Blenderart Mag 08

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Issue 8 January 2007 | BlenderArt Magazine

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EDITORIAL

Go to almost any CG site on the weband you will find them. Cars;

hundreds of CG cars can be found inevery shape, size and color. Littlecars, big cars, fancy cars, sports cars,toon cars, radical designs and eveneconomical cars; they areeverywhere. Cars have long been apopular subject for modelers. Theytake great skill and look amazingwhen done right. You could spendhours tweaking everything from

chrome details to the treads on thetires. And a great many modelers doexactly that.

Many modelers not only model fromblueprints or reference photos, butactually design their own cars. ItsCG; they can add or delete any partthey choose. Colors can be changedat will. Different settings can becreated to showcase their newdesign. And with the advances inrendering engines, all too often theresulting images can be/are mistakenfor actual photos of real cars. Manycar manufacturers take advantage ofthis and provide us with excellentadvertisements too.

Wouldnt it be great if you couldactually build your concept car? But

that is just wishful thinking or is it?Marin Myftiu shows how he built a

prototype of a concept design carusing Blender in combination withother techniques.

Also in this issue we cover tires, rimsand a low poly car in a simple drivinggame. Gaurav is going to take usthrough some 'approaches inmodeling a car body' via the Nissan350z model. And as an added treat

Claas Kuhnen shows us how to createhis amazing brushed metal textures;useful for car interiors as well as for jewelry and a host of other metalneeds.

So rev up your blender engine andlets get this party started!

Happy [email protected]

www.blenderart.org Issue 8 - January 2007


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CONTENTS

EDITOR/DESIGNER

Gaurav [email protected]

MANAGING EDITORSandra [email protected]

WEBSITENam [email protected]

PROOFERKernon DillonPhillip A. RyalsKevin C. BraunDerek Marsh

WRITERSClaas Eicke KuhnenZsolt StefanMarin MyftiuPablo DelgadoThomas Baron

Sandra GilbertGaurav Nawani

COPYRIGHT 05-07BlenderArt Magazine,blenderart andblenderArt logo are copyright of GauravNawani. Izzy and Izzy logoarecopyright Sandra Gilbert. All productsand company names featured in thepublication are trademark or registeredtrade marks of their respective owners.

COVER ARTPhilippe Roubal



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Blender News

Issue 8 - January 2007

Blender Release2006 has come and gone, bringingwith it a large number of excitingchanges and events. I had planned ondoing a review of 2006, but b@rt beatme to it and did such a good job,there is no point in doing it again. Ifyou missed it, you can check out his

2006 review of Blender at:

(http://www.blendernation.com/2006/12/31/looking-back-on-2006/).

The release of Blender 2.43 is on thehorizon. RC1 and RC2 have alreadybeen released for bug testing and theofficial release should be followingwithin a few weeks. The release has

quite a few new features to play with.Of particular interest to me are theWalk-Cycle Modifiers.

The Walk-Cycle Modifiers replace theStride bone allowing for an easiersetup of walk cycles for use in theNLA. Additionally, an Action Modifierallows you to use a Curve Path todeform the motion of controllingbones in the armature. Following is alist of included new features:

ModelingModifier stack upgrades.New modifiers: Edgesplit and Displace

UV Project, Sculpt modelingMulti-Resolution Mesh and RetopoFluid Dynamics supporting animatedObjectsMulti-level UV editingFace Duplicators

AnimationWalk Cycle ModifiersProxy Objects, for local control overreferenced data from Libraries

RenderingRender features: Alpha Masks, NodeShader speedup, Tangents andNormal MapsIrregular Shadow BuffersShadow Buffer, Halfway AverageRender BakingRender Passes

CompositingUV Map, Index Mask and Z-CombineDefocusMatte NodesMatte Nodes, tutorial

ImagingMulti-layer images, Sequence images,flip books

For further updates and currentrelease logs, go to:http://www.blender.org/cms/Changes_

since_2_42.771.0.html

2007 Blender F1 The 2007 Blender F1 contest is hereagain. CurtisS is running the contestagain this year and will soon have theofficial contest site up and ready withall the rules and specifications for theimages.

Check at the Blender F1 Contest sitefor last years results. Also, check thediscussion thread in the forums, forupdated news and to just generallydiscuss the contest.

Good luck and get ready to start yourblender engines!!!!!!!!
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=86269http://www.seesystems.com/f1/http://www.blender.org/cms/Changes_since_2_42.771.0.htmlhttp://www.blendernation.com/2006/12/31/looking-back-on-2006/http://www.blenderart.org/


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Izzy Knows


IntroductionModeling cars can be as easy or ascomplicated as you want to make it.You can design your own car or modelexisting cars. It is amazing how muchinformation is available to help youget your car modeled. In fact, the for-um database at www.blender-artists.org has pages of links to greattips, tutorials and images of someamazing cars.

Here are a few general tips toget you going.

General Steps to modeling a carStep 1: Get blueprints or create

sketches of your design concept.Step 2: Set the blueprints up in the

Top, Right, and Front view ports usingView|Background Image.Step 3: Add a Plane, position it near

the center-line.Step 4: Mirror the Plane, so you onlyhave to model half of the car.Step 5: Extrude the edges of thePlane and move vertices around tomatch the profile of the car in theRight view.Step 5a: Move vertices around tomatch the profile of the car in the Topview.Step 5b: Move vertices around to

match the profile of the car in theFront view.Step 6: Repeat Step 5 until the modelis finished.Step 7: Add some textures, work onlighting, and do a render.

To make it easier to model the interi-or, you can move the roof section toanother position or Layer to make it

easier to see inside the car.

It is easier to model the wheel wells in-stead of trying to cut them out later.

Seams on carCars have lots of seams and smallgaps where parts fit together. Andsince subsurf is generally used on carmodels, seams get smoothed away. To create seams, you can crease thetargeted edges with 'Shift + E' or, you

can model 3-4 rows of vertices closetogether.

Painting your carAt some point, you will want to paintyour car; whether it is a toony car ora super realistic one. It can be as com-plicated or as simple as you want tomake it. Here are some resources tohelp get you started.

A demo car paint material, usingnodes, can be found here (posted by"broken"): http://blenderartists.org/for-

um/showthread.php?t=71232&high-light=car+paint

He has also posted a video tutorialthat shows you how to fake a layeredcar paint material

Sonix created a library of carpaints/chrome/glass/tires and miscmaterials needed for cars:

Blender 2.34 Car Material Library Re-lease 1.http://www.free-webspace.biz/sonix/
http://www.free-webspace.biz/sonix/http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=71232&highlight=car+painthttp://www.blenderart.org/


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Level: Beginer to Intermediate

IntroductionLow poly cars can be a lot of fun;both to make and to play with. Youcan make them as fancy or assimple as you want. Im going toshow you how to make a simple lowpoly car and then we are going to cre-

ate a gamelet (gamelet = morethan a demo, not quite a full fledgedgame) so we can play with our car.

I used Blender 2.43 RC1 during thewriting of this tutorial. Therefore itshould be compatible with Blender2.43 when it releases. It should alsobe compatible with 2.42 as we arenot going to use a lot of game fea-tures to set this up. This is an inter-

mediate level tutorial althoughbeginners should be able to follow

along without much difficulty.

Low Poly CarAs with a great many models, weare going to start with a plane. Wewill model 1 half of the car and thenmirror the other side.

1.In side view, add the car referenceimage View> Background Image>Load (load supplied reference imageCar)2. Then add a Plane; Spacebar>Add> Plane, delete all but 1 vertice.

3.We are trying to make as fewfaces as possible so only add asmany vertices as needed. Select theremaining vertice and Control LMBto create an outline of the car. Thencreate faces to fill in your outline byselecting 4 vertices and hitting Fkey. (Fig 1)4.In top view, select all the verticesand extrude (E key) 2 times. (Fig 2)

5.Select the outer row of verticesand hit Smooth a few times. (Fig 3))6.Add a Mirror modifier, you mayhave to cycle through the X,Y,Z axisbuttons to get it to mirror on the cor-rect axis, also make sure your pivotpoint (little circle/dot in center ofmodel) is positioned on the centerline. And select Do clipping to geta clean join between the 2 halves.

Okay, there it is. One low poly sports

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car. Now we need to add somewheels. They dont need to be fancyas they wont be really seen in ourgamelet. So I just used a scaledtube for each wheel and joined it tothe body. The reason I used a tubewas that I wanted to close only oneend and create a simple rim for

painting. See fig 4Next Duplicate your tire (Shift + D)and place both tires in their wheelwells. Select both tires and the car

and Join (Control + J). See fig 5. Ihavent applied (made final) theMirror modifier yet because I wantto vertex paint the car and I wantboth sides to be the same.

