basics. Press ctrl+x to revert all changes. You should see this:


2.1 Screen composition
Hmm, what is all that?

The screen is divided into three sections.
 - At the top there is Info Window. This window holds the "main menu" in the left and some numerical data about your current scene at the right.
 - In the middle you see the 3D View Window. This serves as your eyes to the current scene. Most of the editing takes place in 3D View. Currently there are three objects; the pink rectangle which is the default cube. It's pink because it's selected. Then there's a lamp, marked by black dot with few circles around it, and finally a camera is peeking from the lower edge. But let's leave them for now.
 - At the bottom you'll find the Buttons Window. There you'll find all possible settings for your currently selected object, its material, animation, lighting and so on.

 Note that all windows have headers and they can actually be changed to any type of window you want. Also be sure to check tooltip if you wonder what something does.

Here are the main items again.


2.2 Headers

Let's take a closer look at the window headers. They're very useful. Here is the 3D View's header:


 - At the left you see the icon showing this windows type, and a drop-menu where the type can be changed. Go ahead and try it. Change the window type to UV/Image Editor, and then back to 3D View. Note how the header changes to represent options available in each window type.

 - Next left you'll see View, Select and Object menus. Go ahead and check what each menu contains.
   - View-menu has different options for current view. We are currently in Top view mode, meaning we are looking directly down. Let's select "Camera" from the View-menu, this moves our view to the camera object. Click it and notice how the view changes. Now go back to Top view by selecting "Top" from the View-menu.
   - From the Select-menu you can edit which objects are selected and which are not. Let's try deselecting everything. Click "Select/Deselect" all from the Select-menu. You'll notice how the pink rectangle disappears to indicate that the default cube was deselected. Now click the "Select/Deselect" again. Notice how all the objects are now selected. If something is selected "Select/Deselect all" will deselect everything, if nothing is selected it will select everything. For now, let's select the cube again. You can do this by right-clicking on it in the 3D View.
   - Object-menu holds commands for modifying the currently selected object. Try selecting "Delete" and click "Erase selected Object(s)" to confirm the deletion. The cube disappears from the view and is deleted. Let's get it back though. Click ctrl+x to get back to the start.

   Note that menus also display the keyboard shortcuts where they're available. You don't have to memorize them now, but they'll become useful later on.



- Next in the header is the Mode drop-menu. We're currently in Object mode, meaning we can select and modify whole objects. Brief description of each mode:

   - "Object Mode" is where whole objects are selected, moved around and deleted.
   - "Edit Mode" is where modeling takes place; there we modify our mesh.
   - "UV Face Select" is where a meshes (sur)face texturing, appearance and functionality is controlled.
   - "Vertex Paint" is where extra colour and static shadows can be painted into meshes vertices.
   - "Texture Paint" is where you can paint and modify the texture image assigned to the selected mesh.   
   - "Weight Paint" is where you apply weight to vertices, used in animation calculation and skeleton-based movement.


- Next is the Viewport Shading selector. With this you can change how the view is drawn. We're currently in solid draw mode.

- Next in the line is Rotation/Scaling pivot selector and "RotateObject centers only"-button.

- Next is the "3D transformation manipulator" controls.

- Third from right are two sets of buttons. These are the layer controls. Much like in a painting program, you can create objects in different layers. You can then hide and show only the layers you're currently working on, or check the overall image by viewing all layers simultaneously. This helps especially when working on large number of models.

- Second item from the right, the lock image, sets the layers and camera to be unique and appear in this scene only.

- The rightmost button renders the window.

 If you right-click on the header, a menu appears. There you can choose where the header appears, or hide it completely. If you hide the header, you can get it back by right-clicking the window border and selecting "Add header". This also reveals another useful option: window splitting. By choosing "Split Area", you can divide any area into two. With middle mouse click you can change the split direction horizontal or vertical. You can also drag the edges to scale the windows to your liking.


