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To create screws in Blender the easiest way is to use plugin, like Bolt Factory, which comes in standart complectation. But the plugin features are not always enough, and the result of using Subdivision Surface modifier on the screw created by plugin is not very beautiful. However, it is not difficult to create screw manually.

Lets create high poly screw suitable to render in any major plans.

Creating screwsRead More »

Some times during the modelling process the problem of filling some volume with number of items occurs. For example it may be a jar with coffee grains, sugar bowl with pieces of sugar, bag of jewels, box with screws and nuts, a bowl of candy, and many others.

All this can be made manually. Creating some copys of items and filling voulume with arranging them in a random order. However this approach much time and efforts to control that the items do not overlap with each other and with the walls of the filled object. To simplify our work we can use the Rigid Body tool – solid-state simulation in Blender.

Filling volume with itemsRead More »

There is one moment in node tree, created to separate the sides of the planet model by “day” and “night” – when the position of light source changes its new coordinates every time needs to re-specify manually in Value nodes. It is very inconvenient while setting the scene. To eliminate this fault Blender “drivers” system can be used.

Using drivers with nodesRead More »

Each planet in “from space” view has two sides: “day” – illuminated by Sun, and the opposite – “night”, with no Sun lighting.

While modeling a scene with planet, it is not difficult to achieve this effect by lighting setup. Leave only one lighting source in scene and place it in the right place. However, the result is not so good as real space photographs. To achieve a greater similarity, the proper texture with a darkened face and bright lights – night lights of big cities, mast be mapped to the “night” side of modelling planet.

Planet sides separation by “day” and “night”Read More »

Creating a model of dice. The model creates only “by geometry” and may be useful in any major plan renders.

Modelling a diceRead More »

The correct planets texture mapping, creating 3D space scenes, plays a key role. If texture mapping is distored, “rides” or has a clearly visible seams – a beauty image will never succeed. There is a convenient method properly map the texture to the planet surface in Blender.

Mapping texture to planetRead More »

After the decision to improve render with HDRI lighting, the question immediately raises – where to get it? We can certainly ask Google-pictures for help, but not all founded images allows their authors for free use. What can we do? The solution is simple – make your own HDRI. Blender has all capabilities for this.

Making your own studio HDRI in BlenderRead More »

Detailed relief means a lot for high-quality render. You can model a beautiful basketball, cut stylish grooves and set up good material shader, but with no relief this basketball would be similar with real only from high distance. That kind of basketball may be useful for general plans, but any closeup render reveal deficiencies immediately.

There are differen ways to apply a relief to the ball. The most reliable – exactly follow the real ball geometry. However, there are from 10 to 35 thousands of small protrusions on the basketball surface, formed its relief. It is possible to model all of that, but the final model gains heavy weigh and needs more system resources while rendering.

Relief imitation with displace and normal maps wold be the best solution. But where to get the required textures? It is possible to model a small fragment of the basketball surface with relief in detail, and then bake it to displace map for the further applying to the whole model.

Baking displace map from geometryRead More »

One of the essential components of beautiful render is quality irregularities map. Scratches, damages and abrasions imparts the model a natural look, it does not look like got to the scene straight from the factory.

Surface microrelief can be formed by geometry (“sculpt” or point by point editing), and from maps – static (prepared in a graphical editors) and procedural (created with nodes – texture generators).

Procedural textures usage to create a microrelief with displace method has all the advantages (dimensionless, three-dimensionality, uniqueness and customization) of procedural textures, but also inherits their main disadvantage – reduced render speed because generating textures requires additional computation.

To increase render speed it is possible to “bake” procedural texture into a static bitmap texture, which is no longer require additional resources during the rendering process. Using this method can benefit from 5 to 30% (depending on the complexity of the generated maps) of rendering speed.

Baking displace map from procedural textureRead More »