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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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My adventures with Blender continue. Only now I have switched over to the eternal work-in-progress Blender Documentation Project, which is being worked on in the same collaborative open-source spirit as the software itself. The reason I shifted over from the 2.0 manual is because of the very attractive first tutorial in this new document. It is called Your first animation in 30 minutes. In most manuals this would mean “How to get a cube to move across the screen in a straight line”, but once you get into Blender you must learn to be presented with the unexpected. This is a tutorial to model, texture, and animate a basic gingerbread man model … with armatures! Granted it took me more than a hour to do this but this is certainly not something you expect to get into so quickly in 3D software. Anyone who wants to quickly get the hang of this programme, and to see the possibilities of its animation system must work through this tutorial. Educational and fun.

After creating the basic walk cycle for the gingerbread man I continued with the documentation. Some sections had to skipped because they have been reused from the 2.0 manual. Finally I got to curves, and a tutorial to model a curves-based logo by tracing an image. I worked through this with an old icon I had created back in college. Impressive stuff. Especially the bezier curve tools in Blender are noteworthy. I found myself wishing that Adobe Illustrator and other 2D vector programmes had such easy to use point and curve manipulation logic. Once I extruded it into a 3D shape I didn’t want to stop there, so I pulled and twisted and distorted it into an abstract wonder, part of which you can see in the image. I am still not a master in good, solid lighting, but I’m getting there.

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This is the result of further explorations of the Blender 2.0 Manual. This scene involves the sword which was modelled using the extrude (E key) function as described in the Mesh Modeling chapter, and also the amphora which was created with a combination of the spin and spin duplication buttons as described in the same chapter.

This was meant to be a modelling exercise, and I was quite happy with the results. The remove doubles command is especially useful to create complex extruded shapes. I thought I might as well create a basic scene with these objects, which lead to a string of disastrous renders yesterday. It made me realize that I know absolutely nothing about lighting and texturing. I started today with the same scene but re-thought the lighting, after reading some of the lighting tutorials linked from ‘Blender - an Extended Introduction’. It is definitely an improvement over some of my previous renders, but I still have a long way to go in lighting and texturing.

Right now it is best to stick to the Blender Manual, and get to know the intricacies of the software. Once that is done I can study the more general theories about lighting and materials.

I have no idea what is causing that un-natural ring of light at the base of the amphora, but I am sure I will find out as I learn more about Blender.
:blush:

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At long last I have started reading through the Blender 2.0 Manual. I got to the Mesh Modeling chapter and worked through it. Learnt a lot of new information I wasn’t aware of before - resizing an object disproportionately being one (click on the middle mouse button when resizing). Some of these editing features are actually a little more intuitive now in Blender 2.3, and they don’t require as much careful dragging of the mouse.

When I finally got to the part about proportional editing, I simply couldn’t move on. This is another part of Blender I had absolutely no knowledge of before today, and it is a joy to play with. The organic forms you can create with this technique are astounding. The image you see here started off as a plane mesh which I distorted in various ways in proportional editing mode. Since I liked it so much I skipped to the part about subdivision to add some more detail. Even better!

To add a finishing touch, I simply had to render this with radiosity. Blender 2.29 onwards has a new quick radiosity render, which doesn’t require the complex multiple steps to calculate a radiosity solution before the render. It took me a long time to get that working but I finally managed. This is still very new, and detailed tutorials and instructions are not to be found anywhere on the net at present. But, this should be addressed in the upcoming Blender 2.30 guide by the Blender Foundation. Until then, enjoy the image.

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