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Ole!
:satisfied:

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Once more inspired by the weekend challenge at Elysiun, I set out to model this devil - the topic is When hell freezes over.

The idea now is to armature the model and put it into some sort of scene. Still working on that.

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The moth is revisited, and so soon too. Based on some very helpful comments I received on Elysiun (here), I decided to revise the previous render. Plus the exciting sneak peak at a new version of Blender with a new native hybrid ray tracing engine, seduced me into trying the new ray-traced shadows.

This is going to be fun.
:hehe:

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At last it is done.
The moth needed many more adjustments to its armature but it was worth it. The mist settings helped add some depth and atmosphere, and 2 spots and a hemi light gave it form.

Now on to the next!

The thread discussing this image can be found
here on Elysiun.

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When we last saw our hero he was wrestling with a whole battalion of rebellious triangular polygons. The ‘tris’ seemed to be sabotaging the great UV texturing experiment, or was that just a red herring? Our hero was soon to find out. Now, on with the story …

ahem … I have spent the last day or so trying to figure out the texturing problem. I looked into the tris vs quads issue. The entire flat face of the wings was made of tris, but converting it to quads had no noticeable effect on the distorted wing and texture. While on the subject, I must mention that converting between tris and quads is a dream in Blender. For tris to quads it’s Alt-T in edit mode, and quads to tris is Ctrl-T in edit mode. Simple.

Having ruled out the tris as the cause of the un-sightly distortion, I needed to look elsewhere. Just as a trial I played around with the placement of the bones in the armature and that solved the problem. Because I had used an extruded curve, Blender had created the face of the wings automatically. This involved lots of tris in a sort of radial pattern, with vertices only on the edges of the wings. The problem was that the centre of rotation of the wing was not the same as the central point of the edge lines. So, the bone armature lay at a glancing angle to the lines, thus causing a sort of unequal twist of vertices when the wing was posed. I could not move the centre of rotation, so I moved the far end of the bone instead - making the armature lay almost perpendicular to the face lines. This seems to have done the trick.

That done, I finished texturing the wings, and then moved on to the body. The body was a little more complicated because it is a complex shape, and I had used cubic mapping on the UV texture. Cubic mapping seems like the logical choice when you see it laid out flat, but try fitting the various sides into a decent texture and it is a different story. I did finish the texture, but next time I should try one of the others methods, maybe cylindrical mapping. The antennae and the compound eyes were adorned with procedural textures, and you see before you the finished product rendered in Blender.

I am quite happy with the results. It is not technically perfect, and it has some holes in it (literally as well as metaphorically ;)), but it serves the purpose. It should work well in the scene I plan to create with it. That is what remains to be done. As always when there is something new to be seen, you will be the first to know … after me, that is.
:satisfied:

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This is just a sneak peak of my progress with the texturing of this model, hence the medium sized image and no bigger version. I’m having problems with distortions of the texture on the wings because of taking the easy way out with that part of the model. I am quite sure extruding the curve and converting it to a mesh has resulted in badly distorting triangular faces.

If I can’t get this to behave, I might be forced to remodel it, or explore other texturing options for that particular object. Maybe plain-Jane flat mapping might work… only one way to find out. The battle continues.
:plain:

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Began my quest for easy UV texturing in one easy step - unfortunately, there is no such thing. But once again, Python comes to the rescue.

I used the obj_io script to export the main objects to .OBJ files from Blender. These files were then opened in UVmapper Classic, a free program that unwraps meshes for UV texturing. There are various modes of unwrapping an object, such as plane, cube, sphere etc. I used a planar map for the wings and a cubic map for the moth’s body. The .OBJ files also need to be saved from within UVmapper to preserve the texture settings. These modified files were once again imported into Blender with the obj_io script. Now applying an image texture material to the objects, with the UV material setting on results in a proper recreation of the mesh coordinates as seen in the render.

Now it is a matter of taking these unwrapped texture files into an image manipulation program, and painting them appropriately using the mesh guides that were created by UVmapper. Simple really … except for all that hard work, but it should be worth it. Watch this space.

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Finally I tackled the wings. As far as modelling was concerned, they were much simpler to achieve than the body, but they needed an armature setup to make them poseable. Hence, they came last.

