It all started with a phone call. Some friends of mine were leaving town and shifting back to France, and I was left wondering what I could possibly give them as a parting gift. An international move is no simple task and so giving my friends a domesticated Indian elephant or anything similarly cumbersome was out of the question. I would have to stick to something simple like a card – easy to carry, and it can say and mean so much if done properly.

It had to be really special though, so I thought I would up the ante and make it a pop up card. Paper crafts have been an obsession of mine since well before I can remember. I’ve always loved the feeling of creating something out of seemingly nothing and creating three dimensions out of two. In recent times all my paper projects have been heavily based on computer layouts and imagery, but due to time constraints on this one I decided to go caveman and create this card in the good old-fashioned digital-free way that I used in a time before keyboards, mice, bits and bytes.

The experience was extremely rewarding and I think everyone should do this sort of non-digital creative work on occasion to jolt your thinking a little. Here are some general pointers on how you can go about it for best results, along with the story of my pop up card about ‘home’.

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My memories of reading as a child and of children’s books are a little strange.

The reason I mention those as two separate issues is precisely what I mean by “strange”. As a child, at the beginnings of the age at which “reading” started to make some sense, I discovered a large dusty tome stored away in a forgotten shelf when I was helping my Mother with some spring cleaning one afternoon.

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I’m not part of the ardent business book devouring audience. I am not one of those who have a well arranged shelf of all the latest tomes featuring grinning gurus spouting the latest business wisdom. But I do read business books occasionally when the mood strikes, because when you come down to it I’m simply interested in everything out there.

I was a bit surprised when I came across Good Business in the bargain bin of a local book shop. While I hadn’t read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s previous famous work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I had heard of it and read a basic synopsis at some point. I found his ideas to be quite intriguing. He seemed to be one of those thinkers trying to blur the boundaries between disciplines, which I like, so when I came across Good Business I picked it up.
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The listing in the newspaper sounded innocent enough:

EYE YOGA…
If you wish to get rid of your spectacles, attending Sampoorna Eye Yoga Camp can do it the natural way. The camp will teach you eye exercises, Vedic in origin, that will help in relieving you of eye disorders. Register for a free lecture in South Mumbai. On January 17. (Tel: 98xxxxxxxx)

My vision is quite normal and I don’t wear spectacles, but my brother and father do, and so this was of interest. We decided to go, and I went along for moral support, and for remembering any useful details as the member of the clan officially interested in this sort of thing.
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After a long sabatical, I have returned to the basics – read the Blender manual and strengten your basics. Being too distracted by Weekend Challenges over the last few months, I desperately needed to get back to learning everything there is to know about Blender rather than trying to get out quick fixes to random topics. I can do that once I’m a Blender genius.

The strategy seems to be paying off, because what started out as some more fiddling with the proportional editing tool, and a little tinkering with the various options in the World settings, turned into this pretty decent image. No new raytracing and reflection/refraction tricks here. Just good, solid, plain-old Blender scanline. I wish all software documentation inspired such results.

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.
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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.
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