Suggestion to the Community and Blender3d.org

[leinad13]

I am not a good 3D artist by a long shot, (yet). But i plan on becoming one, and i can see a tremendous cost for certain things, ok so i have got blender, and its free (great). I have a few "demo" (Which i er... aquired) copies of various other leading 3D software packages and yes they are good but i always resort to blender for modelling. I suppose its because its what i was brought up on. (Not litterally, but its what i started with). I have spent about 2 years, on and off doing tutorials and now i think that i have a intermediate knowledge of not only how to use blender, but several 3D texturing techniques. (Raytracing, Bump, Alpha, Specular maps... those of you artists know what i am on about).

Any ill cut to the chase, when i look at almost any decent 3D still or animation i know that they dont use procedural textures. They use photo textures, everyone who is an artist will probably no that all newbies just start by making quite a competent model, but then use a crap procedural texture).

Well i have found a distinct lack of textures on the internet. I have found several sites offering texture cds, for a price. (Not at great expense but when i add shipping to the UK, (I cant find any in the UK). It adds up and being a novice and just wanting to learn, i'm sure u can understand my hesitation.

Well i think that when we get a good community site going, im not saying elysiun, isnt good but its limited and they are having problems at the moment. (Dont tell me to offer support because i did, and got no reply )

I think that as a community of open source and free lovers we could set up a nice texture repositry, just 1 or 2 from each person would be good, but it would also be nice for those with good digital cameras to send in some more.

How much web space do we have?
(I usually get answers to q's about more tutorials and help, about limited web space and bandwidth)

If we want blender to be taken seriously we need a central site, with hosted tutorials, links and textures. Not only a better program.

Sorry about the rant but i think it needed to be said, i am willing to help out with any website, as a webmaster, i do have experience but not professional experience. Since the open sourcing buzz seems to have calmed down i thought i would post my suggestions again. (I got flamed last time)

[mthoenes]

There is a group currently working on improving Blender3d.org/com.
educational pages, We are reviewing the oldsite stuff, community tutorials, training video clips, etc. Right now we are mthoenes, ManO, and bobthevirus.

If you would like to begin gathering models, textures, etc. That would be great. I have stuff to contibute as well. Reformatting tutorials would be helpful also.

Interested?
I have started a thread in the Documentation-Education Forum - Please respond there.

[cmccad]

Part of the reason that there is such a lack is that (in my experience) textures are highly unique and/or easily created.

For environments and cloth, all that is needed is either a digital camera (doesn't have to be expensive) or a regular camera and a scanner. The tweak the texture to your heart's content using the paint program of your choice. Or, to avoid getting a camera or scanner, just hand paint something and filter the heck out of it till it looks good .

For characters, each one will have a highly customized set of textures, probably painted by hand (or, for human characters, based on a photo but heavily modified). Using the UV unwrap method (for characters, any other method is a PITA ), textures depend heavily on the geometry of the mesh - thus different mesh = different texture.

Of course, this is all from my experience. YMMV.
Casey

[matt_e]

http://www.blender3d.org/Download/?sub= ... s#textures

If you know of any more links, feel free to send them in.

cheers

[thorax]

The demo program available from www.darksim.com is
very useful for creating procedural textures.. I'm interested in
plugins becoming available for use with blender that use it,
but I've been using it for a few projects to create custom textures,
using the screen capture feature.. Their business is selling the package
that programs the procedural textures, but its worth looking at..
They have a really good "plaster" bump map in their alien skin
texture.