Painting the CarAt this point you can go off andapply a fancy UV map to your car orapply simple vertex paint. Thechoice is yours. For this tutorial, Idecided to use vertex paint to keep

memory requirements down.

Remember to view your model inPotato mode (Alt + Z) to see yourvertex paint.

1.Hit V key for Vertex paint and Fkey for UV/Face mode. Most likelyyour car turned completely black.Thats ok; we will fix it in a moment.

2.Select all the faces of the car (butnot the tires) and in the Paint Panelin the Edit buttons window, set yourpaint color. I chose red. Hit the SetVert Color in the Texture Face panelto apply your color to the car body.See fig 6.3.Im going to create some shadowsand highlights using vertex paint,other wise if you press P to startthe game engine you will noticethat your car has no real definitionand looks rather ugly.4.Set your Brush size down to

around 10-12 and opacity to 0.200.Choose a color darker than youchose for your car body. Startpainting around the edges to give itdefinition. This is what I came upwith. Not beautiful, but its a start.See fig 7. Notice I also painted alittle blue on the black tires andmade the hub of the wheel a lightgrayish color. You could also add

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windows and paint them a very lightblue color. See fig 8.

Well our car is finished at this point.Now go ahead and apply the MirrorModifier and make your car all onepiece. Next we will be making asimple environment to drive aroundin.

Drive through the CountryWe are going to make a drivingcourse through the country for ourcar to drive around in.1.Go to layer 22.In Top view, Spacebar>Add>Grid(default of 32 x 32 is fine)3.In Edit mode, toggle the Faceselection button and create a trackfor your car. See fig 9.4.In Side view, Extrude your trackdown a little. See fig 10.5.Switch back to Object mode (Tab),

then go into UV/Face Mode (F) andVertex Paint (V)

6.Set your paint color to a muddybrown and press the Set Vert Colorbutton, Tab back to Edit mode anduse the Select Swap button in theMesh tools 1 panel to invert yourselection. Tab back to UV/Face modeand set your paint color to a nicegreen and press the Set Vert Color

button. See fig 11.Now you have your basic track, butit is a little boring. Im going to adda few hills and valleys using theProportional edit tool (O). You haveseveral choices offalloff to choosefrom, and Ill leave it to you todecide which one you want. In factmix and match them for differenteffects. See fig 12.

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1.For ease in selecting where I wantmy hills, I selected the faces Iwanted in UV/Face select mode (so Icould see where they were inrelation to the track, you will noticeyour vertex colors dont show up inEdit mode).2. Then Tab back to Edit Mode, withProportional editing on (O) in sideview, grab the faces (G) and movethem up. They look a little tooblocky to be real hills, so hit theSmooth button a few times, andthen you may want to move them

up a little bit more. See fig 13.

3.Using the same technique, createvalleys by moving down, not up.Also, dont be afraid to selectportions of your track and movethem up or down also. You can alsouse the Select>Random in the filemenus. After playing around, this iswhat I got. I added some vertexpaint to break up the flat greens and

brown colors. See fig 14. (You mightdiscover when you get your gameletset up that your terrain is a little toorough, this can be solved byapplying a Subsurf Modifier tosmooth it out a little)

Making a GameletOkay, now we have a car and anenvironment for the car to drive

around in. It is time to put togetherour little gamelet so we can playwith it.

1. Turn on layer 1 so you can seeyour car. You will need to resize your

car so that it fits on the track. Afteryou have resized it, make sure thatyou hit Control + A to apply scaleand rotation. Its a good idea toselect the track/environment and dothe same thing. See fig 15.

2.Next lets parent the camera tothe car so that we can see wherewe are going. (Select the camera1st, then the car and hit "Control +

P")3.We are going to use logic bricks toset up basic driving controls for thecar. We will only be creating 4controls, tied to the arrow keys onyour keyboard for navigation. Thatwill give us forward, left and rightturns and the ability to go inreverse.4.Select your car; go to the gamelogic window (F4).

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5. Toggle the Actor button, a wholebunch of new buttons appear6.Toggle Dynamic7. You can leave the rest of thesettings at default for now8.Toggle Bounds and choose Boxas bounding type9.Once you have set the boundingtype, go back up to the Actor buttonsand look for the one that says"Radius", set it to fit around your carmodel. You don't want it too big or toosmall. Switch to solid or wire view tosee the size of the radius in relation

to your model.

Now I am going to show you how toset up the 1st control, then you canset up the rest by looking at fig 16 orchecking out the included blend file.1.You will see 3 sets of boxes to theright of the screen (sensors,controllers, and actuators)2.Toggle the Add box next to the 1st

one (sensor)3.Click on the box that says Alwaysscroll down to Keyboard4.Click on the box next to Key, itwill then say Press a Key; press theup arrow on your keyboard5. Toggle the Add box next to the2nd one (Controller)6. Toggle the Add box next to the3rd one (Actuator)7.In the middle column of dLoc

type (0.25)

8.Click on the little ball next to theSensor column and drag it to theController column and then from theController column to the Actuatorcolumn.

You have now connected logic bricksto create your first control. In effectyou have told the game engine that

you want the car to go forward (ormove along the Y axis) anytime youpress the up arrow key. Thats prettymuch all there is to it. Press P toplay your gamelet.

Here are a few suggestions toimprove your game;1. Add sound2. Engine revving when you push theup arrow.

3. Tires turning when going left or

right4. Thuds as you hit the ground5. Add moving objects (i.e. cows,pigs, tumbleweeds)6. Add ramps or obstacles with orwithout water traps7. Add falling objects to avoid8. Add buildings/covered bridges9. Add lakes in some of thedepressions/valleys10. Drop a few low poly trees in11. Surround the track/grid withwater (turning it into an island)12. Add a sky

You can find great tips on improvingthe game environment in Issue #7,Creating a Realistic Environment forBGE by John Allie (plantperson).

Further game engine resources:http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.p

hp/Game_Enginehttp://www.continuousphysics.com/

Bullet/http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=12

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http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=12http://www.continuousphysics.com/Bullet/http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Game_Enginehttp://www.blenderart.org/


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Level: Beginner to Intermediate

IntroductionHavent you ever looked at your car

and had an idea for a set of rimsthat would turn heads? Maybe youhave gone as far as sketching themout on a piece of paper. Well, nowyou are going to learn how to bringthat idea to life! Well almost. In thistutorial I will teach you a simpletechnique that you can use to modelyour very own rims.

I have tried my best to provide toolname and key combinations that I

have used, still I assume that youare fairly familiar with blender andknow your way around.

Lets Get Started

Once you have decided on yourdesign and you know how manyspokes your rim is going to have,then we begin laying out thefoundation. For this tutorial we aregoing to model a five (5) spoke rim.So in order for me to be able to latercorrectly attach my spokes, I have

to create a base whose verticesalign perfectly with those of thespokes.

So to do that I find a low numberthat can be equally divided by thenumber of spokes that I am going todesign, which in this case is 5, buthigh enough to allow us to give therim nice details and places a vertex

dead center of my spoke. So I chose25. Create a circle by clicking theright mouse button and selectingadd>> mesh>> circle and rotatethe circle so that one of the vertexesis aligned with the y-axis. Your workshould resemble Fig 1.

From the side view select the topvertices using the box selection tool.Now press E to extrude, but do

not move the extrusion. Simply hit

enter to leave it in place. Then fromthe top view, press S to scale downthe extruded vertices until you havean image that resembles imagenumber 2.

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Select the entire object and press Eto extrude again and hit enterwithout moving your selection. Fromthe side-view move the extrudedvertices down a bit until the tubeyou are creating is the size of a rim.See Fig 3 and 4.

Select the entire object and click the

subdivide button from the Mesh Tool. This is so we have more

polygons to work with when webegin to develop our spokes and lip.From the side view select the linethat runs around the tube and moveit up close to the top. See Fig 5.

Select the entire edge of the innertube at the top by selecting oneedge and pressing Crtl+E andselecting Edge Loop Select fromthe menu. Now from the side viewbring it down close to the edge that

we earlier moved up near the top.Press S to scale the edge a bit sothat it looks like Fig 6.

Now we are going to model thewalls around the rim where the tiregoes. Select all the faces along theoutside of the tube. Make sure youdo not select the faces from theinside or you will be in for someheadaches. Use the knife tool (Shift

+ K), select multi-cut and enter the

value 3. Your work should resembleFig 7.

