Planet Blender v2 beta4 - 'Turning Pages'

Modeling A Robot Tutorial
BlenderArt Magazine - 2009-10-20 23:18:34

This article deals with modeling a robot.

Part 1: Modeling the head
Part 2: Creating the eyepiece
Part 3: Creating the ear & mirroring the head
Part 4: Creating the upper & lower body
Part 5: Adding leftover details

Introduction. 3D modeling is one of the most interesting parts of the CG, but it provides quite a challenge for a beginner to the 3D modeling. In this tutorial we will take you through various techniques involved in modeling an simple looking robot in Blender. This particular robot if called ‘papero’ and its a companion bot produced by ‘NEC’ Corporation Japan.

Please note that this article is not made for any commercial gains and neither is allowed to be distributed or used for commercial gains. It is not affiliated to NEC in any way. The NEC robot referenced here is purely for educational purpose only.

The best approach to learn from this tutorial is also to consult the blender manual where ever you find it necessary especially if you are very new to blender then learn about the various naming conventions like view-port, ‘edit mode’, vertex, ‘transformer gizmo’ etc. In this tutorial care has been taken to provide these features as the heading of the steps, so that if we say add a cube you can reference on how to add an object step learned previously. Reading it once is recommended for every new users to 3D world of Blender even if you are not able to follow it properly.

Starting up First of all make a search on goggle for ‘papero’ or ‘NEC robots’ for reference images. Try to figure out how the model looks from different views. There are few different versions available but we are going to make a generic body. It would be helpful if you can get image1 from the net, if thats not possible it is also provided in the sample .blend file for this tutorial.

Image 1

PART 1
MODELING THE HEAD
Step 1. Adding a image to the view port: Start up Blender. First thing you need to do is delete the default cube. Right click on it to select it its not already then press [Del] and confirm deletion in the popup. Now we will add an reference image of the robot in the view port. Press [NumPad 1] for front view in the view-port, now go to ‘View |Background Image…’ menu of the view-port. In the popup click on the ‘folder’ icon and navigate to the reference image, select it and press Enter.

Step 2. Adding primitives : Now we will start modeling, we will first start with modeling the face. Keep the mouse in the view-port and press [Spacebar] In the popup menu go to Add |Mesh | UVsphere. Again in the new popup reduce the number of vertices to 24 and again 24 in another popup then press OK to add the sphere.

Image 2

Step 3. Working modes: Note that the sphere is added at the place where the insertion cursor(red white striped circle) is and the center of the circle is represented with a pink dot. Also you will notice that the object added is in ‘edit mode’. You can toggle the ‘edit mode’ to ‘object mode’ by pressing [Tab] key once. Do it now.

Image 3

Step 4. Moving Objects: Now to position the sphere in ‘object mode’ to the head part as seen in the reference image in back. to do that move your mouse over to blue arrowhead, click and keep pressed the button and move the mouse up wards. The sphere object will move upwards, keep press [Ctrl] Key to make big grid jumps. Use [Shift] in combination for minor grid jumps. Position the sphere as seen in the image.

Image 4

Step 5. Scaling Objects: To scale any object in ‘edit mode’ or ‘object mode’ you first have to select the object or its parts. Since the sphere is already selected. Press [S] key and any mouse movement towards the object center will result in scaling down of object and inversely any movement away from object center will result in scaling up of the size. Here scale up the size of sphere as shown in image following the reference in the back. Note again you can compliment the scaling operation with [Ctrl] or [Shift] or combination of both for better control.

Image 5

Step 6. Selecting vertices: Up to now you were working in ‘object mode’. Keep selected the sphere and press [Tab] to get into the ‘edit mode’. ‘Edit mode’ is the core of working on a 3D model, so learn and observe carefully. Now we will learn to select vertices. You can do various types of selection in blender. To select or deselect all vertices use [A] key to toggle. Press [A] till all vertices turn black(deselected). Now press [B] (box select) and move your mouse cursor to the top left part of the vertices in sphere click and drag down so as to select the left part as shown in the image.

Image 6

Step 7. Deleting vertices: Now we will delete the selected vertices. to do that press either [Del] or [X] key and in the pop select ‘vertices’. As now you can see the selected vertices are all gone. We did that because the robot head is symmetric in appearance so we need to just work on one half an later mirror it to get the complete head. Now as you can see in the image we have also selected the ear par of the same sphere. Yes we will delete them too. Do it the same way as explained just now.

