In this two part, Blender 2.5 tutorial we will be creating a sci-fi panel. This series includes modeling of the high and lowpoly objects, baking the normal maps and other various maps and texturing the panel. We will then show you how to bring these textures into Unity 3d to be used as a custom material.
Part one we will cover modeling the details for the panel inside of Blender 2.5 and then baking the normal map onto a plane.
Porter, right now you’re my hero, though you’re about a week late
I’ve been working on some paneling like this!
thx man, waiting for the next part…
Hey, just to let you know, this is a really helpful tutorial
and its gonna be quite a useful thing. But when you were selecting everything but the low-poly plane, another way is, you can just select the low-poly plane, and hit Ctrl+I to select the inverse 
Just thought I’d let you know, and cheers for the tutorial – great job!
Another way would be select all the high poly objects, then create a new group with Ctrl-G, then just select a single high poly object and use Shift-G to select the group.
I’m glad you’ll go over the normal map baking. It seems like a simple enough process but when I try it myself something always goes wonky.
Woot, loving that you guys are going over into Unity3d. Its really taking off and tutorials that specifically help us into these 3d programs are well worth the time!
@Tweediez
I never thought about ctrl-I; what a great idea. Thanks for the tip.
@Jeff
I always had issues with normal mapping too, and then with a lot of sweat and tears I started to figure it out; until now I can more or less do it in my sleep. Don’t give up, and keep on Blending… Blenderering… using Blender..
@Andy Pace
No Andy, you are my hero. You are always the first person to post on my videos, and my Great Grandfather had the last name Pace as well, so I am sure we are related somehow… Like 5th cousins eight times removed once replaced… or something like that.
@amine
You won’t have to wait long
That would be awesome. I’ve heard many times growing up that all Pace’s in the US are somehow related, so I’d say there’s solid chance.
Great idea for a tutorial. Thanks!
Can’t wait for part 2!
Been waiting for a tutorial like this on blender cookie.
Thanks!
Thnx for another great tutorial, Porter Nielsen. I love low-poly model creation tutorials. This panel can indeed be used in something like a game, especially because it is low-poly.
Can’t wait for the next part.
BTW: do you also have knowledge of importing models+textures into UDK? That would be very helpfull to some people(including me).
A guy named Mike Campagnini has generously rebuilt the ASE export script and provided an instructional vid on how to use it on his site.
http://campagnini.net/2011/04/16/ase-export-for-blender-2-57/
HOLY CRAP!!!! when i woke up this morning this was almost exactly what i was going to do
@Evert-Jan Heilema
I don’t know how to import into UDK, but it is definitively on my list of things to learn.
@matthew morris
Cool.
Almost an archetypical subject for tutorial.I think lots of blender users have thought of doing something along that lines:)
Looks really great and is packed with useful modelling and texturing information.
I really dig this one!!! Great work, thanks for all the effort you people at blendercookie put into educating blender:) ROXX!
I’m running into a problem while baking. I copy your settings exactly, selected everything, with the plane last, but when I hit “Bake,” I get the error message: “No objects or images found to bake to.” Any idea what’s going wrong? If it matters, I have all of my objects within 1 Blender unit of each other.
Oh, nevermind, I see what happened: I hadn’t unwrapped. Derp.
Very cool tutorial! I hope you go into some detail re: Unity 3D. I’ve never even heard of it before, let alone what it is and what it does.
That inset feature is so nice, it should be in official builds, thanks for showing that
Hi Porter, about 20 mins in, just saw the array modifier part and thought this might help speed up your workflow.
Enable merge in the array modifier, then click the copy button on the modifier.
Now just change the x and y offsets and apply both modifiers.
Less time spent repeating steps that can be copied, and removes the need to remove doubles after.
Thanks for the tutorial, I’m off to watch the rest! ^^
On the bolt normals the reason you get weird results when recalculating normals is because the geometry is non-manifold.
You have edges with 3 or more faces.
To fix it you could just delete the bottom half of the cylinder, which won’t matter, it can’t be seen. then when you recalculate you’ll get all your normals facing the same direction. (in or out)
As for reason others including myself us recalculate on all the flip if needed is to save time when working with hi-poly meshes. It could literally take hours to find and fix all the faces by hand. On low poly it can still be a time saver.
Don’t worry, I’ve been doing low and high poly modeling for over a decade and still learning new stuff every day.
Hi,Porter Nielsen,
Thanks for this useful practical tutorial.
I, just completed this first part,successfully created normal,shading and color guide maps.As you spend time explaining the process,I spend more time in understanding and executing it to desire results.
