First off, I am an extreme newbie with this stuff and and I have to admit reading through the posts, FAQ’s and artwork it’s all very overwhelming, intimidating and beautiful. Such talent here it boggles the brain.
I do have a question about something I have always wanted my computer to do. I am a wood carver and the patterns for cutting a blank consist of a top view and a side view. I have been using Corel Draw for years to modify the patterns to make them more lifelike however, I always wanted a program that could merge these two patterns into a 3-d model and then I can place the model into a “virtual” habitat. Then I can rotate it to get a “look” at it from all sides to confirm that is the look/placement I want. Can Blender do this? If so how would I go about doing it?
Blender is definitely what you want. Now the learning curve is pretty steep, and you’ll definitely want to watch a few beginner tutorials and be prepared to spend some real time working with it, but I think it would be the perfect complement to your craftsmanship. Definitely start simple, probably not even with an actual pattern, just working with the default cube for a bit. If you want to post images a very simple pattern from top and side, you’ll get plenty of help from people.
I have gathered the learning curve is pretty steep and will run through some tutorials before I get to the good stuff. My patterns for cutting blanks are pretty simple, just outlines of the animal with minimal details like eyes and fins or wings. Looking forward to giving this a try.
Yeah you can definitely do that with Blender. After a bit of practice you’ll be able to use the sculpt mode in Blender to get exactly the shape you want, and then rotate the object around to get different views of it. And even make a scene to go around it so you can see if the model goes well with certain objects.
If you want to do this I recommend watching a few videos to get to grips with the navigation and use of Blender, then try some things out in the sculpt mode with a cube subdivided a few times. Or you could have a go with the brand new dynamic topology feature, which really is quite cool. I was thinking of doing a video on how to set that up, so if you would like me to do that just ask.
If you really want to do some cool stuff. You could take high quality pictures of your current models(if they’re the right sort of shape), then convert those images into displacement and bump maps, and then have a low-poly version of your model in Blender that you can look around.
Oh, an other wood carver. Yes, Blender is amazing tool for our planning. (I have, however, already a part-time pensioner, so i have quite plenty time to play with). I recommend You to learn carefully all the basics from boxmodeling, then the curves, Bsurfaces, sculpting and retopolgying. I know, it takes time, but specially if You are an young fellow, it´s worth!
@ Enigma246: Please tell us, what is this dynamic topology feature.
The dynamic topology is basically a new feature for when you use the sculpt mode, it will add faces as required when using the brushes. So if you start off with a simple cube, you don’t have to add any multiresolution modifiers or anything, it adds all the subdivisions it needs to show the brush strokes, and you can play around with the values and stuff to get what you want. I’ll do a video for tomorrow and post it here so you can see how it works.
The usual way to work from plan/elevation/section drawings is to import them as images (either scanned or drawn in other software such as CorelDRAW and exported as PNG, JPG or what-have-you).
The technique involves working with Background Images and is well covered in various tutorials. Claas Eicke Kuhnen does a very good job of explaining the technique in his shoe modeling tutorial on Blender Cookie.