Select the last edge of the tire, nearthe bottom of the tube, and move itclose to the bottom about the sameas the edge we moved toward thetop. Move the other two edges wecreated and center them so that wehave two large rows running aroundthe rim, then select all the faces.See Fig 8.

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Scale down those faces so that itcreates a lip near the top andbottom of the rim. See Fig 9.

There is one final detail that weneed to do before we begin work onthe spokes of the rim. Select all thefaces of the inside of the rim thatfalls below the edge we had movedup. Press S and scale them down just a bit so that they make theinside walls smaller. Now use theKnife tool to make a new edge and

move it down so that it resembles

Fig 10. Finally, the base of the wheelis complete! Now we can startworking on the spokes.

Center your cursor and add a plane.Move the plain so that the center ofthe planeis in the bottom left corner.On the modifiers panel add a mirrorand enable clipping. Pull the top of

the plane until it enters the walls ofthe rim. Then select the plane andmove it to another layer. See Fig 11.

Select Knife >> Multi-cut and enter5 and cut the plane horizontally.Move the points to give the shape ofthe spoke. See Fig 12.

From the side view select the planeand extrude it upwards to give the

spoke its thickness and apply the

mirror so that it becomespermanent. See Fig 13.

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Hurray, we have our first spoke -four more to go. We can do this thehard way (By eye balling it) or wecan do this like pros and do a littlemath. A circle has 360 degrees andwe divide that by 5(the number ofspokes we have), so we get 72.Which means we are going to layeach spoke at a 72 degrees anglefrom each other. So press tab to exitedit mode and enter object mode.Press Shift + D and press enter. Itseems like nothing happened butsomething did, it created a clone.Now take your hand off the mouseand press R, to rotate, and using

your number pad press 7, 2 and hitenter. If you noticed the clone isnow visible to you and is laid out 72degrees from the first one. Repeatthis step three more times so thatyou have five spokes. See Fig 14.

Lets go back to the first layer andstart creating the center of the rim.Create a cylinder and scale it down

so that it looks like Fig 15.

Select the vertex in the center both

from the top of the cylinder and the

bottom. On the proportional dropdown menu, which is the one thatlooks like a donut, select connectedand on the fall off menu, which is

the drop down right next to it, selectSphere Falloff. From the side viewuse the arrow manipulator to pullthe two vertices down until youcreate a concave shape. See Fig 16.

Go back to the second layer, whereyou have the primitives for thespokes. Select the bottom fourcubes on each spoke and delete thefaces. Move the center of thespokes from the first layer to thesecond, where your spokes reside.See Fig 17.

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This next part is a bit tedious but just as fun. Select both the cylinder(Rim Center) and the spokes andpress and CTRL + J to merge both

objects together. Now begin tomerge each vertex on the spokeswith the corresponding vertex onthe cylinder so that the resultingimage looks like Fig 18.

Now that we have the shape of thespokes, we have to create the holeswhere the bolts go. Create anothercylinder and scale it down so that itlooks like a long rod with thethickness of the holes we want tocreate. Place it near the top spokeand center it on the y-axis and so it

traverses the spokes center. Place

your 3D-Cursor at the center of thescreen (x=0, y=0, z=0) and changethe pivot point to 3D cursor. Presstab to exit edit mode and select the

rod we just created and duplicate itby pressing CTRL + D and pressenter. Press R and enter 72 onyour number keypad. This shouldhave moved the clone rod to theexact location as the first but on thesecond spoke. Do this three moretime until you have 5 rods. (Note:remember to change the pivot pointback to its normal state or you will

get frustrated later.) See Fig 19.

Next Press W, which brings up theBoolean Tools Menu, and selectdifference from the menu. Thiswill create an object that iscomposed of all the meshes that donot intersect. Press G to grab your

newly created object and move it off

to the side. Select the previous twoobjects that you had and deletethem, and center your new spokeswith holes.

We are almost complete, so hang inthere. Move the newly createdobject to the first layer. Move thespokes toward the top of the rim.Now that they are in place selectboth the rim base and the spokesand press CTRL + J to join the tomeshes into one object. Begin tomerge each vertex on the spokes

with the corresponding vertex onthe rim base near the bottom of thelip. See Fig 20.

All that is left is to add detail so Iadd a subsurface modifier and useSHIFT + E to make certain edgesaround the lip of the rim and theedges of the spokes are sharper.See Fig 21.

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Texture, Position and Render to yourhearts content !!! Enjoy !!!

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Pablo

D

elgado

Pablo is 25 years old from Puerto Ricocurrently living in Miami, FL. He worksas a software engineer and does parttime 3D work for customers usingBlender and [email protected]

173D Workshop - Modeling Tires
http://www.pdelgado.com/http://www.blenderart.org/


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Level: Intermediate

IntroductionIn this tutorial I will take you throughthe steps to model the tires like theone I had earlier made for an AlfaRomeo GT model.

What you will needA sketch of the tire, like this one(PIRELLI P6000). For the dimensionsof the tire, lets use a 20560r16.

OverviewWe will buld the dimensions of thetire from the image we have so letscalculate that:

The width of the image = 205mm.The external diameter of the tire16inch + 2 * 60mm =

16*25.41+2*60 = 526.56mmFrom the image size (in pixels:

500*190), We calculate the height ofthe image (a part of the tire tread)to 205*190/500 = 77.9 mm

As the diameter of the tire is526.65mm, its perimeter is3.14159265 * 526.65 = 1654.52.So, on our tire tread, we can put Ntimes the sketch image with N =1654.52/77.9 = 21.239.

Because the image can be tiled, weneed to round off the fractional

number (21.239) to a whole number.So we calculate out that the tiretread sketch we have will fit 21times around the tire.

Create a 21-edge circle and extrudeit to have one face fitting well overthe sketch. Next, well model justone element (1/21 of the full tire).and then multiply it 21 times, mergeit, and voila!

Step1. Scene setup

Open Blender. Erase all elements ofthe default scene.

In the Right view (NUMPAD 3), add aCircle mesh of 21 vertices. Rotate itto have one of the bottom edgesperfectly horizontal (tip: align top,

opposite vertex with the Z-axis.

As the Blender default Circle'sradius is 1.414 (square root of 2),size it by 0.707 (1/1.414) to have aradius of 1.0. Then, size it by

0.526/2 = 0.263 (tire radius inmeters) and move all vertices up by0.263 (the radius).

Its OK that the bottom edge is noton Z=0. Well see why, later.

Duplicate this bottom edge;separate the duplicated vertices tohave another object. Extrude it

along the Y-axis by 0.205 (the widthof our tire). You now have a Planeand a Circle like these:

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To solve it, just rotate them aroundthe Y-axis. This time round detailsare correct.

As you can see in the Right view,the tire element is not a Plane butwarped around a circle.

This is why its so important torotate vertices around the Y-axisinstead of translating them along

the X-axis. Now, we will cut the

edges in dark areas, to materializethe hollows of the tread. You shouldobtain this:

Its important to keep the edgescircling the dark areas! We will seewhy later. Now its time to optimizeour mesh a bit. We have to removeall unneeded vertices and edges inwhite zones and on borders. Doingthis will allow us to save a lot of

polys on the completed tire

(remember, we will duplicate thispart 2*2*21 = 84 times !!!).

The vertex count goes from 144 to78 and, the face count goes from 53to 22.

Step3. Adding some thickness.

Time to model the hollows! From the

previous step, select all vertices

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Step4. Completing the tire

SpinDup the element you patientlymodeled (1 turn, 360? of course, 42

steps: because we need 21elements and the mesh we have isonly a half). Once SpinDup is done,you may observe your bordervertices are not perfectlyduplicated. So, select all vertices,and Remove Doubles (set thresholdto 0.001).

You now need to mirror the tire.Select the row of vertices at themiddle of the tire, and move the 3D

Cursor to selection (to have it at the

tire's center, in the middle plane ofit) Duplicate the half tire, dontmove it, but rotate it 180 degrees inthe Top view (around the 3D

Cursor). Rotate around the Y-axis toalign the middle vertices to theones of the other half tire. Merge,and youre done!

I advise you to use this mesh withAutoSmooth on, to have solid threaddetails as well a smooth side. Hereare some Yafray renders with a rim(black tire material courtesy ofSonix's Car Material Library).

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T

homas

Baron

Thomas Baron is a software engineerfor the aeronautical industry inFrance. After discovering Blender in1999 he has been a serious amateuruser for two years. A car enthusiast

who also likes to work on planes.