Image 7

PART 2
CREATING THE EYE PIECE

Step 8. Zooming in the view-port: To zoom in the view-port you can use ’scroll wheel’ or [NumPad +] [NumPad -]. Now press [Z] key to toggle to shaded view mode from wire fame mode. Now as in the image select the two vertices by keeping pressed [Shift] key and right clicking on the individual vertices, select as shown in the image and then delete the two vertices to create the eye hole for the robot head.

Image 8

Step 9. Using Subsurface: Subsurface is the most important tool in 3d Mesh modeling. to enable Subsurface on the mesh press [F9] and in the mesh tab in the buttons window (below the view-port) Click the ‘SubSurf’ button also optimal button and increase the divisions to 2, see image.

Image 9

Step 10. Creating a face from vertices: Select the vertices as shown in the image10 and press [F] key once to make a face out of selected vertices. Now repeat it for other vertices on the hole as shown in the image11.

Image 10

Step 11. Subdividing an edge: Select the two vertices which are inside the hole for the robot eye. Press [W] Key and select ‘Subdivide’ , as soon as you select it the face gets divided into two faces. Image12. Repeat the steps with other newly created faces.

Image 11

Step 12. Merging faces: Triangular vertices faces are a bad for a smooth surface so we need to convert the two triangular faces to a single four vertices face. To do that select all four vertices of any of thee vertices faces. Watch image 12 for example. Now go to ‘Mesh |Faces |Convert triangles to quads’ in the view-port menu. And the triangular face gets converted into a four sided face.

Image 12

Step 13. Scaling the vertices: now select the vertices as shown in the image13 and scale them up a little bit so the shape of the eye hole looks like a circle. Here try to move the outer vertices of the eye in a straight line, use various methods of selection that you have learned earlier.

Image 13

Step 14. Extruding the faces: Get in to ‘Side view’ by pressing [NumPad 3] and select all the vertices of the eye that form a circle. Press [E] to extrude the selected vertices and start moving the extrusion in the direction of green axis of the transformer gizmo as seen in the image 14 (a) and (b).

Image 14

Step 15. Keep the last selection, now press [NumPad 1] to change back to the front view. Here once more press [E] to extrude and immediately press [S] to scale down the extrusion a little. See image 15.

Duplicating the vertices: To make a copy of the selected vertices/faces you can press [Shift +D]. Continued from the last selection press [Shift +D] and immediately press [P] (to separate it from the mesh into another object) click selected in the popup. Now you can press [Tab] to get out of the ‘edit mode’ to ‘object mode’. right click to select the new circular mesh and press [Tab] to enter ‘edit mode’ for it.

Image 15

Step 16. Now we need to create the tube like section for the eye. Select all the vertices [E] extrude them down a little (image 16a) Now get in to ’side view’ [NumPad 3] and extrude the selected vertices towards green axis twice as seen in the image 16b.

Image 16

Step 17. Welding the vertices: Welding or merging vertices gives us a closed face which we want for the back of the eye piece to be like. Now again press [E] and immediately ‘right click’ to leave the transform state. Now press [Alt + M] in the popup select ‘at cursor’ and you can see the duplicate vertices get removed and they all form a face as seen in image 17.

Loop selection: Now we need to create a eye cover glass for the eye piece. select the second loop of vertices from the eye piece. Press [Alt + B] and hover your mouse over the second circular loop in the image 18. The active selection will show a blue loop forming on it as soon as it does left click once to select the loop. Duplicate it and separate from this mesh. Get out of edit mode [Tab] now select the newly created mesh and press [Tab] to get into edit mode.

Image 17

Step 18. Following the image 20 extrude once and scale it down (image 20a) Then extrude it again , immediately right click. Then press [Alt +M] to join the vertices and complete the face for the eye cover glass. Get out of ‘edit mode’.

Image 18

PART 3
CREATING THE EAR & MIRRORING THE HEAD

You have noticed that many times we have duplicated a mesh part to start working on another part of the model. This is done for two reasons firstly the duplicated mesh we get fits closely to the par of the model where we picked it from and secondly it save a lot of time if we made that part from scratch like scaling moving and positioning it close enough. In the coming part we are going to deal with it even more

Step 19. Inner Ear: Again we will use duplicating method to make the ear piece. First select the head mesh get into ‘edit mode’ do one extrusion to very small distance towards red axis (image 19b) and duplicate it by [Shift +D]. Now get out of ‘edit mode’ and select the newly created mesh. Again get into ‘edit mode’ [Tab] and do three extrusion in red axis as seen in the image 19c.