2.3 Mouse buttons
 One of the reasons why Blender controls confuse a newcomer is the mouse button setup. Once you get to understand them however, they become very powerful tool. I'd categorize the buttons like this:

Left mouse button:
   Click, Accept action

Middle mouse button:
   Move, Turn, Switch

Right mouse button:
   Select object, Cancel action

In 3D View you move the 3D cursor with left click, you move the view around with middle mouse and select objects with right click. Holding down left or right mouse will pop up a toolbox. We'll explore that later.
 Control and shift are important help buttons here. Combined with mouse button, they give useful extra functionalities. In general:

Shift:
   Slow move, Add to selection
Control:
   Snap to grid move, Add new

 In some situations there's also ctrl+shift-combinations and combinations with alt, but don't worry, you don't have to learn them now.
 To an extent, you can customize the mouse buttons. Try dragging the Info Window border down and select the "View & Controls"-tab. You can choose the settings you prefer. For example I prefer Turntable view rotation over the Trackball one.


2.4 Toolbox



 You can open the toolbox either by holding down left or right mouse button over the 3D View, or by pressing spacebar. This is a collection of menus that will allow you to access most wide variety of tools. Note that some of the options there depend on what you have selected. In Object mode you'll have different tools than in Edit mode. Here are some useful tools:

   - Add-Mesh, Lamp, Camera: Used to create whole new object(s).
   - Edit-Duplicate: Duplicates the currently selected object(s).
   - Select-Inverse: Selects everything not selected.
   - Transform-Grab/Move: The main move function. Moves selected object(s) around.
   - Transform-Rotate: The main rotation function. Rotates selected object(s) around the rotation/scaling pivot.
   - Transform-Scale: The main scaling function. Scales the selected object(s) toward the rotation/scaling pivot.
   - View-Ortho/Perspective: Switches between Orthogonal and Perspective view modes. Both are useful in different situations.
   - Render-Render: Renders the camera view. Main render function.

The other tools have uses too of course, but with just the ones mentioned above you can already do a lot. Also note that most of the tools have keyboard shortcuts marked after them. Now would be a good time to memorize some of these. For example try using the following on your keyboard G=Grab, R=Rotate, S=Scale. I warmly recommend using Blender with one hand on the mouse and other on the keyboard.

For more comprehensive introduction to Blender check out Blender Quickstart.

End of Lesson 2: Getting started with Blender


 *****


Lesson 3: Edit mode
 First clear any mess you've made with ctrl+x. Now it's time to enter Edit mode. Do this now either from the 3D View header Mode selector, or from Toolbox-Edit-Enter Editmode. It is here that you shape your model. Note that the default cube on the 3D View has changed. It's still pink, but it's bordered by yellow lines and yellow dots on the corners. The dots are called Vertices, points in space. By connecting two points you can make a line (edge); by connecting three you can make a plane (face). Those are the basic construction blocks of modeling: Vertices, Edges and Faces.

 Now then, let's have a look at that cube of ours. First I want you to turn on the Perspective view mode. You can do this from the Header View-menu if you've forgotten. Then rotate the view around the cube a bit by holding down the middle mouse button. View is very important in modeling. Correct view can save you a thousand mistakes.

3.1 Selecting vertices

 Now that we know we're really dealing with a cube and not just a pink rectangle, let's start working on it. All the cube's vertices are yellow; they're all selected. Hmm? But pink was selected, was it not? Yes it was, in Object mode. However, in Edit mode the colour convention is a bit different. Here yellow marks selected, while pink marks unselected. Try it out, right click a vertex to select it. This will deselect all the other vertices and leave just the one you clicked, yellow. Go ahead and select few others. Notice how the previous always unselects leaving only the one you click selected. To select multiple vertices, hold down shift key, or Box select with B-key.

 There's this contraption of arrows that seems to follow your selection. It's called "3D transform manipulator". You can read more about it in Blender homepage, but for now, let's turn it off. Do this by clicking the hand icon in the 3D View header.

Here are the main items again:



3.2 Select modes



 Let's look at the 3D View header again. When we entered Edit Mode, a few new buttons appeared there. At the right, there is a set of four buttons. These control the select mode. Until now we've been in "Vertex select" mode, in which we can select and move individual vertices. In addition there is the "Edge select" mode and the "Face select" mode. Go ahead and try the other two modes. Try selecting few Edges and then few Faces. The fourth and final button limits selecting to visible vertices/edges/faces only. Try turning it on now. Notice how the cube becomes solid, and you no longer see the backside of the cube. In this mode you can't accidentally select items that are on the back your object. It's especially useful when working on complex object that overlaps itself many times. You can leave the Limit selection to Visible turned on for now.