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Introduction"Sharing the Road," is the theme forthe 2007 Michelin ChallengeDesign (MCD) (www.michelinchal-lengedesign.com), a year-long transportation design event that

culminates at the North American In-ternational Auto Show (January 13-21, 2007) at Cobo Center in down-town Detroit. This year's entrants -over 260 of them from around theworld - addressed cars and otherlight vehicles, semi trucks and pas-senger buses as well as road userson two wheels and two feet.

Bob Miron, Michelin's director of tech-

nical marketing, notes some of thedesign solutions selected by thisyear's eight-member jury - an ex-pert panel of renowned designers,

transportation industry educatorsand safety experts - addressed be-ing "doored."

"The xV concept from Marin Myftiuof Albania features a locking systemthat prevents a door from beingopened for a few seconds after thevehicle is turned off when an objectapproaches within the door's span".

This tutorial covers how Marin Myf-tiu modeled/created his entry.

Cardesign technique;Concept to scale model.Getting started.

During this tutorial, I will explain thewhole process I have followed fordesigning a car. It will not be a de-

tailed, step by step method since itcovers many fields beyond Blenderor even your own PC. This is an over-view of the whole process, with oc-casional focus on particulartechniques. We will start with theconcept sketches and end up with a1:6 foam scale model.

Concept: First of all it takes a lot

of thinking -> sketching ->rethink-ing -> re-sketching. Car modeling isthe most frustrating thing I haveseen in 3D modeling up to now andyouve got to have crystal clearideas (or almost) of the ins and

outs, solid andvoids, bumpsand depressionsof that surface

before you startoff; most fre-quently, big mis-takes foundduring 3D model-ing will requireyou to redo mostof the work, thatmay be wholeweeks. So first ofall, do a lot of

sketches and dif-

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http://www.michelinchallengedesign.com/http://www.blenderart.org/


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ferent views to clarify as many de-tails as possible.

Blueprints

As you might have seen in car model-ing tutorials, it always takes blue-prints of that particular car and thesame is needed for your ownconcept. For some precise blue-prints you can use freeware vectorsoftware like Inkscape (like I did). Ink-scape also helped me go one stepahead of my sketches, making a

colored illustration. When working

on the blueprints, I would advise tokeep an existing car blueprint on thebackground to keep the proportionsin check.

Blendering

Well, assuming that we have doneall the above correctly, its time towarm up the Blender engines. I am

on a 64bit AMD machine and 64 bit

system so the x64 / SSE3 optimizedbuild gives a lot of added renderingpower (+75%) compared to thestandard. I will not cover here, in de-

tail, the whole modeling as it is a tu-torial apart but, a few concepts arealmost vital when turning yourconcept into a 3D:

- Part Subdivision. Always sub-divide your model body into dis-tinct parts (doors, sides,cowling, mirrors etc). Attempt-

ing to separate some parts afterhaving done some modeling, bycutting or other methods, willcost you a lot of time and effortsto correct/adjust them.

- Grid Resolution.The same is tobe said when you model the poly-gons. The technique I have usedis pretty straightforward; Ex-

trude a point following distinct

curves on the background blue-print. Neighboring curves shouldhave approximately the samenumber of vertices to form as

many regular, four vertex facesas possible. You have to set inmind the exact positioning ofthe main curves since any latercut or loop cut may seriouslydamage the surface.

- Correct Lighting. Usually I usea traditional 3-lights schemeand play with them to get good

lighting and since most oftentime is a concern so I dont in-clude radiosity or occlusion intest renderings.

After all the work, the final render-ings looked something like this:

Scale model

When finished with the renderings




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and photo editing, it was the time tostart thinking about the scale mod-el. While I was not an expert withBlender, a scale model was

something in which I had zero experi-ence and all I had at my disposalwere simple tools like a saw, shap-

ing gauzes, scissors, rulers, a simplecaliper and few other things. The first thing I did was to print allthe three main views of the model in1:6 scale (the models real scale). These images on the wall servedthroughout the modeling process asa 1:1 reference for most of the di-mensions; you open the caliper ac-cording to the part you want tomeasure and then compare it withthe real dimension on the model,pretty straightforward.

Another trick in which Blender

helped me, was preparing cardboard

templates of some given body sec-tions. I subdivided the whole lengthof the xV in 12 sections and cut thecar body after those sections. After

rendering each section cutout, scal-ing them in the GIMP and then print-ing, we only have to stick eachsection on a cardboard piece andcarefully cut the hollow part.

After this operation, the only thingto do remains marking the sectionson the working board according tothe distances of the sections we

have in Blender, so we can placethe right section at the right dis-tance to check the work progress.

And this is the final output. Thismodel will be displayed by Michelinon the North American International

Auto Show, in early January2007. As you could see mostof the process, Blenderplayed a crucial role not onlyin modeling and renderingbut also in putting together acorrect scale model and theresult was pretty satisfactory.




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Marin

Myftiu

Marin Myftiu is from Tirana, Albania. He is currentlystudying Architecture and working part time as agraphics designer. He is working in architecture,product design, interior design projects and moreimportantly seeking a career in car design.

www.freewebs.com/multid

253D Workshop - Making Of 'Cutting The Waves'
http://www.freewebs.com/multidhttp://www.blenderart.org/


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Making of 'Cutting the Waves'

As a regular Blender user, I have al-ways waited for the annual BlenderF1 challenge. Unfortunately for my2005 entry I had little time andcouldn't complete it. Basically, thecar was done but I had no time for abackground scene. Still, a fifth placemotivated me to try harder nextyear, so for 2006 I decided to makethe best image I could, with asmuch detail as possible, including abackground.

Modeling the car

This year I wanted something freshand new. So I ditched the old wheel-based car concept and decided on ahydrofoil-type vehicle with a jet en-gine. This combined flight and wa-

ter, as I really wanted somethingbased around the theme of "water"this year. I started sketching and de-cided on the following design (Fig-ure1):

As with most projects, this one alsostarted with the modeling phase. Iscanned my drawings and loadedthem onto two planes in Blender

with UV mapping, giving a top andside view, as blueprints.

I usually model with subdividedmeshes, as the mesh tools inBlender are the most advanced.However, to aid in modeling, I firstdrew the outline of the car with 3DBezier curves, adjusted to fit the topand side blueprints (Figure 2). Thencame some adjustments in 3D tomake them nice and smooth, giving

the vehicle the proper aerodynamicoutlines.

Using the curves as outline guides, Imesh modeled the car body. Then:Subsurf once, Alt-C convert tomesh, and continued modeling. Fig-ure 3 is more or less the final mod-el, with front grille, windshield, roofair intakes and front lamps added.

To make it more interesting, there is




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an indentation, dividing the fuselageinto two differently coloured parts,purely for aesthetic reasons.

The Driver Though I am not much of a charac-ter modeler, especially not with real-istic humans, I just had to add acharacter to the scene to make itcome alive. Figure 4 shows mydriver, along with the insides of thecockpit. His body is my model, but Ihave to admit his head is a MakeHu-man head stitched to the body. He'sfully pose-able, except for fingers.

Following my motto of "detail, de-tail, detail", I added helmet, glasses,4 point seat belts with the releasebutton modeled, though you can'tsee it in the final render.

WaterThe water I used comes from an earli-er picture of mine (Venice Morning),as I liked it so much :) Its really noth-

ing too complicated, the waves are

done with three Clouds textures,

with different Input Size X,Y,Z para-meters as bump maps, giving 3 lay-ers of waves: small, medium andlarge. The material itself is a simplegreenish blue reflecting and refract-ing material. Figure 5 is my first WIPposted to some 3D graphics forumson the net (Elysiun/Blenderartists). This is good practice, as the com-ments I received really helped me de-velop the picture further. Most

people said it looked like a smallscale model and not a full size race

vehicle, like a toy in a bathtub. I de-cided to get rid of the "bathtub" andgo for the open sea!

LightingFor lighting, I used an HDR map gen-erated with Terragen, as Terragencan make some very nice skyrenders. To find the perfect moodfor my image, I tried various setupsfor the HDR maps until I found thecentral one as shown in the follow-ing picture, a very nice, pinkish-yel-lowish morning sky. It was

undoubtedly the 'One' perfect for amorning test run on the open-seatrack! Besides the global GI lighting,as with many of my images a sunlamp is also used to add somestronger shadows, though these donot show up well on the water. Forrealism, the sun lamp is alignedwith the sun in the Terragen HDRmap.

Fluid WavesOne important part of the picture ishow the sea reacts to the hydrofoil. The vehicle is in constant motion,"cutting the waves". In this cap-tured moment it is taking a sharpleft turn, while the water waves fol-low the original path of motion. Tocreate the proper swelling and de-pressing of the water surface, I usedthe nice Blender feature of fluid sim-




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ulation. It took at least 20 or moretries to get the proper waves toform. The setup that finally workedwas a cube shaped block of water atthe bottom of the simulation do-

main, and a large ball of water is'thrown' with a given starting velo-city (v0) sideways into the water, inthe direction that the vehicle was go-ing. This created a very nice wave ef-fect.