PS- If you can afford it, EniOken has a pretty good course on
texture design.. I think I was the first blender user to take
her course and made it through without a problem. She comes from
the school of thought that good textures are custom designed down to the last detail, and procedurals can be used to generate a base texture but should not be used for everything. I sort of agree, I think that procedurals combined with UV texturing can be very useful, but procedural mapping tends to cause problems, especially when you need your textures to stay plastered to the object.. I tend to use procedurals in animation work if the texture needs to pass over an object, like there
is some cool effects you can get with using an object to control a spherical blend texture on another object, like producing temporary
holes in objects (say you need to do a cut-away at a building or
need to does some could nuclear railgun effect for a Teminator2 like movie, I think Timecop had something like this.. I don't remember the precise movie.. Where the metal slugs would penetrate the building before ever hitting it, like a portion of the building would disenegrate from the heat.. This effect could be produced by combining a spherical blend,
high contrast, with a marble procedural multiplied by the spherical blender, then use this to affect the transparency). That's the sort of case I would use procedurals, particularly because image maps are not
capable of doing volumetric mapping of imagery..

[phase]

woah, nice link... these are impressive procedurals!

http://www.darksim.com/dgallery/darktree_gallery.html

[joeri]

I'd like to add a few cents.

1. A good procedural texture is resolution free.
ie. No pixels of the texture if rendering a big image or the object comes close to the camera.

2. Bad procedural texture users will prob. also be bad texture user.
ie. Objects don't look better if you just slam a texture on them.

3. Textures on the web take diskspace / bandwith.
I pay my internet provider to have a 30 mb homepage, with a decent texture of 1024 x 1024 pixels in jpeg I can have about 60 textures, but I don't really want jpeg. I want tga with alpha. Some of my bumpmaps are 12Mb, are you going to download these on your telephone modem?

4. on the other hand, some textures are always handy:
cyclic wallbrick, cloudy sky, grainy floor.
And these are easaly found on the web

5. I'd buy the blender texture disk anyway it's a good investment.
It will save you alot on download time.

Happy happy, joy joy.

[Goofster]

[SNIP]
5. I'd buy the blender texture disk anyway it's a good investment.
It will save you alot on download time.

Happy happy, joy joy.

And it's a good addition to your income
just kidding, the texture disk is indeed very handy! I just copied the contents to disk and use that for most of my basic projects.

Roel

[thorax]

woah, nice link... these are impressive procedurals!

http://www.darksim.com/dgallery/darktree_gallery.html

Glad you noticed this.. I was beginning to think Skyler's examples
were not showing the best the program could do.. I would
be very impressed to see something like this done with blender..
But this would take a lot of work.. This kind of render achieves the
fantasy quality of airbrushed art:

http://www.darksim.com/dgallery/assets/ ... n_duel.jpg

[Timothy]

Well i think that when we get a good community site going, im not saying elysiun, isnt good but its limited and they are having problems at the moment. (Dont tell me to offer support because i did, and got no reply )

Oh you did?
I must have overlooked it anyways we will be able to accept people offering support for elYsiun soon. Support in creating graphics is always very welcome, support in creating news articles will be welcome starting ehm,.. tomorrow? , and support in creating specials and tutorials will be welcome within a few weeks from now. Support in programming for elYsiun will be welcome by that time aswell, however I don't think that will be an easy task.

Timothy

[theeth]

Oh you did?
I must have overlooked it

tsk tsk tsk
shame


Martin

[thorax]

I'd like to add a few cents.

1. A good procedural texture is resolution free.
ie. No pixels of the texture if rendering a big image or the object comes close to the camera.

Future feature suggestion:
Using scenes as image sources, like how the sequencer uses
scenes like clips, scenes could be used as sources of textures for objects..

[TorQ]

As a matter of fact most of the big studios use a lot of procedural textures. They have artists that all they do is make shaders. As with anything you just have to learn how to use them properly. There are a lot of links to be found in different topics on Elysiun for textures. Here are some of the best free texture sites I have found:

http://www.animax.it/#

http://art.net/~jeremy/photo/public_texture/index.html

http://digitalcraftsman.com/textureBin/textureBin.htm

http://perso.club-internet.fr/lemog/

http://www.noctua-graphics.de/english/fraset_e.htm

http://www.dailydesaster.com/eskimo/ice ... graphy.htm

http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/