Blender Underground

Hi guys,

because of the a Thread in this forum which was discussing a video I made in Blender and uploaded to youtube ...

The Thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5966
The Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgm44XoGGjc

... I decided to try to make a tutorial about modelling such a spaceship. Although I did a lot of mistakes especially in the first part I think it's not so bad, so I decided to publish it.

Download the blender files here: http://sites.google.com/site/coskunsblendertutorial

--- Download the blender files here ---

Tutorial 1a – The upper part of the saucer section (25min)
Learn some basics about blender interface
Start immediately to model the basic shape of the upper part: Learning by doing
Assign a material to the mesh



Tutorial 1b – The upper part of the saucer section (11 + 4 + 12 min)
Continue modelling and designing the upper part of the saucer section
Increase its size
Shape it while increasing
Add a second material
Add a real big Panorma-Window to the surface of the ship
Let the camera target an empty




Tutorial 1c – Create a texture for the current mesh (15 + 30 min)
Create an indivdual texture for our model in Blender
Assign it to our model
Define the UV- coordinates
Use Bumb Mapping




Tutorial 1d – Create the windows of the upper saucer section (52 min)
Add a new layer in our texture blender file
Make a copy of our original Mesh and move it to a layer Far Far Away
Apply the subsurface modifier. The level of this modifier will define the size of our simple windows; at least the way we do it




Tutorial 1e – Optimize the texture layers (34 min)
Delete the old escape pods and make them perfectly aligned to the ships shape
Make them „2-Dimensional in the texture“
Repair some errors in the UV-mapping




Tutorial 1f - Finish the saucer section (63 min)
Scale the mesh down through the z-axis to make it look like being more fast
Add another mirror modifier to copy the current mesh so that we don't need to model the lower part explicitely
Apply the modifier
Select the new part of the saucer section and scale it down (move it upwards afterwards)
Shape it a little bit
Pimp up the material
Make the background black
Add indirect lightning to our scene
Remove the label and add other label (emitting)
Add more „shape“ to our bottom Texture part (and you should do it for the upper part too).
Perform a test rendering




Tutorial 1g – Special: Animating the upper light rings (Knight Rider Effect) (61 min)
Add a generated blended texture
Add the texture color to the material color
Adjust its x-offset value
Compositing (After Effects inside Blender), Fog Glow and Streaks
Apply the mirror modifier because of out textures and the label of the ship
Replace the upper saucer texture of the hull
Add a light which targets the label




Result of Tutorial 1




Tutorial 2 – Modelling the Warp Engines started [12.11.11]

Tutorial 2a – Modelling the Bussard Collectors of our warp engines (30 min)
Model the inner red glowing mesh
Model an animated (Using IPO/Graph editor) structure around the inner mesh
Copy it and scale the copy up
Invert its rotation.
Model the outer transparent mesh surrounding the rotating parts.

(Repaired Version uploaded - previous was one out of sync with audio)


Tutorial 2b – Modelling the warp engines (61 min)
Model the shape of our Warp Engines
Model the Warpplasma inside the engine
Add transparent materials to the shape to see the warpplasma
Initially texture the Warpplasma



Result of Tutorial 2

[video=youtube;Z01fTIt0dp8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z01fTIt0dp8[/video]

Tutorial 3 – Modelling the body of the ship

Tutorial 3a – Modelling the body similar to the galaxy-class (17 min)- Start with a cube, add subsurface and mirror modifier
- Shape the body



Tutorial 3b – Modelling the throat (52 min)
- Copy faces and shape the throat out of it
- Take care of keeping your faces quads



Tutorial 3c – Start Texturing the windows of the throat (28min)
- Copy the whole mesh and apply the subsurface modifier with level 1
- Allign the vertices
- Add a second cam and make it active
- Render the texture
- Use the second cam for view projection and assign the uv coords

(added 14.01.12)


Tutorial 3d - Continue texturing the throat (54 min)
- Delete the windows from tutorial 3c and add new windows with another technqique
- Model the object for the surface texture of the throat
- Optimize UV-Mapping for the throat

(added 14.01.12)


Tutorial 3e - Still continue texturing the throat

- Optimize our textures
- Add painting layer to our texture

(added 14.01.12)

Tutorial 3f - Optimize the texture lightning and add a customized texture-cam to our scene

- Adapt better lightning in our texture layer
- Recreate our textures to let them fit better to each other

(added 18.02.2012)

Tutorial 3g - Optimize the surface texture of our throat

- Optimize the surface texture of our throat
- Re-render it

(added 19.02.2012)



Tutorial 3h - Start texturing the top of our throat

- Copy the site-view material, make it single
- Adapt the material
- Build the surface of our top texture
- Add lightning layer
- Add the top-texture cam

(added 14.04.2012)

Wow, nice tutorials dude

Totally agreed, this guy is a blender guru.

About that glowing ring around the saucer, it might look better of it were some sort of blue glow, possibly suggesting an all around sensor array.

Wow thanks guys, I was worried that my confusion my tutorial will confuse my audience too . But I am glad if you like the tutorial. Yeah the blue ring around the saucer will definetely glow at the end of this tutorial. I will do that with post processing of images inside blender. And I planned to do that at the very end when we start optimizing the look of our rendering result...

But if you say, that for the tutorial it would be better to do that immediately after the texture stuff with the saucer section, I will do that. I did the same with the texture, I would not make the texture before the shape of my whole model is finished normally, but since I wanted to make my audience see a cooler result more ... early... I decided to make that earlier. I can do the same with compositing actually.

The next part of the tutorial is finished, I will upload it soon.

Oh and something else: I don't know exactly what this green string in my very first post in this thread is, which says: "I like Merging- Goliath" Is that an admin comment or something like that. What should be merged? The single parts of the videos? If so, it's true, that there are some parts which are not longer than 20 minutes. They are to short, that's clear. I had a problem with recording my desktop at the beginning and lost a few recordings before I could try. That's why there are some short parts at the beginning. But actually I believe, that the single videos should not be longer than 30 minutes. Tutorial 1d for example is 55 minutes long, and you can see at the and how my mistakes increase and I got bored. That can even be worse for beginners who tries to follow. But if there are some steps (like 30 minutes), people can do one step of a tutorial a day for example... I believe that people will have more flexibility to follow the tutorials, if they are splitted like that.

There is an important rule comming from computer science: Devide a problem by 2 and you devide its complexity by 4! This is somewho a little bit similar to this video deviding approach, I believe...

And another thing else : I want to update my first post when I upload new parts of my videos, to have the whole list of tutorials there. Right now, I am just able to add ne posts and I am not able to update or edit my previos ones. Am I to stupid to see the "edit" button or is there no way to do this in this forum?

Ha ! AH !

Good one,

The "edit posts" option will be activated for you once your post count get over 10.

... either that or an admin has to do it manually.

Oh ok of course, than I will try to increase my post countt, so that I can provide a better overview of the tutorial overview. Thanks for answering.

With a guy like me enjoying merging stuff, chances are i was the one actually merging your many posts into a single one. And i put a message somewhere so you know who to bother if you don't want your posts to be merged.

Sorry for the confusion.

You are at 10 posts now, can you edit your posts ?

Huw, sorry I didn't realized the merging of the topics . Thanks, I like centralized organisation too. I will try out if I am able to edit the head immediately, since I have another part of my tutorial uploaded ..... Let's see...

The head of this thread is updated.

Tutorial "1g special" and description of Tutorial 2a added!