In this modeling and texturing tutorial we are going to go through the process of creating an axe in Blender 2.5. The tutorial follows the same general theme as the Exclusive Citizen weapon pack released prior to this tutorial.
In part 2 we will go through the steps to begin texturing the axe with some simple textures. The tutorial covers UV mapping, basic image texturing, AO baking, render textures, and more.
One or more textures on this 3D model have been created with images from CGTextures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default, please visit www.cgtextures.com for more information.
I would love to see a 2-3 hour tutorial on texturing. Great videos! P.S. I would also like to see a long tut on vertex painting.
+1 here. More tuts of this kind r welcome.
+1 here also i need more help on texturing right now
+100!
Awesome tut! Thank you!
*On my PC blender crashes too so I still use optimized 2.49b build
Sure we wanna see a 2 hour long tutorial about texturing! It’s like telling something important, and not showing how it’s been done correctly. Great job btw!
Yeah i also would love to see a long tutorial on texturing. Plz guys make an advanced texturing tutorial.
Can’t wait to finish my axe!!
I would also love to see a more in-depth texturing tutorial. This was however enough to get a firm grasp of the process. Blender also crashes continuously when trying to render for me as well for build 26139 and others near this build. Thanks for putting together some of the best tutorials on blender out there. Especially for your coverage of 2.5, since this is where I am starting with Blender.
Apart from the slight bugginess, this was a very good tutorial. Blender sometimes decides to keep crashing on me too but as a temporary solution it has proved as working to simply download Blender again and replace the old version due to its portable nature. Of course, this way you lose all customs settings but at least it works again..
Jonathan, could it be that PS would’ve opened your UVs if you’d save them in the default *.svg format instead of going back to 2.49? When dealing with extensions, I find it a good practice to uncheck the “Hide file extensions for known file types” checkbox in Windows’ Folder Options dialog but it’s a matter of preference of course. I also find it interesting that Blender is capable of working with *.psd files, one-way at least. When saving though, it’s probably best to choose a lossless format rather than *.jpg in order to avoid continuous degradation of the image. Just a sidenote anyway, you’d likely have done that not being in hurry.
I would also like to see more tutorials on this topics, especially SEAMLESS texturing and using brushes.
To me, the material of the axe head resembles stone more than metal, likely due to its lightness. Other than that, nice piece of work in a very short time period!
Great tut as always you guys all rock! i would also love to see an advanced texturing tutorial.
@Jonathan
Now UV are saved in SVG not TGA.
That would explain it
Jonathan, i think that your problem with Blender ( the crashes when you try to render) is because the windows vista… in my notebook (windows vista) Blender never works…. Try the Windows XP…
In my Vista Bleder is working!
Actually the shortcut to the textured mode is alt+z in both versions…
I am not positive in 2.5, but in 2.49 alt + T enabled textured mode with shading, where as shift + T only enables the textured mode.
To set the location of the 3D Cursor while in texture paint mode, hold CTRL and left click. That will set the location without having to change the mode.
Oh good to know.
Great tutorial, I learned a lot!
Can we have a tutorial that focuses on Blender and Gimp sometime, not all of us have photoshop :p
Very true
Although, some of the general priniples can be imitated in GIMP.
Almost true
….and GIMP can read/use the UV in SVG-format.
Thanks a lot for these great Tutorial.
NICE tutorial. I really love it and it has helped me out so well. I was also wondering if there are gonna be any blender game engine tutorials? I am really having a hard time finding education on that subject.
We are working to find an instructor to fill this position on BC. The surrogate machine broke so we have to do it the old fashion way. But we are digging around.
Hey Jonathan great stuff as always.
May I ask what software you use to screen cap your tutorials and your settings.
I checked the FAQ but it wasn’t there.
Thanks
Jonathan is using Camtasia Studio from Techsmith. We tend to output at 1280×720, 30fps, h.264 compression.
Thank you wes, Big help =).
Question Mark goes up there somewhere ??
Hi Jonathan, I had a quick workflow question if ya don’t mind
When using projection painting to get rid of the seams on our texture, is it an idea to do this before baking the AO and taking it into Photoshop to blend with the image texture? As trying it myself I end up painting over my AO shading alot of the time. Is there some cunning way round this that I’ve missed? I don’t seem to miss out on anything by doing the occlusion bake after having fixed the seams, as UV seams don’t have the same adverse affect on the AO. But I wondered what you thought about it?
Again thanks for an awesome tutorial.
Although this is different than what I did in the tutorial, I would suggest fixing the seams before AO baking. That way you do not have to worry about the shading differences as much.
Did you just blame Windows for a Blender/Photoshop issue?
Just finished watching; aside from some rough edges, great tutorial! You always explain things nicely.
Just FYI, your Blender most likely isn’t crashing because of anything on your end. You are using very bleeding-edge builds of Blender, so bugs like that should be expected. As for why Photoshop wouldn’t open the UV layout, it appears as though Blender 2.5 can only expert UVs to SVG, regardless of what file extension you name it with. This would be completely fine if Photoshop supported SVG, but it apparently does not. This is a bit surprising since SVG is a pretty common image type today.
I had the same crashes but only when using PSD files as textures, no problem with JPG.
As usual, it is very interesting seeing you working and explaining, thanks for all your tutos.
I LOVE IT !
dude you are really patient with that crashs .
and why not a 2hours tuto
Hi there,
first I’d like to thank you for all this nice tutorials you guys always do, I really appreciate them.