Next step was integrating thebounded fluid domain into the bigdisk of water that was the sea. After

some unsuccessful tries with othertools, the built in script: Mesh -> Ap-ply Deformations converted mybaked fluid-sim into an editablemesh. This was stitched to the largeround sea mesh. TIP: to make itseem like it extends forever (till thehorizon), the outside of this disk isabout 1000 Blender units away. Thisis not enough, you can still clearlysee that the 'world' ends abruptly.So the outer vertices were moved

up a bit, making the disk curve up-ward a bit, and it therefore seems toextend to the horizon.

Extras

With the main objects done, time forthe extras! I modeled two dolphinsand painted them with vertex paint.

You can spot them in the water inthe final image. I'm not exactly surea race track would be allowed wheredolphins lived but I just had to keepthem in the final image. The racetrack itself is bounded with buoysand some direction boards (Fig. 7).There's also a camera on a platform(Fig. 8), the same man model frombefore. It was fun to model his mov-able pedestal, which is properlyrigged with an armature, with the

wires and everything following itsmovement.

Figure 9 is a closeup of the vehicle'sback, with several interesting de-tails. There is the jet engine exhaustwhich properly 'warps' the air - therefractive index of hot air is higherthan of cold air - , and has just ahint of blue where it leaves the car.A common mistake that I see inmany pictures is excessive use ofthick black or fire coloured fumes,usually particle systems, for jet en-gine exhausts. This is unrealistic, en-gines don't burn air, if you see fireand/or smoke - not to be confusedwith condensation trails - comingfrom an exhaust, there is serioustrouble in the engine (reminds me

of: Monty Python, How to Irritate




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People: "There is no cause for alarm.The wings are not on fire." :)), so I'dadvise against it. The see-throughexhaust here was actually a prettycomplex material, with a number ofprocedural textures and colorbandsused. The small water drops are theresult of a separate fluid-sim, thatwas converted to mesh with theaforementioned script, and just the

small drops kept. There are alsobright spots on the hull of the 'car',these are meant to be water dropsthat have stuck to the fuselage atthe back (the air resistance wouldblow the drops off the front).

Final touch-ups

When the date of the competitionwas extended 1 month, I didn't

really have anything left to do. Iadded the island with the lighthousein the background, with some palmtrees, the details of which wereunfortunately lost with the motionblur. Right: motion blur! Basically Irendered a depth map (ie z-buffer)of the image, and using that as a

mask, applied post-pro motion blur

in Corel PhotoPaint to the back partsof the image. This was a simple wayto separate the car from theforeground. I also applied some

Gaussian blur and desaturation tothe background.

Trivia: why does the side say "FalconRacing"? If you look at my blueprintsketch at the beginning, the carlooks like the open beak of somebird of prey. Hence "falcon" and thelogo as well.

And the final image: Placed fourth.Not bad, but could have beenbetter. But there's always a nexttime! :) See you at the races!


293D Workshop - Textured Metal Shaders For Industrial Design


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Level: Intermediate toAdvanced

UV-unwrapping - materialnesting - displacement map-

ping - displacement mixing

This tutorial will explain how differ-ent types of metal surfaces, found inIndustrial Design and Metal Art, canbe rebuilt in Blender. It will coverbrushed and hammered metal tex-tures including modeling, UV-unwrap-ping, and texturing approaches and

techniques.

Most of the scenes are jewelry re-lated because this is my main fieldat the moment. However,

everything explained can easily betransferred to any other type of object as well - as the last chaptershows.

Let's talk about a brushed metalshader first.Many first semester students marvelabout their first casted silver ring

after they've started to clean uptheir first casting with sand paper. They love to move the ring aroundand enjoy watching the change ofthose stretched highlights. But whatare those anisotropic reflections? Mi-cro fine grooves inside a polishedmetal surface reflect the incominglight at different angles away - per-pendicular to the grooves direction.

Those visual elements, most com-monly known as linear and circularbrush patterns, are called anisotrop-ic specular reflections, or short aniso-tropic highlights. However, thosegrooves also spread the reflectionvalue in the same manner. This isknown as anisotropic reflection. It isnot just a diffused, radial blurred re-flection, because the anisotropic re-

flection is stretched as the specular

highlight reflection is stretched. Ananisotropic reflection is composedout of many fine parallel reflectionlines, depending on the groove size.

It is important to know that close ob-jects appear more clear in the reflec-tion and far objects appear morediffused. The last point is especiallywhat is currently difficult to recreatewith the Blender material system. Itis not only a question of stretching areflection along one axis perpendicu-lar to micro-fine grooves, but further-

more to make that reflection havethe correct blurriness according tothe distance between the reflectedand the reflecting surface.

To create this visual effect we needto create a bump map which canprovide us with the needed amountof fine grooves. Because we work in72 DPI and not the real world, weonly have a limited amount of visual

information (pixels) to create this ef-fect. The solution to this technicalproblem is to create a blend of differ-ent materials which all have slightlydifferent bump values. By overlay-ing and mixing them together wecan create that fine surface weneed. Each material we are going tocreate has a small reflectiveraytrace value together with a de-

sired Fresnel setting. In addition,




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each material is utilizing the UV map-ping mode for any used bump map.

The first material contains the main

anisotropic specular reflection utiliz-ing the new Tangent V function forspecular highlights. This functionsas the main base material. It alsocontains a low setting for raytraced

reflections. It is very helpful to giveyour materials unique names tohelp you manage them.

In terms of texture you can eitheruse an image map you create insidePhotoshop (or other image editing

software) utilizing motion-blurrednoise, or you can use a proceduralfunction. The benefit of a proceduraltexture is that it is resolution inde-pendent. I prefer to use voronoi. This texture can produce nice pointpatterns similar to noise. Using thethe Int function you can decide ifyou want to use only dots or more acell-like structure by playing with

the Brightness and Contrast value.

In addition, you could experimentwith the Col1 option. With the intern-al texture scale value you can con-

trol the size of the points which willlater be stretched.

You can now decide if you want tostretch the texture completely alongone axis by turning off one axis in-side the Map Input tap, or you canuse the X-Z size values to scale the

pattern down along one axis andstretch it along the other axis.

This will produce the same visual res-

ult you would get with Photoshop

anyway. The material is connectedto one color input channel of a colormixer node which blends into thecolor channel of the output node. The next step is to create a secondmaterial that contains a diffused un-

stretched specular reflection. Thishelps to build a multifaceted overallspecular reflection which is typicalfor brushed metal surfaces.

This material we duplicate witheach copy having a slightly differentbump setting, then mix them togeth-er with color mixers. The end-resultof this material network needs to beconnected to the second color chan-

nel input to which the first materialis connected. The amount of secondmaterials will define the smooth-ness of the brushed metal look andalso the smoothness of the aniso-tropical reflection.

A schematic view would look like inthe Image below:

Brushed metal shader tree: base




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shader with anisotropic specular

second shader with sharp specularand amount of secondary shadeswith different bump settings

Brushed metal surfaces sometimeshave the problem of catching dirt be-cause of the fine grooves. To pre-vent this you can seal the surfacewith a lacquer. This will result in a

very strong and sharp specular high-

light and a more soft looking aniso-tropic specular highlight. To get thisresult you need to lower the value of

the anisotropic highlight and in-crease the value of only one regularspecular highlight.

Anisotropic highlights are oftenfound on metal objects which repres-ent geometrical primitives like atube, a ball, a sheet or a box. Beforewe continue, I would like to present

few important tips:

1. Always try to unwrap themesh from the side, or top view,but not from any perspective

view to prevent any distortion ofthe UV texture you will apply. Ifyour object or faces are notaligned to any axis, try to lookperpendicular onto the facesyou unwrap.2. To prevent distortions, alwaystry to scale faces inside the UVeditor to the same dimensionthey also have inside your 3d

model. This is very important tokeep in mind when you followthe next steps.3. You should hide the UV seamby either putting additional geo-metry over it or by rotating itaway from the camera.4. Use seams to control wherethe mesh unfolds to have bettercontrol about where you will seethe highlight break.

5. Rotating a mesh in the UV ed-itor will control orientation ofspecular reflections. Think aboutUV in only one direction. 'UV'could be upwards/downwards,and a 90 degree rotated ver-sion, lets say 'VU', could go leftand right.6. To create smooth and even-flowing anisotropic highlights on

curved objects, you will need to




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have a very smooth surface us-ing either smoothed subdivi-sions or the subsurface modifier.Otherwise you will sometimes

see sharp corners in the high-light.

