Hello and welcome to this tutorial on rendering a guitar in Blender with Cycles!
In this tutorial by Kent Trammell, you’ll be taken through the process of rendering a sleek, electric guitar image in Blender with the Cycles render engine.
What you’ll learn:
This tutorial will walk you through all of the steps needed for the lighting, shading and rendering of this guitar in Cycles. You will how to create a soft, satin cloth material, how to create layered shaders for the guitar body and other various techniques needed to give you the final render result.
Want more?
Login to your Citizen account and download the source files to make your own version of the guitar! You can even upload your results to the gallery via the button below to Submit Image.
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wow nice tutorial!
I just want to thank you for making this Awesome tutorials.
And I just want to say that i love your face portrait tutorial series on Youtube
Now only if the Obama administration will leave Gibson alone maybe they can stay in business.
No doubt!
1) It’s not a Gibson… only PRS has that bird on the headstock.
2) If Gibson didn’t break the law, and there are MANY guitar mfr’s who do NOT, they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in.
3) Why are some laws OK to break (Gibson), yet if a Mexican crosses a dry river bed you right wingers have a conniption fit?
1: He says in the video it’s the guitar is a Les Paul custom that the author built, hence his user name “Theluthier”
2: The problem is, no charges are being brought. Gibson is not currently charge with a crime. There is a civil suit going on right now, but without the materials being returned (i.e. government won’t pursue it) or a day in court there is no way to know if Gibson did anything illegal or not. Any assumption either way at this point is folly. Attributing the raid to president is also folly, as he has more important things to worry about than some pieces of wood being imported.
3. What does this have to do with guitars, or blender? Oh well… As a libertarian, I’m neither “right” or “left” in the modern sense of the words. I have no problem with opening all our borders and simplifying citizenship requirements. The trade off is we have to ease the federal government out of providing entitlement services to everyone. There isn’t enough money to keep Social Security and Medicare going with our current growth, much less with a large number of new citizens. Private citizens, private companies, Non-Profits, the local churches, local governments and local communities will step up to the task (as long as they aren’t taxed to death).
Spaghetti junction in the comp window!
It’s a great tutorial but I found it a little hard to follow…
I’ll watch it again when I have more time.
I don’t mean to be cliche but, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Admittedly I feel my explanation and walk-through isn’t as clear as I intended. It’s definitely hard to follow. My apologies.
there is no problem if it is hard to follow , cuz I think that the follower should do some effort to make it worth , not seeking for easy thing , I have no thing to see rather than thank you for sharing information
Aw, no! It is a complex subject and it’s clear enough when you pay proper attention. I should learn not to try and do 4 things at once…
You’re demonstrating some very useful techniques.
The velvet texture is very nice. I would like to know how to make backdrop curtains that are that nice looking.
I hate to reply to myself, but I just wanted to clarify. I am able to use the cloth simulator fine, but no matter how much I play with it, I can’t quite get the folds/pleats of the fabric to look quite as real or crisp as you have in this scene.
I’ve tried different pinning, having the material fall over different shaped objects before it gets in the camera, and some playing with vertices after the cloth modifier is applied. My modifier stack for most of tests have been: cloth, solidify and then subsurf.
Any advice? Possibly a Tutorial you can point to?
I really like this tutorial: http://youtu.be/J2EyodoK9a8
It would be a fairly simple tutorial show how I simmed the curtains..I might do that sometime soon. But the best suggestion I could make is that I pinned the last row of verts on the “North” and “South” ends of the cloth plane. I added a shape key for those pinned verts which animated them scaling smaller into itself; once simmed, this will cause the curtains to fold over itself from the sides as it falls. Also I made a roofless “room” for the cloth that starts larger than the cloth, then shrinks through the sim. This room is a collider that causes the cloth to compress and fold in on itself. I can’t imagine this is easy to understand from words…hope it helps though.
That is very understandable and helpful advice. The “shrinking room” and shape keys is a brilliant idea. I’ll have to try that tonight. Thanks.
