Can anyone tell me how to make a wooden log. I am new to Blender (kind of) and I am making this for a friend who is putting it in his RPG.
Thanks, Colby.
um I am not trying to sound mean but go look for some tutorials. there is a blenderwiki that has a huge amount of them.
If it’s for a game, your friend will probably want a low poly log, which means if it’s going to look good, it will need a UV mapped texture.
That’s not exactly a beginners project, but if your up for it…
You’ll need two photographs, one of tree bark, the other of the cut end of a log where you can see the wood inside the bark.
Add a cylinder for the log, don’t use the default 32 vertices, that’s way too many. Use 7 or 8 or 10. Leave the radius alone, but make it’s depth around 10 or 12. Cap the ends.
Make a loop cut across the log, and put in four or five new edges.
Mark seams around both ends and along the length of the log.
Make a window set to UV Image Editor.
In a 3D window, edit mode, select the sides of the log (not the ends.) Switch from edit mode to UV face select mode, press U and select Unwrap. Over in the UV Image Editor, you should see a grid like mesh appear on the Image grid. Click on “Image”>>Open then navigate to where ever you stored your bark photograph, and select it. It should appear in the UV image editor window, filling the image grid.
Select the UV mesh, and rotate it so the length of the log goes with the grain of the bark, and scale it so it is as large as possible but still inside the image.
If you switch back to object mode and select textured draw mode, probably nothing will show up: you have to add a material to your log, and set the material to “tex face.” Once that’s done, you should see the bark painted on the log.
Go back to the 3D edit mode, and select the ends of the log, and unwrap them. This time, find the image of the end grain, and position the two meshes over the image (it’s ok if the meshes overlap.) Scale the meshes until they cover the end grain picture.
This will “paint” your log with photographs of bark. Finishing touches would include tweaking the mesh out of it’s original straight alignment: put some bends and indents and outdents and such in the log to break up the straight outlines.
There are so many valid ways that you could do it, and multiple types of logs, that what you need instead is just a modeling and texturing tutorial.
Edit:
I read the thread and then left and came back after Orinoco posted. What he said is definitely the easiest way. Just remember that if you deform the mesh too much from the straight shape, the texture might begin to look strange in places.