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Work in Progress - April 2009 Episode | The Process Diary

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The Process Diary

the process diary is a blog and a podcast about Paul Caggegi finding out how to get his story told.

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Work in Progress - April 2009

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DATE : Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:00:00 +0000
Entered in Database : 2009-04-15 21:00:00
length :
Link to the Show / Show Notes

Work in Progress - April 2009 from Paul Caggegi on Vimeo.

Welcome to the work in progress/tutorial for April 2009.

As requested - a video tutorial on landscape modeling, and how to cheat the render at the end of the process using a normal map.

I will be posting extra links and screen grabs here on the blog, so you can follow along. While I cover some basic topology sketching in GIMP, I only get as far as the final model in this tutorial. I will return with a texturing tutorial in the near future, as well as compositing for large scale scenes.

Please find the 2D map I created in GIMP:

From Public Album

The methodology is fairly straight forward:

Sketch out the terrain of your environment
Import that as reference into Blender
Create a plane, subdivide adequately, and begin to sculpt using the grab/draw tools
UV Unwrap
Duplicate mesh, and add Multi-res modifier to duplicated mesh (as high as your machine can handle without crying)
Spend LOTS of time with the draw tool and custom textures drawing your rocky features.
Apply multi-res modifier to mesh, then bake a normal map out and save.
Import normal map as texture and apply to the lower-res mesh
Render

The video goes more into detail, but here are some screen shots of settings:

When you switch to sculpt mode, you automatically get extra tabs in your edit pane. You can add any textures you have already loaded into blender, and they will function as brushes.

From Public Album

When you are about to bake out the normal map, note the settings below:

From Public Album

The results speak for themselves: click the image to get a higher-res version so you can see the side-by-side comparison:

From Public Album

Here is one indispensable tool I highly recommend:

Blender Newbies toolbar. This is a one-stop shop for all blender links. It includes up-to-date texture libraries, tutorials, lists of useful links, and even a list of RSS feeds on projects using blender (um, Hello, Blender Newbies? Care to add me?)

The texture site I featured in the video was: www.textureking.com

Apart from the tutorial, I have included up-to-date test renders of David Winfield. The head may look simple, but it took a week to model. I was not satisfied with the first modeling attempt, so I subjected the mesh to rigorous revisions in its topology.

From Public Album

The result is more satisfactory.

Oh finally - iTunes users! What's the deal? I know you're out there. Next time you fire up iTunes, head on over the the music store, type in "the process diary" in your search pane, and get commenting! Comments and high ratings help the placement of the podcast in the iTunes listing within the appropriate categories. If you like what I'm doing here, help spread the word to folks who might be searching for this sort of podcast.

See you next month, y'all!

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