 
3.3 Hide
 Sometimes when using grab-command (G-key), you accidentally hit H-key. This hides your current selection, and can cause a lot of confusion. Don't worry though, hide isn't same as delete, and you can reveal hidden items with alt+H. Go ahead and select a part of your cube and press H. Then unhide with alt+H. You can also hide multiple items, they all come back when you unhide. Although not too useful with simple models such as cube, hide can really save your day when you're working eg. inside walls.


3.4 Undo

 Mistakes happen to everyone sooner or later. You can't always start anew with ctrl+x when you make a mistake, so let's check the undo tool. You can change undo tool settings in the "User Preferences"-window, "Edit methods"-tab. Keyboard shortcuts for undo are:

 - ctrl+z, U = undo
 - ctrl+shift+z, shift+U = redo
 - alt+U = undo history

 Go ahead and try undoing your last actions, then redo them again, until no more redo is available.
 
End of Lesson3: Edit mode

[Cherppow]

 *****


Lesson 4: Modeling
 All right. I hope you were listening before, because we're speeding up a bit. If you feel unsure, feel free to check the previous lessons again. Rather than going through all the commands, I'll try learn-as-we-go approach, just modeling and explaining a bit what happens and why. Let loose the modeling animal in You!

4.1 Banana


This is Manny the modeling monkey. He's trying to create one of his favourite models. A banana.

He starts with the cube and enters edit mode. There he box selects B the two lowermost vertices, and extrudes E them four times. Being the smart monkey that he is, he uses ctrl to snap each portion equal in size. His model now looks like this:



Next he starts to shrink the ends of the banana. He selects the topmost vertices and scales S them down. Manny starts screaming and tossing pieces of keyboard around! What, why are the vertices leaving a trail! Stupid program.



Manny goes to eat a banana. Cherppow arrives and checks the scene. Rotating the view a bit reveals the flaw in Manny's plan.



The poor thing had used top view all the time, and didn't realize he had "Limit selection to visible" on. Thus only the topmost vertices of the cube were selected, extruded and scaled. Always know what you have selected.

Judging the situation, it's easier to start over than try to fix the current model. ctrl+x When extruding whole faces, it helps to use Face select mode. Do this and extrude the side face of the cube four times. You'll end up with the shape that Manny was after.



Next turn in the top view numpad 7 and the orthographic view numpad 5. Disable "Limit selection to visible" and switch back to vertex select mode. Box select B the topmost pair of vertices. Scale S them down to 0.2.



Go on by selecting and scaling the second pair of vertices from top to 0.8. Leave the 3rd pair as is. Scale fourth pair to 0.9 and fifth to 0.5 and the lowermost vertices to 0.2. Look around the model, it should look like this.



Return to top view numpad 7. Box select B the topmost and lowermost vertices. Enable proportional edit O and check that it's falloff is set to "Smooth Falloff". Grab G the selection. While on grab, use the mouse wheel to control the size of the falloff. Try to match the size in the picture, about 2/3 of the banana length. Then move the selection 2.0 to the right. Use ctrl to snap to grid. Notice how the nearby unselected vertices follow. This is what proportional edit does.



It's starting to look right, but not there yet. Let's smooth the thing a bit. Select all A vertices and press W to bring up the specials menu. Choose "Smooth". Do this two times. After smoothing twice the model should look similar to this:



Go back to top view numpad 7 and orthogonal view numpad 5. With proportional edit still on, select the lowermost line of vertices and grab them 1.0 to the left. You should now turn off the proportional edit O.



Select the topmost row of vertices and rotate R them 40 degree clockwise.



Only few small tweaks left. Let's flatten the banana somewhat. Select all A and scale S to 0.8 along Z-axis. You can lock the axis either by middle mouse button or by keyboard Z. Deselect all A. Finally let's add little more roundness. It's a bit tricky, so follow closely. Switch to Edge select mode. Go in top view numpad 7 if not already and check that you have "Limit selection to visible" turned off. Box select B twice. This will send you into paint selection mode, where you can add select items by painting. Left mouse selects, middle mouse deselects and right mouse exits this mode. Draw over all the horizontal lines, so they get selected, but leave the banana borders deselected. If you've succeeded, the selection should look like this.



