Making animations can sound very intimidating, but it is often easy, even for beginners to make their very first animation without great harassment. This tutorial is there to show you how to do it.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

This tutorial aims at showing how works the SubSurface Scattering Script of the Make Human project.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

Bump mapping is a well known but old technique for faking 3d reliefs. The relief information is stored in a gray-scale image. But a new and very popular method in the 3D game industry offers to store the relief information in a RGB image, increasing the precision and, obviously, the realism of fake reliefs on your 3D models: Normal mapping. This short tutorial is about showing you how to build your own Normal maps without expensive tools, and of course how to use them.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

The messages on Blender forums and boards are countless about smoothing problems. Most of the time, the users report black blotches on the surface of their models, while using the Set Smooth on them. This article is not a tutorial. It's more a discussion, a collection of observations and know-how. It is intended for beginners, but seasoned users could also find it valuable in their own attempts (as resource or reference) to help beginners. Isn't the community about helping each other, after all?

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

Normal maps have become very popular these last few years, shown as a large improvement in the Game Industry but also in more traditional CG Industry and in the movie Industry, even if less obviously. Nowadays, solutions to sculpt models to an incredible level of detailing exist (ZBrush, Mudbox but also our beloved Blender, with its now famous Sculpt mode) but building normal maps to enhance the surfaces of our Blender models is still somehow lacking. Blender now has the capability to bake Camera Space Normal Maps directly from a higher level of resolution and apply it to a lower level of resolution, thanks to UVmapping and the Multi-resolution meshes. But the very last step, the one which will bring Blender up to the standards is still missing) : Tangent Space Normal Maps. If Blender now supports these maps, it still doesn't know how to bake them.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

Blender is able to produce soft shadows from any of its main lamps, quite easily. But we would still have to deal with the main usage for area lights (in order to answer to a very frequently asked question by many beginners), that is achieving shadows with soft borders, useful for simulating the lighting of a supermarket, a computer screen or a cloudy outdoor.

This tutorial shows the usage of soft shadows, and then of the Area lights whose settings are sometimes difficult to master.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

Since Blender 1.58, a new tool that enables you to model complex shapes using the cross sections of the object has been introduced. It is called skinning and works almost the same way the hull of a ship is built. This tutorial is designed for any level and reminds you of Blender's very basics. We'll learn how to shape the can of a sprayer (the missing parts will be the purpose of new tutorials).

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

This is the second part of the two-part tutorial. In this one, we are going to look at how to model a character head in Blender. Along with basic modeling tools we will also focus heavily on good topology and how to create a clean mesh that will deform well during animation.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

In this two-part tutorial, we are going to look at how to model a character head in Blender. Along with basic modeling tools we will also focus heavily on good topology and how to create a clean mesh that will deform well during animation. This tutorial will take you through the whole process from setting up a background image as a reference, to laying out the topology, to tweaking the final model proportions and mesh structure.

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago

In this tutorial we will be taking a look at the retopology tools within Blender. The primary advantage to retopologizing a mesh is it allows you to easily create low-res models from high-res, sculpted models. The newly created low-res model can then be used to generate normal maps or displacement maps from the high-res model. This is particularly useful in game development. Let’s take a look!

submitted: 5 years and 3506 days ago