Beta Testing

 
This is a bit of a break in the rules: I'm using the beta of 4.5, which is a few weeks away from its expected release. What do you know? It's been absolutely solid and, dare I say, faster once I shifted over to the Vulcan API.

Add on: Retopoflow

I need to finally learn how to tackle retopology for generative outputs from Sparc3d and my own scans. Retopoflow is considered the best. It's not cheap, but it does come from  Cookie3D's developers.

I ran through a quick test, and it's maybe harder to use than I thought. I just need to do some simple practice exercises. The jump from version 3 is significant as the add on now in integrated into Blender's UI rather than as a bolt-on set of tools.

Starting off

Select a target object, Shift+A, Add Mesh, then choose Retopology at Cursor. This creates an empty mesh. Use Ctrl+Left click to start building.

Card mountains

I had another quick play with cards for mountain ranges. The lighting issues may be holding me back from using this technique in anger.

I had a play with the visibility settings, but I was still getting inconsistent lighting where the card catches the in-scene sunlight.

Overview. 2 cards!

Piotr Krynski's Efficient Environment Design for Blender #4            

The Wall:

In this lesson Piotr builds the curved canal wall. It's pretty straightforward non-destructive method where he uses the simple deform modifier on the in-scene assets while modelling on an unmodified instance, away from the scene, so that as he models, he can see how it looks in the final scene. Clever!

He refers to Textures.com as a source for bigger, more idiosyncratic textures for mixing. It looks good. I think I signed up on the site about a decade ago, but never used it.

It's interesting to think in terms of writing a sentence with a texture choice. The right texture says more, or has the capacity to say a lot more than a 2m x 2m seamless square.

* When Piotr drops in his chosen texture map he disables specularity and roughness on the shader because "they wash away the texture information".

* 95% of UV unwrapping is ...align your view perpendicular to the main face and then UV unwrap using Project from View.

* Avoid using noise from nodes because it doesn't create noise consistent with your complex real-world materials.  

* Adds a quick bump map

Add the colour into the Height input of a Bump node then pass the Bump node's output into the shader's Normal input. Then add a colour ramp between the colour and the bump which you can then use to control bumpiness by values.

Applies a second material on the bottom of the wall, applies it to a new material on the mesh. Aligns the texture, then creates some cuts in the model to match the protrusions in the material.

Repeats this step for the ends of the wall section.


Tip: Avoid long runs of perfectly straight lines.

Even with handrails, you should add a tiny amount of distortion to break straight lines. Looking at scans, even though they can be a bit gloopy, they often come with that slight break in regularity that often screams "CG." Solution: Subdivide the mesh and apply a slight displacement modifier (Musgrave noise).

Tip: At this stage, the model isn't entirely in the scene, so you can't tell how it will turn out, so don't try to go too far.

Razorbill

I got nowhere. This kind of model takes a lot of prep and care.