Press W to bring up specials menu, and choose "Subdivide Smooth" 1.0 is ok amount here. I'd say the model is ready. However, let's get a render out of it. Place your view in nice position and snap the camera to your view with ctrl+alt+ins. Try to get the whole fruit into picture. Render F12. Here's my render:



Not quite "surely eadible" yet. Let's work on the material just a bit. Exit Edit mode. Select the banana if not already selected. See the Buttons window. Under Link and Materials you see the name of our banana factory (Datablock) and instance (Object). Rename both to "banana". A little down there's Two buttons, "Set Smooth" and "Set Solid". These control the mesh smoothing for the object. Click "Set Smooth" button and notice how the jagged edges on the banana disappear.



Switch on to Shading panel. There, under Links and Pipeline you see the Material currently linked to the object. Rename the material to "ma_banana". On the next tab, Material, you can choose the base color of the material. It's currently light grey, change it to bright yellow by clicking on the color box. Finally under Shaders-tab change the reflection amount to 1.0 and the degree of specularity to 0.



Try rendering again. Looks better. It could use an unique texture, but we'll get to that later. Here's my banana ensemble. I duplicated the object a couple of times, and moved them around. You can duplicate objects with shift+D. You can save your work with F2.



Manny returns and steals your models! This concludes our tutorial for now. I hope you enjoyed it and again, feel free to ask questions and post suggestions.

End of Lesson 4: Modeling

[josephoenix]

I think that says it all ;]

Great work on those lessons, I hope they inspire some more PS'ers to try out 3d :] And I also hope that we'll see some more of those lessons in the future

josePhoenix

[dying_inside]

Yuck. I dislike modeling in blender with a passion.
The only thing I use it for is file format conversions and the decimator tool.
Apart from that I prefer wings. I find it much much nicer to use.
But each to their own.

[Idoru]

Im impressed, Blender has always made me want to cut my hands off so I dont get tempted to start trying to understand it. I have always found 3DStudio and Maya to be much more user friendly. Although the price tag tends to be not so friendly 

I might actually have a go at blender now and see if I can make a banana

[ThomPhoenix]

Wow, that's an unbelievably good guide, Cherppow! 
When I get started on Blender again I will most definately use it

 

[rast]

This is awesome cherpow!

I've just started moving from moddeling in wings to blender, and i'm actually finding blender easier to use at the moment for what i'm doing (relatively high poly stuff - wings slows down for me when i get over 1000 polygons).

Personally i've learned blender just from moddeling things in wings then importing them into blender and then tweaking them a bit. Eventually though you get to a point where you think "wait, perhaps if i model the meshes in blender it would speed the whole process up". Scarily, it does.

But anyhows, hope to see more turorials soon

[Quitarias]

nicely done cherpow these tutorials made me wana take up 3D again 

[Cherppow]

Thanks for the comments and contributions everyone.

Here's the next part.

*****


Lesson 5: UV map


 Manny wants prettier bananas. He decides to apply a texture image to the model's surface. He opens Gimp and creates a new image, 256x256 pixels in size. Being the smart monkey that Manny is, he knows that bananas are yellow, and have some black on the ends. Here's what he draws on the picture:



He saves the file as banana.png and goes back to Blender. There he splits the 3D view in half and changes the other half into UV/Image editor. He also opens his newly drawn texture into the UV/Image editor from the Image-menu. His screen looks like this:


 
With the banana selected, Manny enters UV Face select mode from the 3D view header. He also notices that his 3D view is currently in "Solid" draw mode, and doesn't show any textures. He uses the "Viewport Shading"-drop menu to change the draw method to "Textured". Hmm, no texture still. Seeing that all of the banana's faces are selected (pink), he goes to UV/Image editor side again, to select texture image for these faces. To do this, Manny selects his banana texture from the image drop-menu there. Manny's tail twitches! What is that?! The banana looks awful! Stupid program. Manny presses the reset button for a dozen times and goes to eat a banana.



Luckily Cherppow has removed the reset wiring from inside the computer case. Hmm, this time Manny actually did pretty good job. The only flaw is how he has UV mapped the faces. Or rather that he did not do any UV-mapping, he just used the default one. What is UV map then? It is a set of coordinates that indicate which part of the texture is used on which faces on the model. U and V come from the coordinate axis on the image. While x, y and z are already used in the model space, u and v (in some cases also the third axis w) are used on the texture.

