All articles and tutorials addressing digital art. This includes 3D art using DAZ Studio, Blender and the like. Also looks at 2D applications such as Photoshop and GIMP etc.
Anyone who has followed me on Twitter knows that my sister-in-law Kylie is very clever and has written an App for Apple phones that lets users create check lists for all sorts of projects from moving house, organising a party and so on. The App is called Check It Plus and it is very cool. Anyway, Kylie asks me if I might design the graphic for an ad to go
A long time ago I was a teacher. Besides the normal three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic), I always followed with a second three -Â Research, Review, Reflection. For me, these were consolidation exercises that deepened my understanding. Each of you will have to do this for yourselves. I just thought that I would share my experience of it in learning about 3D hair. Research I watched several Blender and Photoshop
Hi folks, This post will be very similar to my post about making an opacity map. So if you have read that post then you only need to skim this for salient differences. Just to make it slightly different I have also added an incredibly small flaw into the hair by way of a slight wave. I did this because nothing is truly straight in nature. So our goal is
In my last post (about an hour ago), I commented that while occlusion maps were good, I wondered what the hair would be like if I used a texture that already had transparency. So I quickly cobbled one together in Photoshop that was based on the same two textures that I used in the last post. Here is the node set-up that I used in Blender: Note that it is
Hi folks, the purpose of today’s post is to document my testing of the hair opacity map that I created in my last post. I am doing so in Blender cycles and I will be assigning the hair texture and the opacity map to a bezier curve. Huh! A Bezier curve! Yep. At the end of my post, I shall place a link to a great Youtube tutorial called “How
Purpose In the first post of this series, I made a simple hair texture, demonstrating how similar hair textures can be created in Photoshop, GIMP and Paint.NET. In this post, I shall show how to make a simple hair opacity map using these three applications. It’s remarkably similar. NOTE: In this tutorial, I do not intend to implement the texture in a 3D application, simply to make it. What is an opacity
Purpose The purpose of this post is to show how (more-or-less) the same hair texture can be made using any of the following: Photoshop, GIMP, or Paint.Net. Note that I have not been that particular in selecting the same base colors and I also recommend that you experiment a lot with what I give you. Background As per my last post, mastering hair in Blender (for use in DAZ Studio)
This post is about the top 3 mistakes made and lessons learned in making my recent Starship image in Blender. Hence it is probably not the most exciting of posts. This said, I always feel the need to share such things with others in case anyone cares to learn from my mistakes. So here goes. Failing to plan is planning to fail An oldy but a goody. As anyone who
My goal was to emulate the old-school spaceship art of the 1970s. Hopefully, I succeeded. This post will be a bit of a technical run-down in how I did it. Not too much detail, otherwise it will be super-dull. So you remember where I was at with my last post: I asked for feedback and got some great stuff. I experimented with the suggestions to see whether I liked them
Hi folks, Just a quicky because I have to get myself and the family ready and run out soon. It’s been a busy past few weeks (new job, end-of-year obligations, family etc) and I”ve hardly managed to make it to the PC. Yesterday I did and so decided to use some of the new things I’ve learned in Blender this year to have another attempt at a space scene. The
Hi folks, I was unable to do much door work this week until today. Mostly I worked on the door itself. This meant painting the actual door texture based loosely on the reference picture. So here is the reference picture: And here is the texture I painted in Photoshop: I tried to make it look “used” and also admit to tracing a little bit :) I then turned it into a
NOTE: a bit of a technical one today. So now I had a proof of concept design and had commenced a bit of trial work on it. Thing is, I always believe in self-critique. I sat down and looked at what I had done so far and whether it was correct. I noticed a few things, listed in the diagram below: I also decided that I wanted the bottom of
Hi all, Despite being tired, I came home and used Photoshop to make a normal map of the brick wall. This is just a filter in Photoshop that I applied to the skin I created earlier. Here is the normal map image: For those of you new to 3D modeling, this will give me some depth in my final image. I had intended to create a displacement map, but I need to
In my previous post in this series, I had unwrapped each of my objects, ready to texture them. Then I had an epiphany: if procedural textures exist, then does a brick one exist? OK – I’ll put that into plain English for the non-modelers or new modelers braving this post. A procedural texture is basically an image that has been created by writing a computer program instead of drawing it
Due to illness, I have not achieved as much as I had hoped. Also note, this post talks a bit about technical 3D modeling issues, but I have tried to make it accessible to my non-technical readers who may be interested in starting to model. The first thing that I have done is set the pivot point on each object within my model. This is not something that I have done
Hi all, just a brief update on the doorway. I have now successfully rigged my door to open in the doorway. So another task complete. I found the following video very easy to understand in rigging my door:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2mIOFDgdME&t=70s So another of this week’s tasks is now achieved. :) Greg 0
Hi all, this was my wife’s birthday weekend, so I only got about an hour to play in Blender. Just thought that I would show you the progress. So the basic objects are all there. Now to start making it look real. As an aside, I made my first ever Panna cotta today as a treat for Nicole and it was yummy. :) However, I experienced failure with the accompanying toffee
Hi all, as per my weekly plan, here is a rough 2D design of the 3D art nouveau door that I intend to create in Blender. As per normal, my rough design has been completed in PowerPoint. The inspiration was taken from the following door (By Jopparn (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons): My vision is to create 4 elements in Blender: a wall with an appropriately
Just a short post. I did my initial brain dump of design specifications in PowerPoint. These are fairly simple. Here is a link to a Google image search on Art Nouveau. What do you see? Curved lines and natural shapes. So I had a go at using PowerPoint to create some basic outlines of wall shapes. This said, they feel more Art Deco (i.e. more geometric that natural in form).
So you may remember that we started this project with an overall plan that follows the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) approach to remodel a 3D likeness of an x-ray machine that I first modeled a year ago for a presentation at EuroPCR 2016 – the official annual meeting of the European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions (EAPCI) and the world-leading Course in Interventional Cardiovascular Medicine. Here is the diagram