Great! I use Unity so this is very useful.
Porter, I am having trouble downloading the addon you talk about at 7:40. I can get to that page but I don’t see were i can download from. Can you or any one else help me. thank you.
Jay,
I hope there are coming more Tutorials with Blender and Unity3D relation from you.
Great tutorial Porter.
Can anyone provide a link to that extrude inset (or what ever it’s called) script that was used in this tutorial?
@ Ryan
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/Modeling/Inset-Extrude
@Johnathan H
Thanks for the great information, espescially about non-manifold. Need to do some more research on the matter, that is for sure.
Thank you Porter
No problem Porter. Yes, they can be a real pain in the butt ha ha.
Thanks, Porter. Very useful tutorial. To me, everything about low-poly and modular environment is extremely useful, as I didn’t find much tutorials on this. So I hope there will be more about it.
I mean, for example: creating a modular rock wall.
Porter, I noticed at the beginning of the tutorial you turned snapping on and then used edge snap twice to align the mesh on 2 axis. A simpler solution would be selecting vertex snapping, hitting shift (axis you don’t want it to go on) and then holding ctrl to enable snapping. I find this useful to never have to enable and disable snapping manually. Nice tut though, I’ve been needing a normal map tutorial.
Thanks
@Nick
You just made my day. Shift + undesired axis = restrain to two axis instead of one! How awesome is that, I was literally wondering how to do that while making this very tutorial.
Porter, I having problems trying to download the add on. When click the link you post for Ryan, I get to the page but i don’t see no link for the download. The only thing I can click on is in the second box but I get this result. pic link : http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/5994/blender2.png
@DaveRey
I had the same issue and the fix had me facepalming. When you get to that page, right click and select save as; then save it as a .py file and you are good to go.
@Porter, thanks for help with that. You don’y know how long i was trying to figure it out, now to contune on with this awsome tutorial. great work, looking forward for next tutorial. one question you mention photoshop, do you have tips for paint.net. thank you.
Ahh, this is brilliant. You really showed me a lot in this tutorial. I’ve been playing around with UDK instead of Unity 3D, but I’m sure the process is fairly similar. I know my way around the Material Editor within UDK so I’m sure it can’t be too difficult. I’m really looking forward to the next part of this! Thanks a lot.
Just what I needed
thank you very much
cant wait til next part
I, like, seriously love you for this, dude. Especially for including Unity stuff. Awesome.
Porter,
great tutorial, you are clearing up some grey areas for me.
I do have a question, though. When I am baking my shading map, I followed your directions exactly, yet the only image I get baked is a pure white square. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?
Thanks in advance.
Mike
Never mind,
I figured it out (all on my own, even!)
I accidentally had AO and Environment lighting turned on. Once I turned those off, it rendered out very nicely.
Thanks so much! I had the same problem. When I couldn’t solve it I closed Blender and went home for the night (I Blend at work mostly)
However, after reading your post, I opened my blend file to check those settings. . .they were both already disabled, and my bake worked properly.
My only guess is they may have been on the previous night, left over from the Lighting and Rendering tutorials I’d been doing the prior week.
At least you gave me something to think about.
Thanks again
wow, thank you so much!
cant wait to see the second part
Ah! *That*’s what normal maps are for. Now I get it. Thanks for the great tutorial. In my case, it was my floor plane that needed re-normalising, but after recreating it, the bake went well.
Another quick note for you. Ctrl-Z on the hemi-lamp didn’t get rid of the rotation, you just need Alt+R instead.
thanks a lot..very nice tutorial!
@Nick thx for the shortcut to select 2 axis and snapping on/off.
The inset_extrude is a very nice script, but without the script you can select all faces -> E extrude up on Z -> then add the Bevel modifier. You have more control for the width.Maybe you have to manually close more areas but it work fine out of the blender box.
very good tutorial… is nice to see unity3d here to.
I want to share a tip about baking normal maps that I came across. It may sound silly but make sure both objects are set to render!
I had successfully baked a normal map and applied it to the low poly model so I turned the high poly model’s renderability off to be able to check out the results. I wanted to try baking again with a higher resolution image so I deleted the normal map I baked and tried again. I was just getting a flat purple map and couldn’t figure out why. Then I saw I never turned the high poly model’s renderability back on. Hope that helps some people if they get stuck.
Looking forward to part 2!
It’s good to be a citizen
I know what you mean.
