Hey guys! I’m new here, and also new to Blender. I’m working through Tony Mullens book at the moment and thought I’d post my progress here. For some reason this morning when I copied my .blend file it didn’t include the texture files of the model, l thought they were inbedded, but looks like I’ll have to copy and include the textures seperately as well, how does one go about it, does it just all have to be placed in the same folder? Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
As for Capt. Blender, I’m failry happy with my first attempt at Blender. The box modeling I did on his head is horrible though, the eyes are shaped crappy, the head lips etc etc, but I decided to just leave it at that for now and continue onwards with the book. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it eventually, especially with the dvd’s I received from Jonathan (Mr. Bomb I think).
I quite like the actual eyes and Iris itself, but there’s probably a bit too much white around the pupil, I think I’ll tweak it a bit.
To pack the textures into the file, you press the little “package” icon next to the place where you import the image file. You’d normally only do this if you plan to move the file or post it on the forum or send it somewhere.
Fixing the eyes and stuff just takes time and experience, Once you get your head around the tools and manipulating the view, it’ll become second nature.
Hi AndyD! Thanks for your commends and advice! I’ll try the “package” thingy out tonight, thanks for the tip. I should finish the hair and the end of the moddeling chapter this weekend and will post my progress on Monday, with the textures hopefully
Whoa whoa whoa, careful there. In your close-up on captain blender’s face, I started seeing facets, which made me realize what you’re doing. You don’t really need subsurf turned up that high, you can turn it down to a reasonable amount and just set your mesh to display with smooth shading. It’ll look better and draw faster.
I like the simplicity of the model, but I agree it needs some added textures. Also, you might want to be careful you don’t make the red areas of the suit too “fuzzy” in comparison to the shininess of the gloves, boots, etc.
one other thing I noticed was that, though it’s hard to tell from the pictures, it seems the hands might be placed a little far back on the wrists… you’ll notice that basic arm anatomy kinda goes in a fairly straigh line from forearm to the tip of the pinky, with just a slight curve outward at the wrist… so double check that, to make sure the hand doesn’t look unnatural
once again though, it’s a great concept. I love how whimsical it is.
UV mapping comes a little later in the book and I think the “facetting” BlackBoe refers to is actually because you haven’t “SetSmooth” the mesh. I’m not sure if/when Tony does this in the book but it can be done by selecting the character in Object Mode and pressing the SetSmooth button. This should get rid of that fine mesh pattern you can see on the skin in the close-up of the eyes.
Very cool work. As you get into the rigging part, I’d suggest setting the bones to use vertex groups and then adding the vertex groups as you go along, to make sure you get the mesh to move along with the bones. I built the entire rig first, but when I attached the bones to the mesh something went wrong that I couldn’t fix and I am having to redo all the bones.
