/07.Gothic.Church-Retired-

Primary LanguageC#

SECTION 7 Gothic Church

Part of the Complete Blender Creator course on Udemy, see here for a special GitHub offer. The full course is part of this Kickstarter campaign which was 1000% funded.

Click here to find out more about the course, and how we build these assets step-by-step.

These are just the files from the course, not the actual tutorial videos. At the time of writing this course has several hours of high-quality videos.

You're welcome to download, fork or do whatever else legal with all the files!

Enjoy yourselves.

Ben Tristem & Michael Bridges

Section Introduction

  • You are going to make several models.
  • We’ll be making both high poly and low poly versions of out assets.
  • We will emphasise how critical naming is when working with a larger project like this.
  • You will be able to create your own mapping, with these we can make the illusion of detail.
  • We’ll be constantly checking our model externally
  • This will be focused mainly on an interior environment.

Section Specification

  • Create assets to be exported straight into an external program, like a game engine.

  • Creating our own textures, and other maps from high detail models and apply them to a low poly version.

  • Only modelling the interior of the Gothic Church.

  • You can use this technique within Blender itself too for optimisation.

  • I am going to be testing my model externally as I go. I will use Unity to do this.

  • I will be keeping my scene simple, primarily for teaching purposes!

  • I encourage you to add more detail, experiment and have fun. Wouldn’t the scene look much more interesting with a chess set in it.

Planning Your Project

  • Plan your project, define it’s scope and your goals- important to prevent scope slip!
  • Gather your reference material, if possible explore real world locations to get a feeling. Scour the web for images for you references too.

Walking And Flying Around The Model

  • See how our scene looks and feels walking around it. Using the Fly / Walk Mode.

  • Show you how to see the scene in Unity.

  • Understand I am using Unity to keep the iterations quick and simple at this early stage.

  • Anything external to Blender, you can watch to see how it works and is coming across.

  • Better understanding of external programs.

  • Join in, if you have Unity installed and are interested in learning more about this prototyping method.

Light Portals

  • Learn how to use light portals.
  • Understand the limitations of their use.
  • See that they dramatically increase quality and are especially useful for indoor environments.
  • They aren’t used externally to Blender.

UV Mapping In Blender

  • No long ask what does UV stand for?!
  • Overview the mapping in upcoming lectures
  • Understand that we will be creating these maps from scratch, and then using them again to speed up further workflow.
  • X,Y and Z are used for the Co-ordinates.
  • UV are like the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ co-ordinates of an image.
  • UV mapping is the process of projecting a 2D image to a 3D model's surface.
  • They create the illusion of surface detail by mapping part of an image to the geometry on our model.
  • They can be applied automatically, great for basic models. Generating a UV map gives best results.
  • Diffuse Map: The base colour of the geometry.
  • Bump Maps: Tell the shader how to react with light.

The Multi-Resolution Modifier

  • Learn how to use the multi resolution modifier.
  • See it is great for multiple resolutions of a model.
  • Learn to control how sharp edges.
  • Understand that this is best apply to a base mesh that is the final low-poly version.

Solving Issues With Subdivision

  • See a potential issue you may encounter when you use any form of subsurface division.
  • Finish off the solution to the previous challenge.

Copying Mesh Properties

  • Learn how to copy attributes of a mesh object.
  • See this is great when you have lots of components, for e.g. need the same material.
  • Understand it’s a destructive operation e.g. copying materials will overwrite a meshes current materials.

UV Unwrapping

  • Understand what unwrapping is.
  • Learn about seems.
  • See the different default unwrapping options.
  • Remember a UV map, is a projection of a 3D mesh to a 2D image.
  • Unwrapping give us control over any maps we want to place on our model.
  • This is because it maps the mesh co-ordinates to the image.
  • Essential when using assets outside Blender
  • Unwrapping isn’t necessary to apply maps to a mesh in Blender
  • We can let blender ‘guess’ how to apply a map.
  • However if you want control over how something looks it is essential.

