A Beginners Guide to Blender Texturing

Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of basic Blender texturing.  This tutorial assumes that you have worked your way through Part 1 successfully or you know how to create a primitive object (plane, cube, tube, sphere etc.) and put a basic texture on it.  If not please take the time to work through part 1.

http://www.oocities.org/woodsmith102000/Tutorials1.html?

That being said, let's begin.

I want to start this tutorial by examining the properties of textures on Blender objects and what happens to them when you rotate the object.  You can work along with this portion or just read through it as it is mostly informational at this point but will become more important to you as your skills with Blender are honed.

Figure 1

Here we see (Figure 1) Blender with a plane textured again with brick, as the preview window shows (circled in red).  The vertices are yellow, so you know that we are in the edit mode.

Figure 2

If you press the TAB key you will see that the plane turns pink like in Figure 2

At this point if you press F12 and render it, it will look like this, then press F11 to close render screen.

Figure 3

So, what does happen to our texture when we rotate the plane?  Let's take a look.  If you rotate the plane while it is in the edit mode (you will need all the vertices yellow.  Do this by pressing first the Tab key then the A key.  That will turn all the vertices yellow at once) the texture will remain in its original position as in Figure 4.  If you TAB out of the edit mode and rotate the plane you see that the texture moves along with it as in Figure 5.  This information will come in handy down the road and may even save you some aggravation.

Figure 4                                Figure 5

If you haven't done so, fire up Blender and make a plane. Size it a bit larger (about three grid squares and add the brick texture and bump map then set your Col and Nor in the MaterialButtons screen.  It should look something like Figure 3.

One more bit of handy information.  If you hold the Ctrl key down while rotating an object in Blender, it will rotate in 5-degree increments allowing your more precision.

Okay, lets move back to the Texture Buttons.

Figure 6

In Figure 6 you see two buttons circled in red.  These are the XRepeat and YRepeat buttons. They do exactly as they are named.  They repeat the texture on the X-axis or Y-axis as desired.  Each one has a range from 1 to 512.  The range can be changed in any of three ways.  1 You can hold the Shift key and left click on the button then Back Space to delete the current number and type in what the number you want.  2 Position your cursor over the button and hold down your left mouse button and drag the mouse to the right to increase the number or to the left to decrease the number.   This method will raise or lower the numbers quickly.  3 You can position the cursor on the right side and press the Enter key (or left click).  This will change the number by 1 each time you press the key.  Pressing and holding the Enter key will give you a rapid change (this does not work with the mouse).  Again, doing this on the left side of the button will lower the number.  Figure 7 illustrates a few planes with different X Repeat and YRepeat settings.  Go ahead and experiment with this feature for a bit.  I'll wait.

Figure 7

As you can see with this particular texture we loose any sense of it being brick when we get around the 5 mark.  At 512 we loose everything but the predominate color the texture.  While this is not what we would want in this case it does open the possibilities of creating some interesting almost fractural looking textures with just these two buttons.

One last word on the XRepeat and YRepeat buttons.  Remember that we need to set the buttons to match for both the texture and the bump map or we could end up with a texture that looks pretty screwy, much like that in Figure 8 where I have the texture set at number 4 for the X and Y and the bump map set at number 1 for each.

Figure 8

Figure 9

Let's look now at the four buttons just below the XRepeat and YRepeat buttons.  These are labeled MinX and MaxX on the left column and MinY and MaxY on the right column.  The adjustment on these four buttons will be exactly the same as on the XRepeat and YRepeat buttons (for that matter almost all the gray buttons in Blender can be adjusted the same way).  Go ahead and raise both Min buttons by 1 left clicking on the right side and lower each Max button by 1 left clicking on the left side.

Figure 10

You should see a white box appear in the Texture Preview Window similar to that in Figure 10.  Now press F12 and render your plane.  Press F11 and we'll move on.

Figure 11                          Figure 12

Figures 11 and 12 illustrate the difference between the Min and Max buttons at their default setting for both X and Y (Figure 11) and the adjustments we just made to them (Figure 11).  So what exactly have we done?  Well, we have just adjust how much of the texture will be drawn on the object.  That white box we saw in Figure 10 in the Texture Preview Window is showing us precisely how much of the texture will be drawn on the object.  That is to say everything inside the white box will be drawn.

Figure 13                                       Figure 14

Take a look at Figures 13 and 14.  In this case I have taken advantage of the ability to type in a number and set the XRepeat and YRepeat to these settings (circled in red) and the white box in the Texture Preview Window (circled in green) now looks like this.  When rendered we get something like in Figure 14.  Time again for me to be quiet and let you play around these setting.  I highly recommend that you try changing the setting with all 3 methods to get a feel for them.  I'll be ready to go again when you are.

All set to go on.  Great, let's look at the next button.

Figure 15

Figure 15 shows us the Filter button (circled in red).  What it does is simple.  It sets the quality of the texture on the object.  That's not real clear is it?  Well let's take a look and you will see what I mean.

Figure 16                          Figure 17                     Figure 18

Before I tell you what we are looking at, I want to point that the Filter button is one of the rare exceptions you will find for setting the number range.  This button allows you only to drag a new number or type one in, left clicking on either the right or left side of the button will have no effect.  So that having been said, let's get back to the Filter button settings.  The range on this button is 0.10 to 25.00.  Figure 16 is our object with the Filter button set at 1.00 (this is, by the way the default setting).  Figure 17 is set at 0.10.  You can see that it is just a bit crisper looking.  Figure 18 is set at the extreme 25.00.  We pretty much loose the texture completely, much the same way we did then we set the X repeat and Y repeat buttons to 512.

That's it for now.  Have fun playing with what we've just learned and remember to set these buttons the same for each texture as well.

In Part 3 we are going to look at some different types of textures like glass, metal, wood, stone, flooring. Walls, etc. and explore different ways of adjusting them in the Material Buttons, so I recommend that you go back to the place you got the bricks and pick up new textures.  For the metal get a shinny one as well as a rusty one.  We will make our own glass because it's just more fun that way.

Part 4 I will talk about the reasons that I choose one texture over another and some of the pitfalls of texturing.  See ya soon.

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