In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial series we take you through creating a damaged concrete column object that could be used in an urban environment.
Part 02 of this series covers additional sculpting, retopologizing the model and texturing it in GIMP.
Might be worth adding some rebar. Anything built with concrete to handle a load would need reinforcement. Visually, it’ll look more interesting as well.
Well, he could make the case that it is only subjected to compression;) j/knnIt’s a great tutorial, but i do agree with you, it would be nice to see some rebar there, mainly to learn how to something like that.nnAwesome tutorial either way.
@Ricardo.C
Why don’t u make sculpting tutorials for Blender Cookie.
Your youtube channel is full of sculpting videos. They are just awesome.
Pls make it for us.
Sorry for that I thought u were Roberto
The right one in the banner has a Face,
anyways… Great tutorial, you’re really make me understand
Nice tutorial!
Most ohter 3D software, game engines etc would expect normal maps to be slightly different than Blender bakes them. Flat surfaces should have a single color, whereas in Blender flat surfaces end up with color gradients because the meshes are set to smooth before baking, like in this tutorial.
Anybody have ideas how to solve this discrepancy without introducing hard edges in the normal maps? I’ve run into this problem quite often when making assets for use in UDK. Wooden planks looking curved, flat metal surfaces in machines looking convex or concave etc, and I wonder how others solve this.
Great tutorial, straight forward and succinct! My only comment would be I would love to get a higher resolution version of the video if possible. Thanks!
Higher resolution than the 1280×720 or higher than the embedded streaming version?
-Jonathan
Excellent tut imho. Thanks for sharing Ben.
I really enjoyed this tutorial. I wouldn’t have thought of combining the baked normal map with the one generated from the texture in gimp. I’ve been using the sculpting material from the first part in the series since that came out. Definitely a lot better sculpting with it than the default material!
Great tutorial thx, pssst how did you manage to get four faces in your pillar hehe
@ Ben
Hi , it was great tutorial. I wanted to know which graphics do you use. Because my comp starts to lagg. In previous tutorial u stated that a quad-core and 4 gb ram is enough.
But I have an Intel core i7 990x, 16 gb ram, Ubuntu 11.04(64 bit) yet it laggs.
I want to buy a graphics card and start using blender day & night.
Pls help ….
pls
pls
THNX
@chetan
I got an Asus 1 gb ddr5 Nvidia gtx550 ti the other day, it works awesome in ubuntu, only $150!(works great in windows as well, Crysis on high settings, no problem, smooth as silk).
I would be not confident to try an ati card, unless fully researching how to set up before purchasing, it pays to check out what people have had success with, before getting a graphics card that could be a fail.
I was unsure why the end result was not shown off in real-time glsl shading, that would have been appropriate for a game asset like this, and would have shown off the textures/normals and specular maps.
Loved the GIMP tips and workflow, thanks so much.
@ Grep p
Thnx for ur reply.
But can Nvidia gtx 550ti match my processor’s speed (because its a beast).
I have tried its smaller brother NVIDIA GTS 450 and also tried NVIDIA 8800 ultra from my friends, but they were worst than my Onboard INTEL HD GRAPHICS. All these card were bottlenecked against my cpu. I am sick of these.Thus asking for help. Pls
recommend that should I opt for a Quadro graphics card or stuck with Geforce card.
I don’t have any Windows installed, leaving Ubuntu 11.04 & Mac OS X leopard on my drive. So no reason for gaming. I am a pure cg artist. Pls recommend few cards which are good at blender and can match up my processor’s speed.
THNX AGAIN
PLS ANYONE SOLVE MY SERIOUS ISSUE
Dude, I only have core 2 duo , runs fine, what bottleneck?
What are your pc specs?
I don’t exactly know what’s the issue, and I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but my pc is pretty sweet right now. Plus I dont know about macs really either. I hope you get the answer you are looking for.
Cheers.
Or you could SLI 2 gtx 550′S?
My problem is that whatever card I plug in, blender is not able to run 90000 polys smoothly. I have watched many videos on youtube a normal 8800gt can handle 45 million polys smoothly. That’s all my problem really.
Now I pray to god that Sli’s would work for me.