Plane: Unwrap > Project fromview: This is the easiest objectto unwrap. Just make sure youlook perpendicular onto theplane.

Cylinder: Unwrap > Cylinder

from view: To texture a closedcylinder, I found it easier to cre-ate a tube and unwrap it first.After that step you should cre-ate a new loop cut very close tothe edge of the end you wantto close. Because you un-wrapped the tube, the changein the mesh will already be up-dated in the UV unwrapper'smesh. Select the top loop of thetube and scale it down to closethe tube by creating a cap. Donot merge the points. This wayyou can create a cylinder wherethe sides have a linear highlightpattern and the cap shows a cir-cular high light pattern, similarto what we know from a CD.

Box: Unwrap > Unwrap withseams marked before: A box is

a pretty simple shape to un-wrap. You only have four sidesand two caps. However in con-trast to a cylinder, the box can

only provide you with linear high-light patterns. This also meansthat the cap will show a lineardirection which flows from oneneighbor face through the capface to the other neighbor face.The other two faces will provideyou with an anisotropic specu-lar highlights which will not cre-ate a joint with the specularhighlight of at least one capface. If you take a small steelcube and try to brush each sidewith sand paper you will seethat you can only connect 4sides like a face loop. The othertwo faces will not be able to beintegrated.

Sphere: Unwrap > Spherefrom view: A sphere is veryeasy to unwrap as well. Just goto the side view and unwrap it. You will notice that the polesshow some darker artifacts. Tofix that, remove the two toppole points to further open thesphere. Select a loop ring, ex-trude, and scale the selectiondown to close one pole. Youshould move the newly created

loop ring to the same position

of the vertices you deleted firstto retain the sphere curvatureat the poles. As with the cylin-der, do not merge the vertices

ring to close the sphere.

Mixed shapes: Depending onyour object you will have to util-ize different unwrapping meth-ods to get good results. In mytest object I want to unwrap acylindrical object which con-tains an extruded element.

Step 1: Building basic body:Because you need to have a verysmooth surface to receive smoothanisotropic highlights, I prefer to cre-ate cylindrical objects out of cubesutilizing the subsurface modifier tocreate the roundness. Starting witha box, I remove the pole caps and in-clude two loop cuts. (Image 1)




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I go into side-view and unwrap thebox as a cylinder from view.

Next I re-size the faces in the UV edit-

or so that they will be similar to theface size of the 3d mesh. (Image 2)

We can now test out the first result. Turn on subsurf with a render valueof 5, and create a material which

has the Tangent V option, found in-side the shaders panel, turned on.Set the objects' faces to smooth,and do a render preview. You willsee a nice and smooth anisotropichighlight. (Image 3)

Maybe play a bit with the subsurfrender value settings. Increasingand decreasing the value together

with quick render previews will

quickly show you how much thesmoothness of the surface has an im-pact onto the smoothness of the

flow of the highlight.

Step 2: Enhancing geometryand unwrapping:Let's select one face and extrude itand review the result inside the UVeditor. As you can see, the newly cre-ated faces do overlap and a quickpreview rendering shows a bad res-ult. (Image 4)

We need to select the newly created faces in the face selection modeand unwrap them with "U > Un-wrap". Going back into the UV editorwe will see that the scale propor-tions are totally off and we need tomanually correct that. (image 5)

Select all faces of your objects inthe Face selection mode, go into theUV editor and scale down the newly

added faces so that they will



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represent the actual dimensions ofthe 3D mesh. (Image 6)It is very important to keep the face

orientations intact. Go into the faceselection mode and select on face.

You will see two yellow, one green,and one red edge. Those red and

green edges present the UV

orientation. (Image 7)Select a face next to that face and

you will see that sometimes the col-or change depends on the orienta-tion. However, in case the loweredge of one face is red and the topedge of the face below is green inthe Face selection mode - and in theUV editor it is the same, you will befine, they overlap and share thesame coordinates in 2D space. (Im-

age 8)

In case in the UV editor the twoedges do not overlap the faces willhave different UV orientations andpositioning and the highlight will

now flow through both connectedfaces. (Image 9)

I also rotated the face to show howthat will affect the orientation of thehighlight and any textures using theuv coordinates.

Apply a scaled down voronoi textureand stretch it along one axis while

deselecting the axis inside Map



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Input which is perpendicular to youranisotropic specular highlight direc-tion. Map the texture to the Normalchannel, select the UV mapping

mode, do a quick render previewand enjoy the nice effect. (Image10)

As you can see the highlight flowsnicely over the geometry.

Step 3: Fixing texture flow:However the procedural textureseems to have some bad seams.This is because we did not weld thenewly added faces inside the UV edit-

or to the faces of the cube. We haveto do this now. Select the faces ofthe new extruded parts and movethem into the hole of the unwrappedcube. Using snap to pixels will helpwith moving the faces. Stretch themso that they fill out that hole andthen selectively weld the overlap-ping face points together. Do a testrendering and you will see that the

procedural texture perfectly flows

over the geometry. (Image 11)

The drawback is that the last stepdistorts the proportional dimensionsof the newly included faces insidethe UV editor, thus distorting the tex-ture a little bit. In other words, asyou can see, the top sides of the ex-truded face shows stretched lineswhile the sides remaining have afiner grain.

Step 4: Finishing up:Let us close the top cap. Similar tothe cylinder unwrapping, just add anedge loop cut very close to the topedge of the cube. Select the top

edge and scale it down until theedges hit each other. (Image 12) Tomake them perfectly touch each oth-

er use the CTRL key and release themouse button when the scale valuereaches 0 for x,y, and z. (Image 13)

The last step is to include anotheredge loop cut close to the older topedge to create a nicely roundededge for the pole cap. (Image 14)

(Finale Rendering: brushed metal)



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Comments This overview should show you howto approach the texturing and model-ing as well. Try not to make your ob-

ject too complex. Also, keep in mindthat with a very good texture youmight not need to show all geomet-rical designs. Drawing quad basedwireframes of your objects beforemodeling them will help you to lay-out the design and might save you alot of time at the end. Starting overfrom the beginning is always ahassle - especially when you realizethat with a bit more planing youwould have already been done.

Through the overlaying of thesecond materials we also receivesome nicely glowing specular reflec-tions specifically along edges asseen at the top edge of the cylinder.

Experiment with the approaches Ishowed you. For example, the UV ed-

itor is quite cool to play with in caseyou want to create some funny aniso-tropic highlight distortions. Let facesoverlap or rotate other faces andthen welding them rotated again in-to the main mesh. The results mightnot be very realistic or useful for rep-resenting a real object. Howeverthey might be very useful forsomething experimental or other ap-

plications in which you can see this

working. (Image 15)

2. Hammered metal shader

To create a forged bracelet I taperthe ends with a rolling press andplanish them round. (Definition ofplanish: to smooth the surface irregu-larities in a sheet metal part with re- peated hammer blows) Thisproduces nicely tapered round coneshaped ends which can be textured.For that I use mainly a ball shapedhammer. Through texturing I con-vert the round cross section into theshape of an octagon.

This shape has to be recreatedthrough modeling. I start at the cen-ter of the bracelet and create an oc-tagon. By extruding and evenlyscaling down each new extrusion Ican quickly build the main part ofthe bracelet. (Image 16)

Turning on subsurf, setting all faces

to smooth, and creasing the edges

along the body will produce a niceand round body while the edges aresharp. I prefer to have a flat plan-ished end which I roll into a loop. Be-cause those ends are planished,there is hardly any texture left.

To model this I need to transformthe octagon shape into a rectangu-lar shape and move the centerpoints to the sides in order to modelthe sharper edges. In the followingsteps I just gently scale down thethickness of the model and build aloop. (Image 17)



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Because of the pressure applied dur-ing bending, the edges of the metalitself will roll up a little bit. In thiscase it might make more sense to

leave the center points where theyare and scaling down all those cen-ter points which define the loop. (Im-age 18)

We can use the edge crease optionto selectively sharpen the edges of

the bracelets. The edges along theloop have a high value to producesharp edges, while the edges closerto the center of the bracelet have alower value to produce a nice trans-ition between the loop edges andthe base edges. (Image 19)

Before we get deeper into designing

the shader I would like to present

some basic information which is im-portant to know to gain full controlover your shader creation.

