Welcome to another Citizen Friday.. Each Friday we are working to produce Citizen content. If you’re not a Citizen, no worries and no need to draw a picture of a monster eating sheep. This isn’t affecting the amount of free tutorials/content to hit the site on a weekly basis. Basically we are just working harder. Of course you are welcome to sign-up today to get access to this exclusive and many more.
What the Hockey Sticks is a Greeble?
“A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.” – Wikiepedia
In an production environment speed and effeciency is the name of the game. Environement artists may find themselves scrambling for time and a way to knock off some of that production time is to have a handy Greebles file on hand.
What is included in the download:
- .psd containing two sheets of greebles and respective AO


These are fantastic for building up normal maps for personal or commercial work. Taking the shapes that are on these two sheets you are able to combine these, or even edit them to just about any shape. I threw in a couple custom ones that have less mileage, but are useful nonetheless.
Enjoy!
Thank you for the support of us and the site. Cg Cookie is a platinum monthly donating member to the Blender Foundation. Your support helps keep that going and this site alive!











Even though this isn’t a tutorial I learned what a greeble is. It reminds me of a tutorial on Ctrl Paint where he was doing robot silhouettes so he had a file of generic robot parts he could toss on to generate ideas quicker.
Thanks for the greebles!
Thanks for the maps! Unfortunately, I really don’t understand how we’re supposed to use them. Bring them into Photoshop to crop them one at a time?
I think the basic idea is after you’ve baked out a base AO/Normal map you can copy and paste parts of those greebles to an overlay layer to add more detail to them quickly.
That’s exactly right!
-Jonathan
Ah, that makes sense–thanks for the quick tutorial! :0)
im not a “citizen”,
but you should at least have a short tutorial to show how to use these “Greebles” , give a couple examples, etc..
“Should”? Pay first, demand better service later.
There are other tuts here showing how to create/use normal maps etc., e.g. this excellent one by Porter Nielsen:
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/07/22/creating-a-sci-fi-panel-part-1/
Thanks for the greebles!
When I click on that “monster eating sheep” link, all I get is mailing link subscription option with a picture of a monster above it…I don’t get it! Are you launching a new Blender related site, Wes?
We have no idea what you’re talking about….
I think someone is too Baked and needs some Cookies.
oh, that was a really bad pun.
Lol, looked at the site to see if I can find a relation. It seems he’s talking about this:
“Welcome to another Citizen Friday.. Each Friday we are working to produce Citizen content. If you’re not a Citizen, no worries and no need to draw a picture of a monster eating sheep. This isn’t affecting the amount of free tutorials/content to hit the site on a weekly basis. Basically we are just working harder. Of course you are welcome to sign-up today to get access to this exclusive and many more.”
That spot in there were it says “monster eating sheep” is a joke that apparently went over the guys head. The link takes you a spot to subscribe to something, I assume it is a CGCookie newsletter subscription or something.
I have no idea what you’re talking about…
I get a strange feeling you’re joking, Jonathan
.
I wanna know what that is though . . .
Thanks – Sill not completly sure on how to use them.
Are their any tutorials on it?
Hopefully I can give an example to help. Say your have a wall you made and you used gimp/photoshop to generate a normal map from a texture so it looks like it has some depth. You want a to add a vent to the wall. You could model it and then bake out the normal, or you could copy the part from the greeble that looks like one and put it on a layer over your normal map on overlay. You could use the matching selection from the AO layer in the greeble to color the vent on your diffuse material. You want more vents just copy them and past them where needed in the textures instead of trying to model one and adjust them and baking out the maps. I hope that helps and isn’t too confusing.
I can work on creating a short video early next week on this to help explain how these can be used. Or if Jabessette25, if you happen to beat me to it. Youtube it up.
That would be wonderful!!!
I will keep an eye out for it -TY..
Here is something I did up:
http://youtu.be/jbpjrrdl5Xw
I don’t have a mic so I had to do it with text overlays. It is also my first tutorial so hope it isn’t too painful to watch and people get something out of it. During the animation chapter of the Low Poly Series Jonathan said a few times “This is why I am not an animator.” If I had a mic I probably would have said “This is why I am not a tutor.”
Thanks in advance, Wes.
Monsteh eatin sheepz
What are they? I think I just subscribed to a world domo plot or something O_o