Or replace to a C2D
(I have made biggest mistake wasting $1000 getting Core i7 990x, My dad gone kill me for that)
If I am not mistaken SLI is meant for gaming. I made the mistake with my last computer getting dual video cards with SLI thinking it would help with 3D. Are you sure your using a 64 bit version of Blender? Poke around in the User Settings to make sure it is using all over your cores too.
@ Jeff
Thnx for reply and u saved me from buying dual cards.
My all cores(12 threads) are working properly . The default blender scene ( The Cube ) gets rendered in 00.00.10 milliseconds compared to a quad core of 00.00.50 milliseconds. Not so ever problem with my cpu(intel i7 990x). Yeah I am using 64bit GSOC onion branch build of blender 2.58. What settings should I change according to u to get my machine enabled for high poly sculpting . Pls tell me.
Thnx
And Pls suggest me a good graphics card.
Waiting for ur answer.
Do you have the driver for your card installed? I had a nvidia card when I was using Ubuntu and was able to install the priority driver from their software manager. I think your issue might be the card is just using a generic driver and not making use of your card. I remember even something as simple as Tux Racer not running for me until I installed the driver for 3D acceleration.
You also might want to see how well it handles it in an official release of Blender. Just to cover your bases. Did you get that branch off Graphicall or compiled it yourself? I noticed a boost in performance from compiling Blender myself and then if you do so you can also optimize it. I don’t think that will help your current situation, but you may want to keep it in mind for later.
As someone who has used linux for years I understand where your coming from. That being said I had Window freeze on me for no apparent reason this morning. Your damned if you do, damned if you don’t!
The SLI thing was a joke, by the way.
I think u r running into some totally different issue, as Jeff suggests above.
@ Jeff
I am using nvidia-173-dev 173.14.30-ubuntu1(latest version) with nvidia-173-glx(Transitional package) for nvidia gts 450(from my friend). The proof that all drivers are working is ” COMPIZ “. Compiz works flawlessly on my Desktop. But when working with blender, compiz is switched off.
I also have Zbrush installed with the help of wine. And 60 million poly calmly worked without any type of lag( Getting 70-85 frames/sec ). It was something unbelievable to my eyes.
Is this a problem with blender. I have tried various versions of blender and the same story repeated every time.
Today, I made a test run on my friends computer which had Intel core i3 540, nvidia 9800gt and 4 Gb RAM , Ubuntu 11.04(64 bit). And 20 million polygons were like silk.
I am very sad about this. Now I am getting frustrated with my dum pc. Crying allot.
Pls help
Pls help
Pls help
@greg p
You were trying to fool me. Really I had decided of buying them both. Pls help. It’s an serious issue for me.
I had a problem with this a short time ago, with my hd5670 ati card think it had something to do with opencl missing but not sure, I suggest you try compiling blender yourself to find any missing dependencies, if you need any help you can email me for my skype username and I can talk you through it and give you my updater script that will automatically download new updates from SVN and install them. I currently have 3 versions of blender: tomato branch, main branch, and blender cycles, also have SmallLuxGPU and luxrender build from source, hardest part seems to be dependencies that actually sped up my whole system after they were installed.
email: [email protected]
make sure you have subject that says something like “4 blender help” or something similar so I know what it is for or ur email address will be blocked.
Thank You so much for doing this tutorial! Just finished my own one (you can see iit at the blender cookie Facebook page) and it looks great!
Thanks again,
Gus
@chetan
Please accept my apology, I just had my nvidia drivers crash out and now I am getting only 680 X 340 screen resolution!(with 1 gb gtx 550 ti overclocked version)on ubuntu!
I can understand your frustration!I spent 1 hour , but can’t fix it yet, really annoyed, and was planning to just dump ubuntu after 2 years and go back to windows xp, as my new pc runs xp awesome! These issues can be resolved, but they are extremely annoying , glad I am not a pro cg artist, or I would be totally devastated.
I think you should try looking on blender artists, or similar sites?
Good luck, and sorry mate.
NVIDIA settings (windows) for optimal sculpting with fermi cards (4xx and 5xx).
Just wanted to share this info: in the nvidia control panel set ‘Force vsync off’ for blender, and in blender make sure to turn off double sided for you mesh under object data. I went from lag at 400K polys to smooth sculpting at 1.6M polys
Found this info on blenderartist btw.
