Brand Noob to 3D

Hawk Teflon

Hawk Teflon

Veteran
Today is my second day in blender, and I felt confident enough after watching a couple "Blender basics" tutorials to build a shape without any help (other than just looking at it on my desk). So I decided to build my iPhone. I thought it turned out ok until I saw some of the "my first 3D render" stuff on here, and now I'm ashamed of it ...

But my question is this: I have a grey iPhone stuck in Blender now. I've been watching video after video on texturing, but all of the basic textures are "texture this box with a picture of a side of a crate." I don't have a box, though. Mine is more complex than that, and googling, "Texture certain areas in blender" reveals nothing to me. So how do I texture just certain parts of an object that isn't a sphere or a crate?

Would it help if I posted my project file?
 
Hey Hawk. Congrats on the first model. My first model was a wire mesh UFO so don't feel bad. Believe me, mine was worse than yours.

I don't use blender but someone I'm sure will chime in shortly. But here's some generalizations in the meantime.

Welcome to the world of unwrapping UV's.
Google 'Blender UV unwrapping'. You should find something.
example: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-234/uv-unwrapping/

Basically and generally you need to make polygon selections and then unwrap the selections individually. Sometimes you can then recombine the UV's to avoid seems.
It would also help to understand the process if you understand what UV's are.

This is a very basic C4D unwrapping video I did a while back but it shows the basic concepts.
http://www.vimeo.com/1374292

There are even specialty unwrappers like 'Headus UVLayout' which is more for organic unwrapping like complex characters and creatures.
 
Thanks Gord! Hopefully this is what I can look into today at work.

Man, 3D modeling makes time FLY by. I'm not sure if it's because it's fun, or because you start thinking, "This is all I've done in the last 4 hours?"
 
Bah! I picked the wrong time to start with Blender. 2.49 and 2.5 are COMPLETELY different interfaces, and about 20% of the things I need to learn are based in 2.5. I upgraded to 2.5, and now I can't find the OHER menus I had just learned ... sigh...
 
I guess they did a major overhaul of the UI, for the better, I've heard. On the bright side, you get to start off with the new UI apart from a couple of days lost using the old one.

I see they have a 2.56 beta out also. http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-254-beta/

I'll have to give that a spin one of these days. Zbrush is keeping me busy though, trying to get more familiar with the program. It's a bit weird sometimes.

Good luck though. Post a pic when you feel comfortable.
 
Bah! I picked the wrong time to start with Blender. 2.49 and 2.5 are COMPLETELY different interfaces, and about 20% of the things I need to learn are based in 2.5. I upgraded to 2.5, and now I can't find the OHER menus I had just learned ... sigh...
Click to expand...
Consider yourself lucky! I've used it for almost ten years so I've been relearning everything in it with the new gui. And congrats on making the leap to Blender! Good luck! (And yes, UV Unwrapping is what you're looking for"
 
Thanks guys. Yeah, I was talking with someone today about the Blender changes (he's been using it for about 4 years I think), and he was frustrated. I guess the changes are for the better, which is a good thing I'm not too invested yet, but it just seems odd. It would be like Final Cut changing basic shortcuts (like the arrow) from the "a" stroke to Shift+9. I liked having the spacebar to add things in Blender (though I found ways to change it back, which IS nice).

Ok, so I did the UV Unwrapping (I think), but my item doesn't render out that part. I mean, it's in the edit window. It appears ON the object, but when I render it ... nothing. Some sites were saying, "Make sure Texface is active." However Texface is not where it used to be, and it's frustrating because I don't even know what a Texface is, or where to look for it!
 
I was trying to figure out a way to put the phone in a prebuilt environment so it could react to that instead of the crappy blue, but it was to no avail. So all of the blue on the phone is actually reflection:

phoneattempt.jpg
 
Thanks, Gord!

Hmmm, it was a bit of a "back and forth"-ing in some menus, but I'm getting closer. I don't know why the world looks like it was stretched to a pinhole, though.

phoneattempt2.jpg


I like the way the volume button came out, but it's further from the camera.
 
It looks like your enviroment map is getting mapped to a sphere, which it is supposed to, with the pole being at the center of the screen.
So it's probably either the wrong type of map and/or the projection method.
Maybe double check everything again, the right kind of map and the proper projection method.

Just a tiny thing while I'm here, the bottom left corner of the model appears to have some banding.
I'm not sure if that's just the jpeg compression. If not, that's often caused by a setting in the phong shading.
I'm not sure how it's handled in blender ( http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-52659.html ).Don't worry too much about it, it just caught my eye.
 
Yeah, I rendered at 4 levels. Blender will go to 6, but last time I tried that, it never finished. I think I made this more complex than it needed to be. It has 250,000+ vertices and faces. Is that normal for something so small?
 
No, it's not a render problem, it's phong shading or 'Normal Smoothing' in Maya. It's all the same difference but different programs have different names for things. Just to be different.

250K for that model is too high. But it's okay for a first model. If it was for a studio shot or something, it wouldn't matter. The point is how it looks.

But, and it's still something I have to pay attention to, is the poly count.

Can I ask you to export that as a .obj file and send me a link? I'll give you some ideas about how to remodel it so that the poly count is more efficient.
 
Sure, I'll read up on that tomorrow. It'll be my next project within a project. I'm not kidding, it took me 45 minutes to figure out how to save the render. I was like, "Ok, I rendered it, now what?" File>Save As... would only save the project. The save option was in the lower left hand corner... sometimes this program makes no sense to me! BUT it's starting to make a little more each day.
 
As a shortcut to save the still image render:
set your file type in the render settings to jpg or whatever. Hit F12 to render the image. When it's done, hit F3. This brings up a save as dialogue for the still image.
 
Well, I was the only one here today so I used the time to work on creating what I see. I took the cover of the August 2010 Creative Cow magazine and tried to recreate it. I had a LOT of issues getting the colors right. I was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be:

creativecover.png
 
I just had a look at the mesh. Normally with something like that you would model as low poly, which I assume you did, then apply a non destructive soothing modifier to it.

Is that what you did or is the hi poly version fixed now? Because if the poly count is fixed now then you wouldn't be able to go back and edit the model later if you had to.

For example, I couldn't edit this model that I downloaded. And if I had to unwrap the uv's again, for whatever reason, I wouldn't be able to because the poly count is just too high.
In fact there are no UV's on this model yet so there's no way to unwrap it. Not practically anyways.

Do you still have the lo poly version of it that I could see? Just a picture of a wireframe render should be okay, or just a screen grab.

I might remodel it tomorrow, depending on how your lo poly model looks, and maybe download blender and give it a spin.
 
I didn't even know there was such a thing as low or high poly. How do you find out?

I can get some screen grabs, no problem. I should warn you ... My wireframe is very convoluted.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top