Studio@jumpers-inn.de

Just stumbled upon this great collection of Blender tips from some of the best Blender artists. Some things I already knew, but others are really cool to know. Check them all out here!

Well, haven’t posted in a long long time now. A lot of stuff has happened, but nothing that fits in this blog. I have been toying around with lux a bit more, but nothing worth showing has come of it. But now I managed to work some more on game art for Duality, namely our first and only enemy monster, a cute spider.

I made a base mesh in Blender from reference, then created the details in Sculptris. Bumps and color were painted in Sculptris as well. Then reimported into Blender, adjusted the low poly mesh, baked the color and normal textures. What you see in the render above is the actual game model. The spider is already rigged and I’ll create some basic animations with it so it can act as an enemy.

So for the game I’m helping in developing I’ve started to do a enemy monster, namely a spider. I started this in Blender and modeled the basic shape from a box. I used a mirror modifier as well as a subsurface modifier to help in the process. I also used a top down view of a spider as a reference image. Then I applied the modifiers and exported to .obj. From there I’m now working in Sculptris to flesh out some details and give it a paint job at the end. For today I started with the legs, more to follow soon.

While trying to create a nice indoor render I found that the Blender internal raytracer is not really well suited, at least not without extensive tuning. Especially volume lights are hard to achieve correctly. With the last revision of Yafaray the integration into Blender is now very well done. The script allows the convenient fine tuning of materials and lights through easy interaction with the Blender scene. This allows to get impressive results with very little effort, the Yafary gallery impressively shows what can be done with a deeper understanding. This is what I achieved after maybe half an hour of fiddling with light emitting meshes, materials and render settings:

Yafary test render

Quickly modeled a capstan to add to the shipwright library. The capstan was used to lift all things heavy on a ship but especially for the anchors. The capstan is a cylindrical piece of wood that can be rotated using logs that are put into it radially. Several sailors then pushed the logs to rotate the capstan which then served as a windlass. Usually the capstan continued from the upper part down at least one deck. This page explains the setup very well.

The model is simplified but still detailed. As usual textures are not included and need to be downloaded separately from the PotBS website and restricted to the conditions posted by FLS.