Using the references I had collected, I came up with a flat shape for the wings. It would have been easier to simply model them as a single flat plane, but once again I wished to make it a little more complex. So, I decided that I needed each half of the wing to have two sections that were attached to each other at the swivel point somewhere near the body. This segmented wing is found in many moths. I think it helps differentiates the model from the average butterfly.

After importing the wing shapes into Blender as a background picture, I set out to reproduce them with bezier curves. Next, I added a little extrusion in the Edit settings to give the wings a minimal thickness; nothing in the real world is infinitely thin like a plane in CG. This was converted to a mesh. The smaller piece of wing was give a slight slope, so that it would be at an angle to the main wing piece. Both of these pieces were duplicated, mirrored and joined with their twins to create a single wing mesh. I also thickened the central-front portion of the wing mesh, where it is attached to the insect body just above the head, to reflect the real thing.

Finally, the armature setup took some time to do. It’s nothing fancy at the moment, but there are 4 separate bones controlling the 4 pieces of wing. Due to the overlapping of pieces, assigning vertices to each bone was a slow process, but it was completed to a satisfactory level. The vertex assignment is not yet perfect because at some rotation angles, parts of the wing still intersect the insect body. That is an issue to be tackled as I work further on this model.

Next comes the UV texturing part, which is something totally new to me. I do, however, plan to make my life a little easier to begin with, by not using Blender’s built-in UV texturing utility. Will leave that for another project. Still, it remains to be seen how successful I am in texturing this to my satisfaction … and then there is the scene, the lighting etc. etc. …

Why did I get into this field again?
:confused:

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My work on the moth continues. After completing the limbs, my next challenge was the antennae. This would have been a simple matter if all I wanted were single curved tendril-like antenna. But I had my sights set on something more complex. Some of the photos of moths I used as reference, showed some filamentous fern-like antennae. That is what I wanted to model. I could have done this by the tedious manual placement of the filaments in the shape I required, but you might as well learn a new technique when faced with a challenge. So, I decided to learn the duplivert technique.

Dupliverts in Blender, are a great way to model complex structures that involve the repetition of a basic unit in some regular manner. You select a mesh which is going o be the template for the placement of your copies, and you make it the parent of the object/mesh which needs to be repeated. Now press the Dupliverts button found in the object window (post v2.3) or the edit window (pre v2.3). This places a copy of the child object on every vertex of the parent object. So to create my antenna, I first created a simple mesh curve to be the parent. I then subdivided it many times to increase the number of vertices. Next, I created a stretched mesh plane which I subdivided and proportionally edited into a curved sail shape. This was the repeating shape. On applying the Dupliverts option I had a line of identical curved planes placed vertically along the parent curve. I needed a variation in the size of the filaments. Since dupliverts are logical copies of the same object, I had to convert the copies to real objects (shift-ctrl-A). Then with proportional editing I created a cascade of the curved planes gradually diminishing in size along the curve. This entire group of filaments was then duplicated and mirrored along the base curve to create the complete fern-like antenna shape.

I had already modelled 2 compound eyes before. Now the antenna was also duplicated and mirrored to create its symmetrical twin. To complete the body model, the half body was duplicated mirrored and joined to the original half. Remove doubles was used to create a clean joint between the two halves and to get rid of the ugly seam.

As you can see in the screenshot, the body of the moth is now complete. All it awaits are its wings. Coming soon to a blog near you …

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While I was experimenting with the Fiber script, I came across the latest Weekend Challenge (#77) over at Elysiun. I am definitely not quick enough with Blender to try my hand at one of those yet, but #77 had an insect theme to it, and that lead me to think of modelling and insect to go with my newly found grass skills. A few Google Image Searches later, I decided to model some sort of moth.

… easier said than done. While I now knew perfectly well that I could model the wings as extruded bezier curves like I did during one of the tutorials in the manual (twisted metal, 2 posts ago), I wasn’t very clear on how to do the body and limbs. First I tried what I thought would be the easy way. I started with a UVSphere and tried to stretch and flatten it into the approximate shape of an insect torso. A little selective vertice editing in proportional mode, and I had a knob at one end that was supposed to be the head. To see how I was doing, I switched on Sub-Division to add detail, and the whole thing looked like a mess - a blob of clay with stretch marks all over the place. I gave up on that and decided to try again.

