In this tutorial, we introduce you to the basics of unwrapping the UVs, simple detail sculpting, and the very basics of texture and normal maps.
This is meant as a technical guide on getting you started down the texturing path, please feel free to take these textures and techniques further on your model at home. Next installment we will begin rigging.
Thanks for the tutorial! These videos on your little alien dude have been a lot of help and fun to watch.
I was wondering if you could tell me why you could not do your UV editing in Blender 2.5 and had to switch to Blender 2.49b? The only thing I tell was Blender 2.5 does not have the script that exported the UV map as an image file to work with in Photoshop. I work on a mac and so I just took a screen shot (Shift + Command + 4) and did a little work that way. I have not done the hole sense as you have, only quick test see everything work, but I could not find any other problems besides not having the UV export script.
that’s pretty much it, as far as i can remember. but i like to do as much with blender as possible, and since that wasn’t yet available in 2.5, i went with what WAS in 2.49.
Nice tut Dave
Bit long but that’s OK. I like that you kept the little rendering problems, cause it help us to figure out our problems better.
Here an exemple, about your spot lamp problem (energy) : Go to the “lamp buttons” then into the “lamp tab”
and change the “lamp falloff property” from “inverse square” to “inverse linear”. That’s it
thanks, i’ll do that
Great tutorial! Thank you.
You’ve eliminated the keyboard sounds with awesome success. Problems just make it more fun to watch and give very important information when solved.
You can select “part-of-loop” easier by selecting one vertex (start) and then the end vertex, and hitting “select vertex path” from the specials menu. Yes, I watched car modeling tutorial part 2 and learned
Hey Dave, Great Tutorial Thanks a Bunch. I have the same trouble with my PC when I try to render. I appreciate the fix…
Great tutorial, now I know how to export the layout of a uv.
Oh ya, I find that in 2.43-2.49 that when rendering if your maximise and minimize the render window while rendering it will soon appear.
yep… Same for me. It seems to render with the blank screen until, like you said, maximize the screen or stretch the render window… I do not seem to ever have that issue with any of my Macs.
Let me rephrase what I just said… The station that I work for who owns the Macs that I use… Good Machines! I personally cannot afford them But I do tend to run into rendering issues That need to be solved to make better time on projects. I am sure I am overloading my mesh with textures.
This is completely off topic and I’m sorry about that but what were those pictures of oranges for?
haha, you saw those, did you?
those were some pics i took for a painting i want to do 
For raytraced ambient occlusion, it will not look grainy if you set the samples higher than 5. I usually set mine to 24 or 32 depending on the scene/objects and how close the camera is to them.
Im with potado.. those were allot of orange’s ^^
awesome tutoriala btw! as always
ctrl+up and shift+space does the same, at-least in linux.
It was long time since I’ve last used PhotoShop, but I remember feature that allowed to make layer transparent according its brightness, this feature should be located under layer style properties (right mouse button on layer in layers tab). I’m pretty sure that its blendif http://shaunchng.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=20126 .
P.S. great tut..
If you have a crash or accidentally close Blender, it does autosave every x minutes (AFAIK 10 minutes by default). To reopen if you closed it manually:
- Drag out the preferences thing from the top
- Select the Auto Save tab
- Click ‘Open Recent’
If it crashed you may have to look up where the files are stored and open them manually (might want to copy them somewhere else so they don’t get overwritten automatically).
BTW According to one of the talks at the Blender conference there’s going to be a ‘are you sure you want to quit’ confirmation in Blender 2.5 and the terminal window is not going to be used anymore so you can’t accidentally close that anymore either.
Now that’s what I’m talking about.
@ Aistis – yeah the hot keys are the same in windows (2.49b at least)
@ me – fastest way to recover a crashed file is : File —> Recover Last Session.