Displacement > how to control the

displacement :Every displacement map should util-ize a gray scale. Use the 'No RGB' op-tion inside the 'Map To' panel to turncolor bands into gray scale informa-tion. Black and white are the two dif-ferent ends of any displacementmovement. The value of the displace-ment will control the distancebetween these two ends. Dependingon if you set the displacement

direction (ie. working outside to-wards the inside of the geometry),white will either move polygons out-side or inside. Black would have the

opposite effect. Neutral gray will notmove any geometry.

So it is advisable that you do notwork with white to black transitions.Only use Black to neutral gray trans-itions inside the color band and se-lecting the No RGB option. This wayyou can easily control the displace-ment direction with the 'Disp' but-ton inside the 'Map To' tap.

Stencil > how to control the blend-ing of displacement maps :To mix two different textures togeth-er you have to position a maskingtexture between them which hasthe 'No RGB' and 'Stencil' options in-side the 'Map To' panel selected. The 'No RGB' will give you bettercontrol over the blending because

the blending is based on gray val-ues. The 'No RGB' option also en-ables you to use the color bandfunction. White means it will be100% transparent and black meansit will be opaque. Gray values willrepresent the transitional valuesbetween white and black, in otherwords - between transparent andopaque.



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As mentioned, we have a transitionfrom a textured octagon shapedbody into an untextured rectangularbody. Creating a material like this

would be easy. You would only needto apply a cell texture as a displace-ment map for the main body, asecond texture map with a muchlower displacement value, and ablending texture to blend those twodisplacement textures togetherwhere the model changes its crosssection shape.

To my knowledge it is not yet pos-

sible to mix different channels of ma-terials together utilizing thedisplacement information. Currentlyonly the color output is supported.Fixing this limitation will allow thecreation of a layered shader with dif-ferent displacement settings utiliz-ing the node system.

A schematic view would look like

this: Hammered metal shader tree:mixing

- channel one : 1. displacementtexture (strong value voronoi)

- channel two : stencil texture(hand-painted uv map)

- channel three : 2. displace-ment texture (soft value voron-

oi)

This means that we will have to cre-ate a handmade displacement mapwhich provides strong and soft dis-placement values where we need

them. This is not very difficult andcan produce very convincing results.With hand painted maps you alsohave more control over the end res-ult. However they are also moretime consuming to create.

Unwrapping and exporting the UVFace LayoutAll we have to do is to unwrap ourbracelet and correct the face layout

inside the UV editor. Start the UVFace layout script and save it by hit-ting F1. (Image 20)

You can model one-half of the brace-let, and after texturing stitch a du-plicate to the other end. The UVcoordinates will be transferred to

the duplication.

Preparing the texture baking To bake a displacement texture weneed to apply a texture to the Colorchannel inside the 'Map To' tap. Aswe did earlier, I recommend thevoronoi texture. Inside the Map In-put tap I increase the scale for x,y,and z to create small enough faces.Because I unwrapped the bracelet

first the procedural texture willnicely flow along the cylindricalbody.

Switch to the UV editor and start the Texture Baker script. The bigger thefile size, the sharper the end-resultwill be. Because we work with pixelsand not a procedural map, youshould make sure that your displace-

ment map will supply you withenough pixel information to preventa blocky look.

Composing the Displacement Mapin PhotoshopLoad both images, the baked tex-ture and the UV face layout file intoPhotoshop and compose them to-gether in one file. Apply a layer

mask to the baked texture image



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layer. Create an opaque to 80% trans-parent gradient, and fade the toppart of the baked texture away start-ing at where the UV face layout map

shows you where the loops of thebracelet start soon. Hide all other lay-ers and export this image as a highres jpg file.

Creating a dirt mapHammered silver surfaces tend toget dirty in deeper grooves becauseof tarnishing. The higher hills are of-ten just polished through wearingthe bracelet. Those dirty areas also

have a lower reflection value thanthe high and polished areas. Savethe newly created composition as anew photoshop file and call itsomething like reflection_dirt_map.Apply a level layer effect and in-crease the contrast between whiteand black. You can also lower thevalue output by moving the slide atthe black side a bit away towards

more a dark gray. This will keepstrong white edges while brighten-ing up the darker areas. Dirt is nev-er uniform so apply amonochromatic noise filter to thebaked texture layer. Hide all otherlayers and export this image as ahigh res jpg file. (Image 21)

Creating the hammered silver materi-

al in Blender

Switch to the Material window (F5)and create a material and turn RayMirror on. However leave the RayMir value untouched. Select Blinnfor the specular highlights and cre-ate a sharp reflection. First we will

create a channel for the displace-ment map. Go to the Texture tapand create a one channel. Inside the

Map Input tap select UV go to the'Map To' tap and deselect Col and se-lect Disp. Set the Nor value to 0 andset the Disp value to something like

0.045. Depending on the gray scaleof your displacement map youmight need to increase or decreasethe Disp value to achieve realisticvalues.

Secondly we will create a channelfor the reflection and dirt map. Adda second channel and also set themapping mode to UV. In addition tothe Col option, select the RayMir op-

tion. Selecting the last one willmake use of the values of the reflec-tion map to define which area of thebracelet will be reflective and whichwill not. Gray values will be thetransition between reflective andnot reflective. Leaving the Col op-tion selected will show the dirt val-ues where the surface has noreflection value. Nice how both work

together though one image map.(Image 22)

Img 21

Img 22



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Switch to the Texture window (F6)and create an Image texture. Loadthe baked displacement map jpgfile. Deselect Interpolation and set

the Filter value to 0.1 to prevent addi-tional smoothing of your map. Cre-ate an additional Image texture andload the reflection dirt map jpg file.While you're at it, deselect interpola-tion and set the Filter value to 0.1 Tomake working with textures easieryou should select the auto namingfunction, or give each texture a

unique name. (Image 23)

And we are done. You can hit renderto preview you results. Check outthe shadows. They show the dis-placed surface of the bracelet.

CommentHand created objects often show alevel of imperfection or irregularityin surface and shape. As you cansee the final model of the braceletshows some of those deformations.

For example, each loop is different. Imoved and removed some geo-

metry. I did these steps after Imerged both half shapes of thebracelet together. This way, I savedthe time to create two custom sidesfirst which also would have requiredme to create custom made imagemaps as well.

You should only do this after yourare basically done with your modeland texturing it. Furthermore, I did

paint a bit into the displacementmap to flatten out normally dis-placed areas. Through the processof bending the bracelet, I also plan-

ished out some areas of the tex-tured surface. Using a hand painteddisplacement map gives you theability to quickly show those irregu-larities. With a pure procedural map,you would not be able to do that soeasily.

Displacement Modifier The next version of Blender willhave an interactive displacement

preview. This displacement modifierwill enable you to see the displacedgeometry in realtime. The subdivi-sion modifier level will affect the pre-cision of the preview. The higher thelevel, the finer the detail, but it willbe slower. This is great for smallerobjects but not very fast to previewmany at the same time. However,you tend to only work on one object

at a time anyway.

Procedural textures or image mapsare supported. Because Blenderalso comes with a built in paint mod-ule you can create your displace-ment image map in Photoshop,apply it in Blender to the displace-ment Modifier and preview the res-ult. In case you need a littlemodification you can load the image

Img 23



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in the UV/Image editor and paintchanges.

Switching between Object and Edit

mode will force Blender to recalcu-late the displaced geometry and toshow the changes to the imagethrough the 3D mesh. With the pos-sibly very high amount of polygons,it makes sense that Blender doesnot refresh any change automatic-ally. Fortunately, his modifier comeswith a very handy feature - It canbake the displaced geometry. Thismeans that you can turn your pre-

view into a solid new mesh and con-tinue modeling with it. This enablesthe artist to use the displacementfunction, not only as a render time ef-fect, but also as a solid modelingtool. With this tool, matching otherobjects to displaced geometries is fi-nally not a nightmare!

Warning

There is one down-side. Your scenefile can quickly explode in file size.While my low polygon braceletscene is around 1 MB a backed dis-placement geometry will add an addi-tional 242 MB! This means that thisfunction is great when you apply itto a small selection of objectswithout the highest subdivision levelvalue.

3Structured and darkenedsilver surfaces found withcasted rings

Very common for casted silver jew-elry which show a high level of de-tails is that it is difficult to keepthem clean. This causes a darkeningof these areas which are hard toreach with a sulfur based chemical. Through wearing the ring all highpoints of the ring surface are goingto be polished.

