In this multi-part series, I’ll be covering how to box-model a stylized dragon, making heavy use of the various sculpt tools. The texturing will cover creating tangent normal maps and using the “toon shader” to get a nice cel-shaded look. I’ll also go into some intermediate rigging with some nice animations; from walking to pouncing to flying. and finally we’ll look into setting up a good composition with props and lighting.
In this part 6, I go over a few more tricks on baking, and go ahead and add a “jaw open” shapekey so we can see inside the mouth. Then we jump into Photoshop to do some cleanup on the texture.
You are my favorite
I really like the color choice, very scary. =)
You might want to go back to the other articles and link them as you add more. It would be more helpful to have links to go to the next tutorial as opposed to links leading backwards, which you have right now.
You are absolutely right… will get on that right now.
this still hasn’t been done… there are nine parts but part 6 and below only show the links up to part 6, part 7 doesn’t show 8, and part 8 doesn’t show 9. not sure if you know this or not…
yes! i’ve been waiting for this.
What you missed at the end with the normal maps was the image assigned to it had changed to the skin texture image.
I’m excited to see the rigging. Rigging is something that has always been my weakest link.
Great tut. I have now tested out the Shape Keys on a cube, and got it to work.
great! just in time for the weekend.. thanks, dave!
and how many total parts to this were you thinking of making?
hi Wes, i believe that the no image baking error is from not saving the image to the disk.
You should change the blending mode in Photoshop (or GIMP for FLOSS among us) to “Color” for the parts of the image that you selected with the pen tool (Teeth, claws, etc.). This will keep the ambient occlusion data (luminance) while still changing the color. Your processor worked hard to give you that information don’t let Photoshop hide it!
the ambient occlusion data made things too dark. He brightened it up while changing the colour.
So I guess, it was intentional to do what he did.
Although of course, the teeth, horns and claws didn’t have any data left at all
Hey! Grate tut… fast tip: if you have a file which name ends with a number, you can press “save as”, then “+”, and Blender automatically detects the number and adds +1 (if it doesn’t have a number, Blender will add one). Fast and easy!
Cheers!
Oh! Sorry, Grate = Great!!!
Maybe you could use “Classical Halfway” and both Distances to Auto to get rid of the shadow issues…
AFAIK, there is no disadvantage of Classical Halfway over Classical. However, it gets rid of certain Buffer Shadow issues
Oh, and great tutorial
Very cool stuff Dave. Wish I had more time to play around creating my own Dragon.
ALT-B to show only the part you want, then ALT-B to restore.
This is the best 3D tutorial ever!! Thanks a lot.
I was learning a different 3D software, one of those “intuitive ones”.
At the beginning I thought Blender to be impossible, too cryptic interface….
but! after this tutorial I simply love Blender, I’ll never look back again.
Thanks David for the inspiration
Here is what I got so far
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/couturier.arnaud/Art2010#5501883735207205906
Nice work Piiichan
I wonder what ever happened to part 7.
It is on its way
i saw part seven and i think you should add what you learned in the game engine and make a walk cycle for the dragon. just a simple walk cycle, but make one and set him up so you can walk him around
I can not get Blender to bake the texture. I have the dragon selected. The progress bar moves along but the uv editor window just stays a black.
I’ve run into a problem. Everything works fine right up until the baking of the textures (17 minute mark in the vid), but the texture bakes out black. The progress bar shows Blender is doing something, and it doesn’t crash, it just gets no result. I can get a result by switching the Ambient Occlusion image back to ‘mix’, but then I get no AO on the texture. What am I doing wrong?
Plus I just wanna say thanks for this, you guys are amazing.
Crafty Hippo,
That is the exact same problem I am having. Glad I am not alone. Hopefully we can figure it out.
I tried to change the color in the texture options. xD Yeah, I went to texture, then I clicked on “color” and “ramp” and made it red. It works, but don’t know if it was okay. Hope it will cause nothing bad later. xD
I had the same problem; for some reason, when I try to bake the textures, Blender overwrites the occlusion image, and then that one goes completely black (although it does not overwrite the original file-saved image, so it could be easily backed-up). Creating a new image and/or changing it in the image selector does not seem to work: the baker reloads the occlusion image and overwrites it (aaargh); still trying to figure out what’s wrong…
I am having the same problem. During the Textures bake, the image switches back to the AO image and makes it black. The file containing the AO image has to be refreshed in order to recover the AO texture. I have been unable to stop this from happening without losing the AO.
Please can someone give us a clue to getting around this problem?
hey david
i got a question for you.
ive sculpted my dragon with scales along the body but in certain areas, side of neck and legs theres stretching of the sculpted texture any idea how to solve this to get a clean flow
http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/stvndysn/weirdscales.jpg
In texture view my dragon gets pink! D: How can I fix that?
Great tutorial for a beginner like me. Thanks!
to get the texture to show after baking i went into influences for the ambient occlusion texture and only checked ambient, and now the texture is visible when i bake. not 100 percent sure if this is the right way but it helps for now
why dont you just select, and change the hue?
i dont get the deal with the masking, seems like a huge overcomplication.