Btw I set my default Auto Save Temp Files to 3 mins (little paranoiac)
Hahah, this backward compatibility issue with rendering has been driving me nuts too… Having the render window filled with a scary black darkness is not exactly an appreciated outcome of hours’ work, is it
Thanks for solving the problem in front of my eyes on the video, though troubleshooting may have accounted for about *half* of the tutorial but that’s just fine to me.. comes in handy 
This may be the first (or 2nd?) video I have seen so far showing the relation between “U-V” texture mapping and external texture creation and I’m especially grateful for that part, along with the cool multi-res trick. Thanks!
Hi and thanks for that tutorial.
I learned a lot, and hope 2.5 will quickly include all 2.49 functionalities.
Awesome tutorial, as usual. But (again, as usual) I have a question. Now that you have the alien and the suit, what would be the best way to rig them, without the skin accidentally getting on top of the suit in some cases? Shrinkwrap? Joined Mesh? Seperate rigs with parenting? *tries to think of the perfect solution* Help? =P
Anyway, thanks again for this great tutorial! =)
-Patrick
there’s a nifty little modifier called “mask.” you designate a vertex group, and it “hides” that part of the mesh, so no worries about it coming through the clothing, so you can just apply the armature the same on both. i’ll try to go over it in my next segment, if i don’t forget
Ok, that’s a pretty cool modifier! xD This will help me alot in my current little project, in which joining the clothes with the mesh is not an option, thanks! =)
I’m gonna be a pain and bomb you with another question though: Would it be possible to turn the modifier on and off on specific frames of an animation?
When I was at graphicall.org I saw that baking is back since the 25612 commit.
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Baking is back in 2.5 since rev [25612]
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Dave or someone else possibly, could you verify if this tutorial will work in one of the 2.5 alpha releases since 25612? I’d like to do some modelling all in 2.5, but i’m not experienced enough to try it myself and would hate to waste hours of trying to get it to work in a 2.5 build if it’s still not even possible.
this tutorial was done in 2.49b, as some of the functions i needed to use hadn’t been implemented into 2.5 alpha yet.
Its because you had do sequence on in render settings why it would not render for ya.
I think the reason you had problems rendering is that I noticed when you were in 2.49, you had the “Do Compostie” and “Do Sequence” buttons depressed in the animation tab of the scene panel.
Hey I am a noob so I am sorry if this is a really dumb question but I am stuck! I love this series of tutorials btw and your awsome.
I have missed something or maybe I am just too green and its so simple but when I do the final render I get the alien skin color on everything but the eye ball? I have the texture but its the color of the skin. Please tell me where I went wrong or what I am missing.
thanks alot I am learning so much
Frank
hey i was wundering when u were done unwrapping the models mesh. when you said go to script and then to the uv exporter
I have been having problems with that part of the tutorial cause when i hit script to get to the uv exporter nothing shows up from the script side link or arrow like it dosnt have the uv exporter
This is an awesome tutorial! Thanks a ton!
You didn’t specity how to get the make track menu…
You can solve the annoying problem of having to minimize and maximise a black render window before it displays, by setting render display to image editor after splitting your screen…less cumbersome (sorry bout my error in my previous post…besides it was just ctrl T)
Hi
I have been trying to do the tangent thing in blender 2.5 beta, but i cant seem to find the bake option… am I just bad at searching, or is it just not added yet, still?
Is there any reason why there is no source files?
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is it possible to do the photoshop part in GIMP. Yes, i’m a cheapskate, i don’t have photoshop.
Absolutely; in fact you could use GIMP, PixelMator, MyPaint or most any other image/painting application. They are merely tools for the process.
-Jonathan
I don’t know if this has been asked yet, but I did a search and didn’t see it,so sorry if it’s already been answered. For some reason whenever I try to make the detailed mesh into a normal map it has an error that says “feedback loop detected.” I already looked at Jonathan’s tutorial for baking normals for 2.5, but it didn’t answer any of my questions. What’s causing this?
Hey, great tutorial!
I’m having a problem on importing to 2.49 where my mesh turns into a wireframe. I can’t fix it using z and it doesn’t show up when i render it. If I add a completely new mesh to the scene then that renders, but nothing else. Please help!