So what can we do about it? Let's take a look at the banana again. It appears to have some kind of chessboard texture, although the image we used as texture certainly wasn't such. This is due to the default UV map. By default all the faces are mapped to show the whole texture. If we look at an individual face closer, we can see that this is just what is happening.



Ok, now to fix the mapping. Blender has good tools for editing UV maps. We'll be using one of the automated scripts to generate a map for us, and then fine tune the results by hand a bit. First though, let's select all the faces in the banana. All the Edit mode's selection tools also work in UV Face selection mode. After you've all the faces selected, go into UV/Image editor header and select "Archimap UV Projection Unwrapper" under UVs-menu. This will popup the unwrapper window. In the unwrapper, disable the "Stretch to Bounds" option. That is used to enlargen the UV map to better fill the image, but it will also distort the face shapes a bit, so let's not use that. Then click ok.

*edit*
In the new Blender 2.43 Archimap unwrapper is integrated, instead of separate script. It can be accessed through UV Calculation menu (U-key) while in UV Face Select mode. The name has also changed, to "Unwrap (smart projections)".

 The result should be more or less like this:




We now have a more decent UV map for our model, but it can be improved. To do this, we'll first need to identify the pieces the automatic unwrapper made for us. Editing the UV map by hand isn't going to do us much good if we don't know what UV represents what face. Let's identify the second piece from the left first. Select the whole piece. Do this by hovering the pointer over it and pressing L. L-key is the shortcut for linked select. Now grab the piece and move it around a bit, but don't accept the move, just wiggle the piece around and then cancel with right mouse. If you look at the 3D view, nothing happened during the move. Let's change that; turn on the "Update automatically"-option under View-menu. Now try grabbing the UV piece again. Wee! Seeing how the UV changes affect the model in real time, is a good help in UV-mapping. Now we've also identified the first piece, which is the topside of the banana. Do the same for the other pieces, to identify them too. Here's what I found out:



How to improve the UV map then? The three things a good UV map does are:
 1) It makes the texture look good on the model
 2) With as little texture space as possible
 3) While leaving the texture as easy to make as possible
If we look at number one and our model we can say that aye, it looks good. However, on rule number two we have a problem: there's plenty of unused room in our image. Rule number three doesn't really count in our case, since we have pre-made texture by Manny. However, if we didn't have a texture yet, and had to draw one based on our UV map, the third rule would be important too.

 So, let's improve the use of our texture space. One devious way to do this, is by overlapping the UV pieces. This makes the overlapping pieces look similar on the model of course, since they use the same part of the texture, but in most cases that doesn't show too much. If we look at our UV map, clearly every piece has a similar counterpart; the top and bottom, sides and ends. This is because our banana is pretty symmetrical. We can use this to our advantage. Link select L the whole bottom piece and mirror M it along x-axis. Then move the piece over it's pair, so that it overlaps it perfectly. You can zoom in with middle mouse and use shift for precision. The result should look like this:



Do the same trick with the rest of the pairs: Move right side over left side and low end over top end. Remember to mirror each piece you move. The sides and ends don't match each other perfectly, but don't let that bother you, just overlap them as well as you can. Here's what you should end up with:



 The UV map is starting to look good. However, there is a small problem that the unwrapper made for us. Try selecting all the UV pieces A. Now grab and wiggle them around, but again don't accept the move, instead look at the model. Try turning your 3D view so you can see the left side of the banana, and then move the UVs around again. Hmm, it moves to different direction than the rest of the faces. The reason for this is that its UV-map is upside down... or rather it is the only piece that is not upside down! No panic though, first, let's just put them all upside down. Link select L the left side UV piece which is different way than the others. Be sure that you've selected the left piece and not right piece, it's a bit difficult now that thy're overlapping. You can always test-grab to check which piece is currently selected, as long as you don't accept the move. When you have the left piece, mirror M it along x-axis and then along y-axis. Now if you select all the pieces and grab them, you'll see that the texture flow on the model is much more unified. Finally select all A UV pieces and mirror them along y-axis. All right, problem fixed. Should look like this:



Let's continue with touching up the UV map. To save more space, the top and bottom pieces could be mirrored along x-axis, so they'd better fit with the side pieces. You can either mirror both pieces separately, or select them both and mirror them together. Remember that you can add to selection by holding down shift. This also works with linked selection. After mirroring, you can move them a bit closer to the other pieces. Grab the top and bottom piece and move them 7.0 to the right. While grabbing, you can simply give numbers with the keyboard and move will snap to that value. You can control the axis by middle mouse, or with x and y keys. In this case we move horizontally, so x is the correct axis.