I had to try a more controlled approach, with fewer vertices to begin with, so that sub-division could add in the necessary detail. This time I started with mesh circle of 12 vertices and started extruding and sizing to create the basic shape, similar to the sword I modelled many posts ago. At the end I had a very bumpy spindle shaped object with a spherical knob on top. It looked nothing like an insect but it was a start. Now it was a matter of adjusting individual vertices to get rid of all regular geometric arrangements and make it into an organic shape. Many proportional edits later I was satisfied with my bumpy insect torso.

Now came the compound eyes and the limbs. The compound eyes I added in as a UVSphere scaled and rotated into the proper position, and then mirrored into a matching pair. The least complicated way to handle the limbs would have been to make them separate objects, but I decided to make them part of the same mesh to future proof this model for animation, with an armature setup. This meant that I had to extrude faces off the side of the body and model the various segments of the limbs from there. I switched off subdivision to work with the actual faces, and I realized that my model was too efficient. There were a few large faces, and I needed to create smaller ones to extrude from, without rearranging anything. What better excuse to try out Blenders new Knife and Face-loop cut tools? Since I had no idea what these two actually mean I just tried them out one at a time. I selected a quad face in the side view and tried out the knife tool first. This was very easy to understand once I tried it, but it resulted in some new triangular faces. From what I have read these are not supposed to be good when animating an object, so undo, and I tried the face loop cut tool.

Until I tried this out I was ignorant about what a ‘face loop’ was, but the excellent interface of this tool explains it well. Select this tool and move your cursor over the object and yellow lines blink on to show you where a cut can be made on the various face loops (basically a loop of adjacent faces that form a flat strip along the surface of a 3D object). With this is was easy to add detail to the areas I needed to extrude the limbs from. At this point I deleted one side of the model, so that I could mirror it after I had created the limbs for one side. The limbs were simply a lot of hard work with extrusion, scaling, and rotating, both in and out of proportional editing mode. Once the basic modelling was done I sculpted the legs into their natural position, and that’s what I have completed so far, as you can see in the image.

A lot remains to be done, including some antennae and the wings. Most importantly, once the modelling is done I am going to have to tackle UV textures to get the effect I want. From what I have read on the subject, I might find it easier to use an external UV unwrapper than starting with Blender’s built-in system.

Watch this space for updates.

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I can never stick to reading and working through manuals continuously for long periods of time. So, to continue my exploration of Blender I decided to try out something totally different. One of Blender’s greatest features is that it can be scripted with Python to add features that are not built in. The script that has always interested me the most is the Fiber script by RipSting, so I decided to try it out. Once I had installed Python 2.2 and downloaded the script files, it was only a matter of setting the Python path in Blender, and it worked like a charm.

The Fiber script is extremely powerful. The best way to get an idea of what it is capable off is to play around with the example blend file included in the archive. While the patch of grass example this file opens with by default is impressive, there is more to see on the other layers including some basic simulations of human hair. The long list of settings can be intimidating, but try generating fibres by changing one setting at a time, and you can quickly understand what all this means.

I started experimenting with the grass, and was trying to get it to look as true to life as possible. Playing around with the material settings helped a lot. I then found a close-up image of a blade of grass online and used that to create a greyscale bumpmap. Some more tweaking of the texture and bump map settings, and I was quite pleased with the results. The image above was produced after only 30 minutes of seriously playing around with settings, so a more in depth study of this script should produce wonders.

There are also some interesting alternatives to Fiber. Bantam 3D Grass is a free stand-alone program that can produce 3D models of grass and other similar structures. It allows you to design the geometry of individual fibres, so it can be much more powerful for more complex scenes. The models can be exported to standard formats to be used in a wide range of 3D software. For Blender, the Fiber script is just more convenient to play around with at the moment, since you don’t need to switch between programs and you can work in the same interface. Another option that is still in the works is the Beast script being worked on by ezual and Landis. This one looks very promising, but it is more likey to compliment the functionality of Fiber than replace it. My study of Fiber continues.
:satisfied:

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