Akta's Way – Blog

Here you go with another tutorial from super3boy! This time we are going to talk how to use vertex painting for hair for example or how to use UV and make some realistic-looking grass
Enjoy!

I really liked this video in which Sebastian König models a fly. The quality of the the work is extremely high and of course this is not for newbies of Blender, but is more oriented to people who are already quite skilled with the software.
Anyway enjoy the video and see again what Blender is able to do!

Here it is the first animation done with my TV cartoon char
Enjoy!

The first time I started to do character animation I found really helpful this tutorial on the BlenderWiki page. I really recommend it to everybody, beginners and medium-advanced users because alle the steps, from modeling to shading, rigging, walk-cycling etc. is explained there

Have it a go here:

Introduction to Character’s Animation

Happy blending!

Well, in my spare time (it’s not that much unfortunately because my job steals 90% of my time in this period) I’m working on a simple multiplayer game using Blender and of course python to create the classes server and client that will be used to share realtime data such as positions, rotation etc. among the players. I’m thinking about Pong as baseline for my game, however some changes may happen due to a couple of things that I need to verify!
For now enjoy this amazing tutorial about arrays in Blender, really useful sometimes to achieve nice effects as shown in this video

Hello Blender friends, this tutorial is actually in italian or at least the user has Blender with the italian UI. However it’s quite straightforward and understandable, hope you enjoy it!
The tutorial can be watched also from the source where I watched it, www.blender-tutorial.com

Just a quick post from Barcelona where I’m spending the week for a project review

Here you have a useful videotutorial from super3boy in Youtube, I suggest to check his channel especially if you are new to Blender. There are 28 tutorials in total, for now enjoy this one in which he explains how to use the explode modifier in Blender, enjoy!

Diffuse shaders determine, simply speaking, the general colour of a material when light is shined on it. Most shaders that are designed to mimic reality give a smooth falloff from bright to dark from the point of the strongest illumination to the shadowed areas, but Blender also has other shaders for various special effects. You have to master them if you want to achieve good results in your renderings and to do so you need to know and, of course, try them! So in connection with that here it is the page from the Blender manual where you can find detailed informations and examples about diffuse shaders:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Materials/Properties/Diffuse_Shaders

Take your time, try them and try to combine those with the specularity shaders that are listed just after the diffuse ones in the link I provided you

When you can master them, results will improve significantly, below an example with toon shaders:

Vampig

Happy blending!

M.

Texturing is an important part to make our models real. We give them bump maps in order to make them with some (fake) irregularities so they look more real, we use normal map for displacements and then we have a big variety of choice of other textures we could use, such as image maps, alpha maps, specularity maps and so on..
But before we can apply our textures we need to do one of the most tricky things in Blender, especially if our model is complex and this thing is the “Unwrap”.
To unwrap means literally to open the mesh and put it on a 2D plane, like if it were an image on which we can draw on and define its materials/textures etc.
You can unwrap in Blender selecting the mesh in edit mode (TAB) and pressing (U).
Before you unwrap the mesh you have to select the faces you are going to unwrap (A to select them all) and if you want (I strongly suggest it) you mark a SEAM that will be the path on which the mesh will be “opened”.
Well to understand how to mark your seam, make a lot of practice. You can mark a seam just switching to edge mode and selecting the edges that will be your seam, then go to Mesh -> Edges -> Mark Seam. You need a seam if you use the normal unwrap method.
Another way could to use the smart projection system or the unwrap from the current projection (for example if you want to unwrap a face you switch the front view, select the face’s polygons and unwrap from that view).
However since the unwrap is a big and tricky topic I suggest you to check this link from the official Blender manual, where you can find all the possible usages of this function:

Blender manual – Unwrap

Happy blending!