Let's move the end pieces at a better position. Select and grab G the tiny things. Move them -96 along x-axis, to the left that is. Then -243 along y-axis, meaning down. Finally, if we look at the 3D view (black areas especially), we can notice that the right side piece is a little higher than the other ones. Go select it's UV piece and move it -5 along y-axis. Try to match the results here:



Pretty good. Now what exactly did we gain? There's still a lot of empty space in our image, even more than before actually. A good question. We didn't gain anything yet. However, now our UV map is so small it can fit to a smaller image, and that's just what we're going to do. Open Gimp if you've closed it and open the banana texture. Select Crop tool and click on the image to open the crop information window. Type in the values in the image below, they will cut a 128x256 piece from the middle of our 256x256 image. The result is the second image and our new texture, half the size or the original.



Save the cropped image. You can close Gimp and move back to Blender and in UV/Image editor. Select all the faces and load the new texture. As you load the new, different shaped image, you'll notice that the UV map shrinks along x-axis. Blender tries to keep the scale same through image changes, and now with an image of half the width, our UV mapping becomes 50% thinner. This is no problem though, since we know how the aspect ratio changed. To fix the problem select all A UV pieces and scale S them along-x axis x to 2.0.



Leave the UV Face select mode, and return to Object mode. You can also close the UV/Image editor, either turn it into another 3D view, or join it with the existing one. Rotate your view around the banana and find a nice angle, then snap the camera and render.



Treachery and doom! All our texturing for nothing!? Even Manny would laugh at us. Don't give up hope yet. We still have to apply the texture file to the banana material. See the buttons window "Texture"-tab and add new texture. Then switch to "Map Input"-tab which just appeared. There, choose "UV" as map input method. Finally go to "Texture buttons" with the button on the header or with F6. There we can choose the settings for the texture we just created. Change texture type to image. From the image-tab which appears, select the banana texture image from image drop menu. Now that the image is set, click the small car icon next to texture name "Tex". This will automatically create a name for the texture, using the image filename.




Now then, render F12. Here's my render. I duplicated the fruit a couple of times again and used Sun-type lamp. You can change this in "Lamp buttons" area. Remember to select the lamp first though.



Umm, well. Looks like our texture artist could have been a little less hasty. We'll have to touch it up later. This is the end for UV mapping part, the rest is image manipulation.

End of Lesson 5: UV map

[Induane]

Cherppow these are excellent guides!  I have been working on a site for such things for PS'ers.  I'd love to apply these to my site:

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/psdoc/

As you can see I'm low on blender tutorials  

Somehow in my haste  I forgot to actually ask if it would be ok to format these guides for my site?

[Ralleyon]

And by the way of Induane, here's a link from his documentation site which deals with the installation of the following programs on a Windows platform: Blender, Blender2Crystal, CrystalSpace, Python24, PyXML, PythonImagingLibrary

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/psdoc/?q=node/24

@Cherppow: Amazing tutorial! Thank you for your efforts. 

[Erik]

don't have to be a 3d-guru to be able to create usable and enjoyable models.

Ohw...?

[Robinmagus]

Hey mate. Decided to try, but I messed up :O When I do the extrude thing, the new boxes aren't solid...when I switch views, I discover that they're just two lines. No color or bottom line like yours. I think I missed something :O




EDIT: Oh wait, I selected corners diagonally across from eachother. damnit. lemme try again.

EDIT2: VICTORY!!!



EDIT3: Now he tells me it's wrong :/

EDIT4: *sigh* My next problem. Only the first and last boxes will do the curve thing.



I assume it's something to do with that falloff radius, but I have no idea about how to work with that thingy. Advice,tips, etc. will be appreciated.

[Nikodemus]

If you have problems with making faces, remember you can select 3 or 4 vertices and press "F" to make a face.

[Jauffre Martin]

I assume it's something to do with that falloff radius, but I have no idea about how to work with that thingy. Advice,tips, etc. will be appreciated.

Try checking this site here for information (and a small tut) about the falloff readius.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Mountains_Out_Of_Molehills
I'd also suggest looking around at the rest of it. There's some pretty cool tutorials in there.