So what we would need is a materialwhich provides a smooth polishedand reflective surface for the mainbody and a material for the decor-ated area which shows a displacedsurface, having a reflection value forthe high points and a colored andnon-reflective value to the lowpoints of the displacement map. Inreality those two different materialsdo not blend into each other. This

means that we do not need to cre-ate any blending between them inBlender. To apply those two differentmaterials to the ring we can simplycreate two different material in-dexes and apply them inside theEdit mode to different face selec-tions of the ring geometry.

Select all of the faces which repres-

ent the main body of the ring and

hit 'New' and then 'Assign' insidethe Link And Material tap. Inside themodeling window press W and clickSelect Swap to select the other

faces which will be displaced. Hit

New and Assign as well. (Image 24)

You now create the two new materi-als, then assign those materials to

two specific areas of the ring. Mostring designs can be modeled as alow polygon cage with quad faces

that wewill besmoothutilizingthe sub-surfmodifier.Through



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adding loop cuts we can pick out lay-out areas which will receive differenttextures. With some push andpulling you can quickly create some

nice looking and comfortable towear ring designs. (Image 25) Time to create the materials. A

schematic view would look like this:

Structured metal shader tree:- Main mesh faces: base materi-al with silver settings

- Detail mesh faces: structuredmaterial with additional silversettings

- channel one : displacement tex-

ture

- channel two : inverted displace-ment texture

- channel three : color texture

for darkened silver

We already created the material in-dex for the ring. Switch to the Materi-al window (F5) select the firstmaterial which represents the major-ity of the unstructured ring insidethe Links and Pipeline tap. Renamethat material to something meaning-

ful, like "Main body". Set the Objectcolor to black. To rebuild a perfectlypolished silver surface, turn on RayMirror, set the RayMir value to 1.00and create a sharp specular high-light with the Blinn shader.

Even perfectly polished surfaces of-ten still have some fine grooves andscratches. Through buffing yousmooth out the sharp edges ofthose scratches and those producea more even reflection which givesyou the impression of a scratch freesurface. An easy step to create thateffect is to quickly unwrap the facesof the main body. Apply two loopedge seams along which Blenderwill cut the ring apart. (Image 26)

Switch to the Texture window (F6)

and create voronoi texture. You can

scale it down a little bit and activatethe Colorband option under the Col-ors tap. What we want is a bumpmap which only has few scratcheshere and there. For that set theblack color Alpha value to 1.00 andturn cyan into pure white. We stillhave that cell structure grain typicalfor voronoi. Move the black colortwo thirds to the right side and the

white color to the full left side. Knowwe have a nice black surface withsome dots only. It might make senseto rename that texture somethinglike "Voronoi Scratch". See Image 27.

Switch back to the Material Window(F5) and apply the newly create tex-ture inside the 'Map To' tap only tothe Nor channel and give it a very

low Nor value. Inside the 'Map Input'



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tap, set the working axis for yourmodel to a high value. This willsqueeze the bump map to producea brushed look. In my case I selec-ted the Y axis and used a size Yvalue of 40. (Image 28)

Now it is time to create the displace-ment material. Inside the Links andPipelines tap, select the second ma-

terial. Rename it to something like"displaced". Turn on Ray Mirror in-side the Mirror Transparency tap butleave the RayMir value at 0. We willcreate a texture which will definethe reflection values. You have to de-cide which procedural texture plugin you want to use for the displace-ment. In my case I selected a Mus-grave. Play with the NoiseSize valueinside the Musgrave tap to create

the desired pattern size. Switch tothe Colors tap and turn on Colorb-and. We only want the displacementgo into one direction.

It should either rise away from the

ring surface or it should sink into it.For that we need to set the colorb-and to a gradation between black orwhite to neutral gray. You can move

the black slider away from one sidecloser to the gray point to definehow soft the transition between un-touched and displaced geometrywill be. (Image 29)

After you made your decision it istime to create a blending mask. Se-lect click into an empty channel in-

side the Texture tap and select thesame Musgrave texture from theAdd New menu. Click the 2 next tothe small car icon to turn that in-stance of the texture into a singleuser. Go into the Colorband andmove the black and medium grayslider a bit to the left. Add anothercolor position and set that one to

white and move this one a tiny bitaway from the right side. You justcreated a mask which has slightlysmaller holes than the displacement

map through which the next texturewill be visible through. (Image 30)

The last texture will be a dirt map.Select whatever proced-ural and im-age textureyou want touse. I used

a strongly

Img 28

Img 27

Img 29



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scaled down voronoi texture and setthe colors inside the colorband toblack and dark gray to produce avery fine and hardly noticeablegrain look. (Image 31)Go back to the Material window (F5)I stress again to make use of nam-ing each texture to make managing

your channels much easier. Selectthe first channel with the displace-ment map. I set the Disp option tomove faces away from the ring in-

side the Map To tap. Select the 'NoRGB' button, set the Nor value to0.00, and select a very light valuefor the Disp. I use 0.02 for example.(Image 32)

Select the second channel with themasking map. Deselect Col insidethe 'Map To' tap and click 'Stencil'and 'No RGB'. Turning both on will

make white transparent and will

also enablethe colorb-and. (Image33)

Select thethird channel

with the dirt map. Double click Ray-Mir. This will set the RayMir functionto work on that part of the texturewe did cut away through the mask-ing map inside the second channel.This way the third channel will showthe dirt map where we masking map

did not key

out and aswell showthe reflec-tion. Further-more doesthe texturewe created

also provide us with all needed Ray-Mir value. (Image 34)

Having all those channels set upcheck out the Preview tap. Looksgreat doesn't it? (Image 35)

Inside the Editing (F9) window selectthe Subsurf option and give therender option a value of around 4 to6. The higher the more precise yourdisplacement will be during rendertime.. (Finale Rendering: StructuredRing)

CommentWhen you work with perfect reflect-ive surfaces it might make sense togive the different materials differentbase colors. This way you can seewhere you applied which material towhich faces inside the 3D windows.I find that very convenient to work

with. The higher the subsurf value,

Img 30

Img 31

Img 32

Img 33

Img 34

Img 35



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the more precise the realtime pre-view.

When you work with reflections youalways need to take the environ-ment you put the ring into also intoconsideration. Your raytraced reflec-tions have to reflect something.Quite often, raytraced objects donot work out for beginners becausethey only created the shader for theobject, but did not continue to thinkabout what those reflections willshow. Putting the ring into the rightsetting will often drastically improve

the quality of those reflections.

Soft irregularities inside reflectionscreated through a second veryblurred bump map will often in-crease the realism of reflections. There are hardly any perfectly flatsurfaces in reality. Raytracing tendsto produce those perfect visuals. Asan artist you have the task to bring

nature's irregularities back. Thosefine details are often the key to pro-ducing realistic results.

Compositor based depth offield rendering

Small object studio photographymakes high use of the depth of fieldeffect to diffuse distracting back-

ground elements and to put focus

on the main object. We can repro-duce this effect with the compositor.There are two ways you could do it.The old way uses the well known Z-depth blur trick. In Blender youwould use a pixel based matrix cre-ated through the z-depth informa-tion to blur the render output. Theproblem you would encounter is thatpixels of the edges of the object in fo-cus will be mixed together with theneighbor pixels, which belong to thebackground.

A real DoF effect would not use a Z-

depth based image, but wouldrender pixels depending on the dis-tance to the camera in relation tothe lens settings. The final braceletrendering shows that problem. Thetop edges of the metal surface areblurred as well. However a way toprevent that is to divide the objectsonto different layers and blur onlythe layer with the background ob-

jects. With using an Alpha Overnode inside the compositor you canthan mix the blurred background to-gether with the object in focus.

You just have to be very careful withnot blurring also parts of the back-ground on which the camera focussits on. Otherwise you might see ablurred surrounding while the focus

object is sharp. This would lookphysically wrong. In most cases youwill only see a small amount of theforeground with object studio photo-graphy. This means that you canalso ignore blurring the foreground.

The "Finale_Unwrapping" blend filecontains all the required setups.Keep in mind that when you spread

objects along render layers, youalso have to make sure that all yourlights also are active in those layersat the same time. Inside the Objectwindow (F7) can select the differentlayers inside the Draw tap.For more information about how tosetup the render layers go to: ht-tp://www.blender.org/cms/Render- _pipeline.747.0.html Look also intothe other two jewelry blend files and



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you will find similar blur problems.

Z-Depth sample based blurring

Recent changes in Blender broughtto us by Alfredo de Greef brought usthe new Defocus node for the com-positor. From working with it, I gotthe impression that it seems to be across-over of the traditional Z-depthbased blurring. It is not purely pixelmatrix based, but rather usessamples like with a true DoF effect. The Z-buffer information seems to

work as a helper in aiding Defocusto know where to sample. This willresult in a sample mask which willonl

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