Well, I just downloaded blender a few weeks ago, and I’m still basically a noob. :eyebrowlift: I’ve been slowly picking things up here and there on how to get around in Blender, and have whipped up a basic scene as somewhat of a crash-course introduction.
It’s nothing spectacular so far, and is still relatively unfinished. I’m fairly satisfied with the lighting, and the walls, accessories and such look fairly good. My biggest problem here is my absolute lack of texturing abilities, other than going into the materials section and loading an image. Does anyone have a link to a tutorial that explains how to properly texture something like the bookshelf in this, or can someone just do a quick explanation? The textures I’m using are actually really good, and I have normal, bump, and specular maps to go with all of them. I just don’t know how to put them onto the objects correctly. :no:
Anyways, any input on the idea? Please, don’t hold back… tell me everything I’m doing wrong, or anything that could use improvement.
To Do:
Re-texture all wood objects
Improve outside backdrop
Add more detail to bookshelf objects
Add more objects in general (on desk, on bookshelf)
Redo window/hole frame
Get better camera angle
Re-texture floor/finish normal map
Finish ceiling beams/add ceiling
It has a long, long way to go…
I’ll finish off the floor first then add a ceiling. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…
On a side note, it looks a lot better on my PC because of the attachment size restrictions. It was 1920x1080 until I saw it could only be 1024x1024…
You should add some fill lamps to soften the shadows, or just enable ambient occlusion in add mode. Experiment with AO settings.
For the fill lamps basically disable specularity and shadows, so they only ‘lighten’ stuff. In doing so, I’d give the sword special attention, since the shadow from the candle ruins its shape. Also, I’d move the candle a little towards the camera so it casts shorter shadows on the sword and the things that hold it.
That’s very nice but the render looks too dark. You gotta light it up, somewhat…
Are you using 2.49 or 2.53? (Or even a recent graphicall build?) - Things have changed a lot between 2.49 and 2.5x
What you gotta do is basically, next to your 3Dview open up an image editor section, go to edit mode with the mesh, you desire to texture, hit U (UV-Unwrap) and then tweak the unwraped mesh until you’re satisfied with how it fills the plane of your texture.
As you have a finished texture which you want to match your model with, it’s kind of backwards… you’ll need to load the image into the image editor and arrange the faces until they fit the given borders as you need them.
(except if it’s a generic wood texture. That makes things easier, I guess :))
To add more control over your UV unwrapping results, mark seams on your mesh (In Editmode, edge selection mode, select the edges which should be seams in your UV layout and then Ctrl+E -> Mark Seams)
After you do that, just hit U again to see how that affected your unwrapped mesh.
Just experiment a bit: Box-like objects should be fairly easy to unwrap
I’m still running 2.49 as of right now - I’d rather learn one then switch to the other later than be stuck between both versions. 2.5 came out just as I started working in 2.49…
I just went back and set my render size to HD, and it looks immensely better than the picture I uploaded. I’ll have to scale it down to 1024 and reattatch it here.
I’m still working on perfecting the lighting. I do agree, though… it does need some lightening up the way it is right now.
Thanks for the explanation, Kram… that’s exactly what I was looking for. I knew it had to be here somewhere, I just couldn’t find it.
I’ll work on getting everything worked out a little more and post an update. Thanks for all the help so far.
If you wanna texture objects the best way to go is probably UV mapping, with this method you can basically turn your 3d object in some sort of 2d map/grid which you can then add an image on in an image editing program like photoshop. This probably doesnt make much sense, but it might if you watch a few tutorials.
It makes perfect sense. :eyebrowlift2: I already had a basic idea of how to do UV Mapping from a few other videos and tutorials, I just didn’t know how to unwrap and such.
Still working on ironing out all my current problems/tweaks before I keep doing significant additions. Nothing really worth uploading yet…
