stylised texture tiles
Make better use of Blender’s Dynamic Topology system
Blender offers some really nice sculpting tools, with a good Dynamic Topology system that enables you to generate geometry – as well as add and remove details. Although Zbrush’s Dynamesh allows sculpting without constraint, you still need to update your mesh often in order to sculpt further. However, Blender’s Dynamic Topology sculpting generates geometry on the fly, allowing you to increase or remove details on parts of your mesh, without needing to flood fill the model with the same volume of polygons – that’s one of the big strengths of Blender’s sculpting tools. It also includes a smooth tile system in Sculpt mode, which we’ll be looking at this during the tutorial.
However, what I really want to take you through is my process for creating nice-looking, tileable textures in Blender. In particular, we’ll be looking at how to create stylised wooden and stone tileable textures from sculpted surfaces. Using a hand sculpting method will allow us to bring a nice style to our tileable texture and also output all the different passes needed (Zpass, Normals, AO and so forth). This tutorial is an extract from my larger, in-depth workshop, The Cliff Tower course. If you’re eager to get the full course, as a 3D World reader you can get an exclusive 20 per cent discount using the coupon code: 3Dworld. Go to www.gumroad. com/l/theclifftower.
You can follow the training on these pages, and also download my video walkthrough, textures and HDR files from this issue’s online Vault.