I need some help as I am new to Blender. I work as a 3D imager for a company that does life size dinosaurs & other animals for museums. We sculpt the models and then Mill it in sections on a milling machine, assemble it and so forth.
Now until recently we had to sculpt every single scale on a dinosaur by hand, to compensate for the milling machine chamfer. but we are using Software now for the sculpting, saves a lot of time of course, but we need help and tutoring on one aspect of this process, hopefully Blender can do it!
Let me explain: We decided on a simple geometry like hexagons for the skin, (See pic1 attached) .My big concern is will BLENDER be able to create a texture of these simple polygons?
in a nustshell: we basically need to wrap simple geometries (the hexagons-pic1) over complex forms of the model (see pic 2)
*first picture attached is a screenshot of the simple hexagon geometry (original is a vector)
*second is a screenshot of our dinosaur
Hope you can help and direct me to a step by step tutorial…
Blender’s sculpting and painting tools are improving for this new 2.5x series of Blender, so maybe you should consider using version 2.49b and have a look at this particular tutorial in case you wanna have a go with Texture Paint: http://vimeo.com/5093588
What do you mean by “wrapping” simple geometry; wrapping image of a skin, or wrapping actual skin scale polygon? I suppose if you are using milling machine you need three dimensional coordinate. In that case you can use Shrink wrap Modifier. Here is simple example. You do need to make the skin scale mesh for wrapping; fig A. Than with Shrink wrap Modifier that mesh can be dropped right on to the main object; fig B. You probably need to wrap it section at a time though.