That selection map that you’ve created can actually be used in blender to automatically assign, say, 5 materials to a 4-vertex mesh: just use the texture nodes to filter out all its colors except one, and then give the masked result as an input to a corresponding material node. Kind of like stencil, except that stencil works with textures, and this is for the actual materials. Damn, I thought it was my know-how, even considered recording a tutorial of my own, but now that you’re just one step away from it, it won’t be necessary…
Can some one post or give me a link to an alternate download mirror to the inset extrude add-on for blender? I’ve tried accessing the download page from different web browsers and even my brothers computer but I still cant download it says there’s something wrong with the security certificate or something
I ve uploaded it for you:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20284799/mesh_inset_extrude.py
@WIll.m
when you left click on the link, is this what you talking about.
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/1939/blen3.png
if so. read my post at 28.1 i got the same result but porter said to right click the link. a pop up menu comes up and click save target as… then put the file in your add on folder. hope this help.
@Mike
I got the same problem, but I cant follow your solution. By AO you mean Ambient Occlusion? And where to I disable it and Environment lighting ?
OK, found it, its disabled. But still I dont get the shading map
Or you use the ‘Merge’ option in the array modifier instead of ‘remove doubles’… (they do the same, but the one is automated and the other not).
And why not select face-loops with ALT-RMB
Anywy it’s a great tutorial. I’ve always wanted to work in unity
Any possibility for a unity3dCookie? That wold be fantastic.
This is really cool. I would love to see more tutorials using blender and unity together. They are scarce on the web.
Also: is this possible for shapes other than a plane?
Thanks!
Thank you very much for this type of tutorial as it will help me in my UT 3 mapping. I am looking forward to part 2 as well.nnQuestion: Using Blender 2.57b, I had to place the low poly mesh above the other high poly meshes for it to bake properly. I did select all of the high poly meshes first, then selected the low poly mesh last.
Just excellent, thanks a ton!
Awesome awesome and awesome . Thank you .
I was dreaming of tutorials on a Blender to Unity pipeline and I find this one the day I am back from holiday! seems it’s time to start working on that. Thanks a lot
Hey Porter. Thanks so much for this. I started playing with normals after your excellent brick wall tutorial. I never knew you could do this.
Suggestion: Regarding the B not typing, just resize the right panel a bit larger then you can see the first letter. Bugged me too.
I saved my bigger size as a user preference.
I’m really looking forward to the Photoshop part.
I also noticed that depending on the height of the parts, i.e. bolts, they seem to not show on the baked map.
After some messing around, I noticed that the Distance seemed to make no difference, but the Bias did. 1.5 was needed to “see” any parts that were farther away from the face.
Yes, the bias needs to be adjusted to detect objects further away. The further the object the higher the bias needs to be.
-Jonathan
I also noticed, Jonathan, that it looses the closer ones when you have to set it higher.
What’s the magic size space to use? What I mean is, say I set the Bias to 1 and all of my parts need to be inside of 1 blender unit. But it doesn’t seem to work out that way.
Is there a rule of thumb on this?
Awesome tut! I would love to see more tuts like this. How to make environment tilesets for 2d games completely in blender would be really cool.
Once again, these low poly tutorials are awesome. I am really enjoying it. Also I thought I was the only one who got irritated about the first letter being hidden when typing into a text field.
I am quite excited for the part 2. Even though I will be following along in gimp I have yet to have a problem following the Photoshop parts in tutorials.
Thanks.
Very good tutorial. Can’t wait for part 2.
Quicker way to make floor texture:
Take a plane, Subdivide it.
In tools window set number of cuts to 60 or so.
Go to Face Select mode and hit “A” till all faces are selected.
Extrude Individual Faces in the Z axis. (Make sure you use Individual)
Set the Pivot Point selector in the 3D Viewport toolbar to Individual Origins
Hit “S” and scale the faces in.
Set the Pivot Points back to “Active” or “Median” or whatever you normally use.
Cheers.
Thanks for fiddling with the normalmaps and saving me a lot of time.
The reason CRTL+N screws up the bolt normals is: The bolts have an interior and rim without a volume, so blender is confused, because it can’t guess what is “outside” in a non-closed mesh like those. Non-closed works, if you don’t have planes coming out of the volume.
Cheers
Hey, I love this tutorial, i always have issues when baking textures.
Quick Tip: When you couldn’t rotate your Hemi lamp. Press alt+R to clear rotation, alt+G and alt+S also clear location and scale
Bravo! This realy was a very nice tut!
