modelled mainly in wings3d but with proud additions in Blender … rendered with Blender’s internal renderer. Had a lot of frustrating experiences with Yafray (apparent stalls, incredibly long renders, weird to me behaviour though this is probably simply for not being able to experiment due to speed) so I ended up relying on Blender’s internal renderer. I must say I’m pretty proud of it. With all it’s recent raytracing & features it does quite a nice job. To get more realistic lighting however I used 2 lights dupliframed.
Black leathery look
The Lightning Tree
sweet colours!!! sweeeheeet!
I’ve finalized it now (though I’ve done it quite a while back) for my website’s (www.ixaarii.com) 3d gallery.
Umm…pardon me for asking, but what is this? It’s interesting looking. But it needs some work on the textures, you’ve got some major texture stretching/distortion going on there… With some texture and light tweaking it could be much improved.
I really tried a lot to fix the stretching … but I’ve ran out of ideas / options. I’ve even tried a small non-repeating patched over the stretching … but it didn’t look any good
As for what it is … well, originally I started out randomly, then it kinda shaped itself into a totem pole like thing … so I made levels on it … and then stopped here
You could try a couple of things to sort out the textures on the second image.
If you look at the center of the image, you can see the top of the sphere mapping where it’s all pinched together, ideally you want this at the top of the mesh. To fix this, enter edit mode for that mesh. If the rendered view is the front , go to side view. Select all verts, hit R to rotate 90’, leave edit mode and rotate the whole mesh -90’.
This should put the top of the mapping on the top of the mesh, which can’t be seen in the render.
You could also try a different mapping method to Orco, sphere. In the Green mapping buttons in the material buttons, try Glob with sphere/tube or Nor with sphere/tube (one of my favs for sorting out bad textures.). Increase the X,Y,Z values for the texture reptition in the material buttons, equally which might also help.
thanks.
About the mapping … well, I tried … but I didn’t know what to do anymore like I said above. Not unless I split that big object into many different small objects (which I don’t know how to do) … or there was a way of actually manually aranging how polygons fall over textures, which I don’t know anything about in Blender.
On the second picture a certain ammount of pinch was intended (well, not inteded, but ejoyed ) … but thanks a LOT for that rotation of local space idea. GREAT idea! Also I tried some of the combinations you sugested … though I thought I tried them all, but it seems I was wrong, because indeed glob with sphere turned out pretty nice.
Right now I’m trying nor with tube for the first rendering which is where the top left stretching really bothered me as here I wanted a more realistic texturing … and it seems to be working.
Thanks again for great advice!
PS: in case I’m missing it … is there in Blender a way to explicitly specify/tweak how a certain polygon maps to a certain region of the texture? I’ve never used it … could “uv/image editor” be that?
unfortunatelly it seems it just moves the stretching … so now I’ve got the tough choice of losing that bottom texturing I so like (talking about top pic) but keeping the top left ugly stretching or fixing the top left but getting something not as “smooth” looking at the base and losing details on the tops thingies
Yep, UV texturing, you’re exactly right about that. Unfortunately I’m not much help on that, I’m also just learning how to do it. But there are a lot of UV Mapping & texturing tutorials on Elysiun you could search for. Modron wrote a basic one a while back, just try searching for UV and Texture tutorials, I’m sure it will pop up.
well, the thing I probably most enjoy/miss is face select. Weird as I believe I spoke with Ton Roosendaal a couple of versions back and he said that the Blender programmers were all aware of the ups of Wings3d in poly modelling and are working in improoving Blender in that area. Ever since then with every releace I've been expecting that ;P Other than that wings also tends to give the impression of more options when extruding .. however I do believe Blender to be the more professional tool (shortcuts, more features ..) however face select is a really big thing :-(