Texture Resolution

  • Understand that resolution will control the level of detail at a particular distance.
  • Realise when a texture is too large or too small.
  • Learn about the power of two (POT) and why and when it is important.
  • Computers work with 1s and 0s, or Binary.
  • A lot of external programs like POT textures.
  • They aren’t necessary but are a good standard to adhere too, especially when working with external programs.
  • Don’t have to be ‘square’, providing side length is a POT.
  • Mathematically they’ll be 2 to the power of n or 2^n. eg. 2^5 = 32
  • If you have been around computers for a while you’ll recognise this sequence:
2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512,1024, 2048, etc.

Managing Multiple Maps

  • Reinforce your naming structure.
  • See that I am using: OBJ_SIZE_TYPE.png
  • Learn the order to do things in.

Optimising A UV Map

  • Be using Blender Render.
  • Making your UV map more uniform, minimising distortion and optimising image use.
  • Understand the use of margins
  • Learn more about seams and their placement.

The Diffuse Map

  • Paint onto your model!
  • Be creating the diffuse map from scratch
  • Defuse map is for the colour changes in a model, not necessarily surface detail.

UV Problems And Solutions

  • Learn what pinning is.
  • See how to reset a UV map if things go wrong.
  • Experience sticky selection mode.
  • Keeping UV Editor and 3D Editor in Sync.
  • Look at the other types of unwrapping.

Layering Textures

  • Learn how to layer textures using Blender Render.
  • Understand this is a great way of checking out an effect quickly and simply
  • Have a glimpse at what other maps can do!

Working With Cycles & Blender Render

  • Understand that Blender Render (BR) and Cycles are fundamentally different.
  • See how to work with only one material.
  • Realise you might have to create separate BR and Cycles materials.

Using A Bump Map In Cycles

  • See how to use B&W image as a bump map.
  • Normal and height maps are both bump maps.
  • See the again illusion of surface detail!

Creating Tiling Textures

  • Understanding what a tiling texture is.
  • We’ll be aiming for a basic texture
  • Create a tiled texture for the walls of our Church.
  • Understand getting it looking right will take time.

Mesh Re-Topology

  • Use existing mesh data to create new mesh data.
  • Understand remaking meshes can take a lot of time, but is often part of the workflow especially with organic models.
  • Fix your model, If you have the same problem as me.

Retopology Continued

  • See the solution to the last video
  • There is multiple repetition, so only the highlights are shown.

The Knife Tool

  • Use and understand how the knife tool works.
  • Create uneven geometry by chopping up our existing mesh.

Polygon Count

  • See multiple ways to cut down the polygon count in your scene.
  • Understand that the speed of your computer will dictate how complex a scene can be before it starts to become unmanageable.

Displacement & Height Maps

  • See that these are used to change the underlaying geometry.
  • Understand that they are grey scale images, If you used a colour image it will just use the average of RGB- converting it to greyscale.
  • They aren’t not suited to things like generating a final brick wall. V High Poly count needed for resolution match.
  • They're very useful for applying detail e.g. scales on a lizard/fish or dragon. Great for generating geometry and then optimising or for larger items, like terrain.

The Displacement Modifier

  • Use your displacement map to alter geometry.
  • Realise that you need geometry to modify.
  • Use the displacement in Blender Render.
  • Then use the Displacement Modifier in the same manner.

Normal Maps

  • Understand they are a type of bump map.
  • Gain a greater understanding of how normals work.
  • They contain direction information not height information.

Normal Maps

  • Contain direction information not height information.
  • The RGB colour channels define the direction of a normal.
  • XYZ components are defined with Red, Green, Blue.

Normal Maps Appearance

  • When creating normal maps they are affected by whether or not the mesh object * has smooth shading turned on.
  • Normal direction is very important otherwise the map will be useless.

Creating Normal Maps

  • Create a normal map for our pillar detail.
  • Add some more geometric detail to the brick work and create a normal map of that.

—— Videos in this section of the full Udemy course...