Looks like this tutorial is going to rock! I have this to watch along with the 2010 Series and just ordered some of the DVDs from the BF e-store. I’m up to my ears in training! Not a bad problem to have I guess.
Dog’s bollocks.
Where can I find a tutorial about modeling a guitar?
Hey I have that guitar too.
Mine’s black and white though.
WOW learn’t a lot just hope I can remember it all! I particularly like the colour masking technique..
I need to watch it again…..
I would really be interested in the modelling of a guitar.
Preferably an electric hollow body and most ESPECIALLY with Bsurfaces.
Throw in some f-holes and I’m in ecstasy
I have an epiphone les paul classic. Dark blue outer to lighter blue inner. The made in China one. Its actually good guitar used and abused it a lot and it still looks brand new. can hold notes like crazy. The bad thing its heavy. like most les pauls. Just have to be careful when play standing up because they have been known to pop the strap off and drop. best to get some clips for the ends at a guitar store. By the way thanks for the tut ill have to check it out later too bad the guitar i built when i was a noob is just ok and only halfway done but i think ill try a guitar again since this came out. bye
Kent, can you describe the hardware you are using for this tutorial? What kind of mac, graphics card, and also if you use GPU or CPU for rendering?
I enjoyed the tutorial a lot. High resolution of the screen from one side helped me to understand better your ‘real’ work setting, and it was good and important, from other side it made hard to read fine details in your nodes, during your video. I guess a solution would be to follow the video having your final blender file at hand to figure out better what is going on.
Absolutely. Hardware specs: Older 2008 Mac Pro, Quadro FX 5600, and CPU for rendering. I’m sorry, the compression and resolution shrinkage makes the fine details harder to see. Following along with the final scene is a great idea!
Thanks a lot Kent. Is there a specific reason you did not use GPU? Stability? I have the same machine, and I am considering Quadro FX5600, to do CUDA GPU rendering.
Lol that’s precisely why I bought the card. To my disappointment, the FX5600′s “CUDA compute capability (version)” isn’t compatible with Cycles. It’d be great if there’s a solution that I’ve not discovered, but to my knowledge GPU is a no-go with this card.
Only me that got some problems with the video from 15 minutes into it to some 29 minutes???
Then its OK again…..
Could you also do a modeling part?
Because that is the part I’m struggling with!
At first sight, that guitar looked real… then I remembered I was at Blender Cookie… Nice job Kent!
What i really like about you guys, is that you always try to make something new and prototype.
Brainstorming is hard to find in our work-line!Keep it up!
Yes, nice work! My first impression was,”Wow, what a nice velvet shader!” The original seems a tad more matte…did you mix it with the factory velvet too? Pretty neat idea with the masking. It’s a creative approach. Personally, I would just duplicate similar materials, assign them to their respective vertices and make the changes there. I think you should have gone a lot deeper into the masks themselves…unfortunately without an understanding of how the masks interact, this technique is very difficult to understand. Actually, it seems like you meant to, but just forgot in the excitement of finishing!lol I’m sure with a greater effort I could eventually break it down, but I prefer to separate all materials anyway. Very nice result, and you really got amazingly close to your initial image. The compositing tips at the end and the AO shader were fresh as well. Some good stuff here. Keep it up Kent.
nice tutorial , would be great if you made one about how you created that curtain
I got most of the idea of the shader and I was able to construct it following the video, however i would be very interested on say a series of videos with simple explanations of what this or that node does, I’m still unclear s how the Fac input on the nodes work, and the masking while I get the general idea, meaning green blue and red get transformed to gray scale values then they are connected via multiply, add, and mix shaders via the color or the fac nodes, thing is after so many connections Im left wondering why you did them.
Something like three or four basic connections types related to your shader without the spaghetti madness would help newbies like my self get how the shader network works so we can create a new shader completely different form yours while using the same core principles.
As i gather there’s
RGB color masking
Fac Color connections and mix shader uses.