I am having an issue with the inset extrude – after finding the file and installing it I can’t get the “I” shortcut to work, I have to search for it through the space bar menu and then activate the extrusion. I tried looking for it in the preferences and key commands but cant find it. any ideas??
my Mesh (under add) is disabled?? O.O
In chapter two of the some of the more common extras will be explained useful features that can augment the production process or add value a feature or function to low-poly models when used for game development the various bake options available in Blender 3D for instance which provide 3D artists with a relatively quick way to make the different image types often used in games predominantly to improve the general fidelity of in-game assets.. The bottom image shows both bakes with their respective UVW map overlaid to highlight how each type of lighting situation bake relates to the chair and UVs the process of baking any form of map including ambient occlusion maps will produce images similar to the bottom image..
Wu I find that part brilliant, useful, with one tips per minute. All that details using finally only one plane ?! That’s what I call low polynom. I guess ‘baking process’ will be my next task on todo list. It’s magic the way some few details give the illusions of a complex model.
So much things to work, so many times to use…
Hi very good tutorial,
I have only one issue when I am looking at the edges that are beveled they are not sharp looking like yours.I am very new to blender so, I think I may have missed something with the set up.
Never mind I had the geometry all wrong for the shape I was trying to make but I have it fixed now ^^
I am having trouble with the shading map portion. When I bake, all I get is a solid grey image. The normal map worked fine. Anyone care to assist? Great tutorial so far.
Please disregard my post. I found the answer from Mike on page 1 of the comments.
Anyone having a problem with the inset_extrude addon?…I have it installed but for some reason it wont let me activate it, I installed the py file and its showing up on my addon list but it wont let me check the activate box…anyone have advice for this blender noob (also im running 2.58)
yeah. I’m having the same problem. And I’m using 2.58 as well…wth?
I think that this addon works no more for blender 2.58, i did a little search in the addons library we got in blender and i did find that there is something that looks maybe the same and it’s called polygon-inset, you may have to google it !
w00t! the addon works in the newly released 2.59
While baking my bolts were showing up as a little high and slightly to right in the normal map despite appearing to be in the place. Turns out it was because the origin of the bolts was not aligned with the origin of the plane. I swear I had aligned them before, but must have bumped it at some point. Just thought it might be helpful to point out if anyone else was having a similar issue.
Hey Porter thanks for this awesome tutorial.. it was fun and informative.
Does anybody know if I can use these same techniques in order to make a low poly terrain for Unity?
You are phenomenally helpful. You read these comments and reply appropriately. I hadn’t realized that this is what the baking was all about. I have got to say that thanks to you and the myriad of really brilliant contributors and “hackers”, Blender and its world is THE PLACE to learn 3d modeling, sculpting, and animation.
Great tutorial!
Hotkey ‘I’ does not work here… Blender 2.60a
You need to download the addon, link provided in previous post.
Why do you have to create a fake panel to bake to the real panel? Is it because you have to bake one image to another?
Very good tutorial
Although, somewhere at 3:58, when I changed the shading mode to textured, the colors only became brighter. Is there any way I can fix this?(or would it be okay if I let it be?) I’m using Blender 2.57 if that helps
Hey thanks for this awesome tutorial. i have learnt alot
so far i have had no issues except that my shading map is far duller then yours. i dont know why, im guessing that my geometry was extruded less than yours or something. still if you know of an answer to this then please let me know
and again awesome tutorial
thanks
Actually it is causing a major problem. because with linear burn its not showing through the metal texture hardly at all. i guess the question is this. how do i assure greater contrast between the darker & lighter areas?
Thanks
Josh
Very Nice tutorial, especially for beginners using a bottom-up approach.
Hey!
I have a problem i hope someone can help me out with.
After adding the texture i baked and saved the image of to the low poly plane, and do EVERYTHING he does on the video up until turning on Viewport shading: Texture, i get a completely black plane
Anyone got an idea of what it might be?
First off, Awesome tutorial… but i’m having issues with the shading texture as well… i just get a grey image… soooo annoying, everything has worked perfectly up until this. tried doing what others suggested above but don’t seem to work
after about an hour of trying to get the shading rendering correctly and just after posting the above msg, I figured I’d restart blender and see if that works… and what do you know! exactly the same settings and it rendered correctly first try.
i don’t know if this is intended but these 2 tutorials are being showed in the unity side as well the blender side
I have a problem when backing the shading maps. My normal map looks perfectly fine. After applying it to the material and looking at the plane it looks cool and as expected. But in the deepest rims (i.e. between the 75×75 floor pieces) I have a white line while with the light.
This makes it terribly hard to do a nice selection an the shading map for the bare metal fill int Part 2.
Any suggestions how I get rid of the white lines in deep rim, when the normal map is applied?
Thx in advance!
Oh yes and great tutorial!!