-Pelle
@chetan
well, its official, my loyalty to ubuntu has totally ended, BOTH my pc’s have the same bozo low res screens, and I cant fix it! I am now a windows fanboy, bye bye linux!
All this , just to enjoy Blender! Rediculous.
Put this in our terminal
1. Open the terminal
2. Type sudo chown -R username /etc/X11 (Replace the ‘username’ with your own username) this command will remove the x-server settings file
3. Then type sudo nvidia-xconfig
4. Finally run gksudo nvidia-settings
5.After running the above last line you’ll get the x-server settings manager, set up your display settings (resolution, refresh rate…etc.) and click on “Save to X Configuration File“, and click Save.
I think this should fix your problem.
Ubuntu is the best. Much better than Windows. Don’t forget that our favourite software ” BLENDER ” is made on linux.
Apologies accepted.
Cheers this should work.
If u have any problems, let it me know.
& don’t overclock your card it may harm it.
“sudo chown -R username /etc/X11″ this is not a good habit to get into, chown means change ownership -R is set recursively so basically you are telling it to give non-root control over to the user with every file and folder in that directory. I hope that was just a mistake in writing because you should never advise anyone to do this.
here is what I ‘think’ you meant to put there instead:
2. sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old
Absolutely right. But he is noob to linux. So I told him the following things. This should also work.
@ Kerrey
Did you received my e-mail????? by the name of Mayur Shah
I did receive the email and I sent a reply, I thought maybe you had fixed it since I never received a response. I will resend from different email address hopefully that will fix it.
Didn’t received your mail yet.
Waiting.
I did turn off v-sync. This needed help me. But only up to 10 K polys.
Email id :- [email protected]
You should have received it shortly after I posted the reply, I sent a new email just now entitled “This is Kerrey, please email me asap if you get this” I am going to see if I can send you Skype request, if you do not get it do you know of any non-public way of getting my Skype username to you?
@greg p
By the way, I also help ubuntu community in developing it as a part time job. Any problems related with ubuntu ,ask me freely.
My Email Address :- [email protected]
@chetan
If only i could be bothered!
I have already made both machines totally windows, i will maybe come back to ubuntu in the future, but seriously, I really am looking forward to not tweaking and fiddling for a while.
I have had no viruses, sure, but how many times have I had to format and start again on Linux? Many.
Just want to do stuff, not be a sys admin on a desktop! I am a bit mad right now about it, but I will get over it , I’m sure.
Wishing you well, thanks, greg.
@greg p
No problem its your machine. But Linux is the best.
Cool, but I suppose that instead of adding extra detail to the normal map in Gimp you could have used a sculpted some in with brush texture over the whole column (similar to doing skin pores in a human face) so that would have been included in the baked normal map? Any reason why you chose to do it this way, because it’s slightly quicker maybe?
Slightly quicker, and the extra detail also matches up with the other textures.
Btw, a link to part 1 would be nice…
Thanks for this tutorial. I’m really impressed by the speed you are working. Kinda hard to follow you as a “beginner”. Are you working with a tablet or with the mouse? What tablet would you suggest if you wouldn’t have much money?
I’ve only used wacom tablets, which are great and I reccomend them. You can find them second hand much cheaper, and they’re very well built, so you it’s a good way to get one. I started out with a bamboo fun which did me very well for a couple of years and now I use an A4 size intuos 3.
Hi, very nice tutorial, thanks!
If you were creating a displacement map (instead or as well as Normal + Hardness maps), how drastically would the work flow change?
Cheers!
Why can’y you say which shortcuts you use ? I’m new to blender and i have no idea how you open new windows with some options and you make it so fast, quite confusing…………
I wonder if you get much of a seam on the texture wrap with this. I wish you guys would do a similar tutorial with stern advice on how to reduce texture and normal seams. It seems no matter what I do I always end up with a texture or normal seam somewhere in my UVs – I guess most games I play have these, but it’s sure nice to make seamless textures.
Have you just tried re-colouring the background in the diffuse? Having a black background can cause seams when the texture starts to mipmap out, so try and colour it as close to main unwrapped space as possible. Otherwise it’s no secret – just a case of being smart where you place the seams.