(and its on this ones where I the most confused)
Glossy and diffuse shaders are explained and used
very often on your vid so those i got the best.
I think for this video, or any other shader network video cg cookie makes
there needs to be a good breakdown of the elements of the shader with
simple examples, and after that’s covered then jump into the madness
Still on the overall its a really good tutorial with a great model a great shader and a great end result, its just the explanation part could be improved quite a bit, I also would love more videos form this same teacher as he clearly has awesome ideas and a deep understanding of nodes on the whole, i just wish he took more time to breakdown the knowledge.
I’m sorry, I should have explained the concepts of the shader network more clearly. There are several tutorials here on CGC focusing on simpler node setups that you should check out. This was meant for “advanced” users and I had to assume the viewer had experience with nodes, lest the tutorial be 2 hrs long. I’ll try to implement your suggestion of “simple examples, and after that’s covered then jump into the madness” for future shading videos.
Thanks for watching!
I was very impressed with this tutorial, i wish Kent had explained the mask A-B and how he made them and why he uses that tec,,,, as that was a huge key to this tutorial.
I used the 2 mask textures the same way “ID Masks” are used in compositing. When practicing the tutorial I tried making specific textures like “guitar_glossy_hardness” and “guitar_glossy_color” but I found myself jumping back and forth from photoshop to blender way too much. It proved to be much more efficient to use a mask so I could control shading on specific parts of the guitar. This allowed me to stay focused in Blender rather than jumping between apps.
The mask was simply created in Photoshop from the working PSD file I had for creating the guitar’s diffuse texture.
Thanks for watching
thank you for this tutorial Kent! AWESOME. Finaly i understand with the masking.
i just want to ask, how did u do the unwraping? did you scale it manualy again?
thanks again
I’m sorry for the horribly late response..This was a model I built years ago in maya. I simply cut the seems there, exported, and unwrapped the UVs in zbrush (which has the best pelting algorithm of any app IMO).
Thank you for watching!
Kent,
What would you say are the advantages of using your technique as opposed to say separating each part and making different materials for each. Do you gain performance in render times by having one complicated material vs more but simpler materials?
And thank you for the quality tutorial, I really appreciated your different techniques.
Great question Maui Postma – I’ve not take the time to test if the complicated material renders faster than multiple simpler ones..so I can’t say it’s absolutely the “best” method. It just makes more sense in my head to do it this way. There’s nothing wrong with breaking down each piece and giving them their own simple materials. Whatever results in the best image is my advice!
Thanks for watching!
my graphic card cycles does not read,, please is there a list of recognized cards that blender reads ,, id like to buy myself a graphic card but dont know what one to get? please help?
I have an Asus VGA ENGTX560 DCII TOP/2DI/1GD5, 1024MB, GDDR5.Everything is good and smooth so far.Got it here in Greece for about 200 euros!
I loved the background scene on your image, so i’ve tried it with my guitar model, I came quite close to it, but i couldn’t get that silky effect off. it was all textured with the eye from photo, I specially was not watching tutorial to see how close i could have got to ur result, but one way or the other U have to admit that I’ve modeled much, Much cooler guitar!!! Great tutorial, TNX!
This is probably a very good tutorial, the problem is I am not there yet, to fully understand the conecpt of texturing and render setup in Blender. I hope Kent that you don’t mind that I am borrowing your scene for use inside modo? without your guitar ofcourse, I am putting mine there.
Excellent tutorial – many thanks!
I had problems with the high gloss particularly, but found pausing the video and taking time to trace the connections helped. Didn’t quite get the same result (pretty close, though), but as a newbie to Blender, your tutorial certainly taught me more about the node editor and what it can do.
Hi there!
One thing that I noticed was how tedious it can be to place lights/emmitters correctly (so that their reflections show up exactly where you want them).
I’ve just made a little patch that could make this a little easier. If you are interested:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?289939-snap-align-to-reflection-option
hope this can be useful
Greetz
Philipp