My problem with blender 2.5 is that I dont know how to apply tangent space normal maps.
Im working quite alot with 3DCoat and I’ve never had any problems with my normalmaps in Blender 2.49.
But even if I open a scene with an applied and working TS normalmap from 2.49 in 2.5 it is not working.
Can anybody explain how to use TS normalmaps in 2.5 or do a quick tutorial?
greetings from berlin
Fabian
The workflow tips really helped me, thank you.
Did you notice how towards the end of the tutorial, your mouse cursor got really big after leaving Photoshop? That has happened to me, too, using Photoshop with Windows 7. Have you found a solution for it?
In 2.49 I can’t seem to get it to bake properly. I select ambient occlusion and then bake, but it only gets the head of the axe for some reason and leaves the rest alone.
You probably do not have the image applied to all of the UVs. Try going into Edit Mode, selecting all vertices and then selecting the correct image from the UV/Image Editor.
Thanks, I will try messing with it again here in the future. I gave up on it and still came away with a pretty decent looking axe. You weren’t kidding when you said modeling was preferable to texturing for some folks (me). Anyways, thanks for the advice.
In a different Tutorial video I heard that the crashing while rendering only happens when you render to full screen. In a new window it should not happen. Haven’t tested it myself.
Wow that is an awesome trick with the texture seam removal. I’m going to have to watch this video again and learn how to do that so I can use it more often.
Well done.
Thank you for all of the tutorials that you have provided for us, so far. They are a real inspiration and you explain things very thoroughly and clearly.
After viewing this Axe tutorial, i decided to model a small plane and apply uv layouts and textures but, when i try to render the model, Blender always crashes, leaving me with the “Blender has encountered a problem and needs to close.” message. In texture draw mode i can see all of the textures are correctly applied and look nice but, when i attempt to render, it goes throught he motions of a render but, at the finish, even though i can see the render is almost completly finished, it crashes! What am i doing wrong?
Jonathan, sorry i forgot to write, that i am using Blender 2.49.
In this 2nd Axe tutorial, you seem to have no problems moving and rotating your UV islands, in the UV Editor. When i try moving my UV islands, all other islands seem to be affected, as well, as though they are all on a single sheet of rubber. What am i missing?
I would like to apologize to everyone for my acute ignorance. In the above Feb. 15 – 5:22 post, where i whine about Blender crashing, i had had a sub-surf setting, for all objects, during render, set to 6! Since then, i switched down to 4 and Blender is rendering beautifully, again. So, a thousand apologies; i growl in mortification.
No worries – and appreciate you hanging on the site.
I can’t bake the Ambient Occlusion, Blender keeps crashing on me.
Can you give us a few more details?
At which point does it crash, are you receiving any kind of error, what operating system are you on, which version of Blender are you using?
Dear Jonathan,
When i try moving my UV islands, all other islands seem to be affected, as well, as though they are all on a single sheet of rubber. What am i missing?
I Stephen,
It sounds like you have either Proportional Editing enabled (O) or Live Transform turned on (UVs > Live Transform). Check both of those and if that doesn’t solve the problem let me know!
Thank you, Jonathan. Yes i had Proportional Editing enabled.
I love your tutorials, you made me aware of Quad Topology and “Good Edge Flow”, all of which were Greek, to me until i saw your tutorials. thanks again!
Hey, great tutorial (as always) I learned ALOT of texturing which was a big problem for me, but I’m wondernig how would I make the wood less shiny? Thanks!
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL @ the crashing. The crashing is not on your side or on the developer’s side. It’s on Microsoft’s side, well, I guess it is a bit the developer’s side. It’s because blender uses the whole processor to focus on rendering the image, ignoring signals from windows asking if it’s responding. If only windows had an ignore option to that…
And that’s when I stopped using windows for good (Well, except for rare cases like some programs that do not work in Linux, I reboot into widows for that.)
I would recommend Ubuntu, and then read this http://freeasinbeard.org/post/105517877/running-photoshop-cs4-on-linux-using-wine to get photoshop working.
Great tutorial!
-tjb0607
Oops, it actually isn’t a problem with windows. It’s just that windows sucks with debugging and doesn’t even say why it crashed…
When it crashed before in windows to me, it was during the rendering, not right when the rendering is starting. Also, I didn’t even have 2.5 when I said that
I’m stupid
I’ve had it crash in linux once. Apparently it was the infamous segmentation fault.
I would love to see more texturing tutorials, even a very long one. Especially within the interface of the GIMP.
Thank you very much for these tutorials:)
the photoshop is kind of hard for me:( But I would love to see more texturing tutorials, even a very long one In gimp!!!!!
when i press cmd i on my mac it goes bule and i can’t press cmd z ?
Hi, in this tutorial and couple of others I learned so much. Thanks to authors of this great site and best tutorials that I menage to find on internet.
I made one model of acoustic guitar and short presentation. You can find it in my YouTube channel. Thanks a lot.
I forget to say, just click on my name to link on my videos.
I find it difficult to learn texture and lighting but thanks to you I’m making progress.
My axe: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZOBw9AC1g5w/TnI4reOKJeI/AAAAAAAAAGY/WshVj4xtNMo/s1600/hachaTextura.png
Should ambient occlusion setting be turned off after you bake a map for it? I don’t see much bump and spec until I remove it and make my lights more intense.
great tut….helped me a lot, Thanx for the effort you put in.