Finally create one more extrusion and scale it down a little. Create a duplicate[ Shift +D] from current selection and separate [P] it from the mesh.

Image 19

Step 20. Outer ear part: Exit the edit mode and select the mesh just created. As seen in the image 20 extrude it three times and once more right click and weld the selected vertices [Alt +M].

Image 20

Step 21. Once again get out of the ‘edit mode’ and add a sphere of 16×16 ([Space Bar] ‘Add |Mesh |UVsphere’) in the middle of the ear as shown in the image 21. make sure that you position if right. Check the position in ‘front view’ and ’side view’ see Image 21.

Image 21

Step 22. Mirroring a mesh: Now the head is almost complete. Since the head is completely symmetric so we can go ahead and mirror it to get a completed head mesh. To do that select the ‘head mesh’ and make sure that you are in the ‘front view’ now press [Tab] to get into the ‘edit mode’. Press [A] key till all the vertices are selected. Noe press [Shift +D] to duplicate the selected mesh. Immediately right click to cancel any transformation. Not press [M] to bring up the mirror menu popup. here choose ‘X Global’. You will see the selected mesh is mirrored.

Image 22

Step 23. Merging the mirrored surfaces:. Now using the ‘transformer gizmo’ of the x axis (red) bring the two meshes closer so that the near edges are overlapping each other watch the image 23a for the highlighted part. At this point you can zoom in and make sure that those edges are ‘correctly overlapping each other. Now deselect all other vertices and make a box selection [B] around the highlighted part as seen in image 32a. Press F9 and go to the ‘Mesh tools’ buttons tab (image 24) and make sure the ‘limit value is 0.001′ and then click ‘Remove doubles’ button and you should get ‘Removed 24′ in the popup.

Now get out of the ‘edit mode’ and as soon as you get out of the edit mode you might see a black line in the middle of the head mesh as seen in image 23b. Again get in to ‘edit mode’ select all vertices and press [Ctrl + N] (calculate normals). Now the mesh will look smooth and you have created the head of the robot.

Image 23

Image 24

Step 24. Creating the res of the head parts. Now following the procedure of duplicating and mirroring go ahead and do the same for the ‘eye piece’ (image 25a) eye glass’ and the ‘ear ball’. After you have done that the final model should look some thing like in the image25b.

Image 25

PART 4
CREATING THE UPPER & LOWER BODY

Step 25. Make sure you are in ‘Object mode’. Got to ‘top view’ [NumPad 7} and add a UVsphere [Space bar] ‘Add |Mesh | Circle ‘ of 24 vertices (image 26). Get out of the ‘edit mode’ and change the view mode to ’side view’ [NumPad 3]. First position the circle just below the ‘ear part’.

Image 26

Step 26. Rotating the objects: Press [R] key to rotate the circle as shown in the image 27a. Get in to ‘edit mode’ and extrude once downwards on the Z axis (blue) and scale it as shown in the image 27b. Following the image extrude once more.

Image 27

Step 27. Extrude once more following the image 28a. Now we need to make out the body design as seen in the reference images. To do that get in to the ‘front view’ [NumPad 1] and box [B] select the vertices as shown in the image. [G] grab the vertices and immediately press [Z] and pull them down as shown in the image 28b and 29a.

Image 28

Step 28. Adding a loop of vertices: At this point we need to extrude vertices once and then scale them down so that we get a smooth bend edge for the body. But you will notice that the body looks a bit pulpy so we will add a new loop of vertices just near the bottom part (image 29b) to make it look like a solid surface with defined edges. To add a edge loop press [Ctrl + R] the cursor will now change in to a blue lop line and will follow the position of the mouse, bring it down and near to the bottom part as seen in image 29b and click to add the loop.

Image 29

Step 29. Lower body: Make a duplicate [Shift +D] of the same selection and separate it from the mesh. We will use it to make the lower body. Get out of the ‘edit mode’[Tab] and select the newly created mesh and again get into ‘edit mode’ [Tab]. Now extrude one and scale it a little. Again extrude and bring the extrusion down a little.
Extrude and bring it down as seen in image and here move the vertices in the same line. Now extrude twice following the image 30a and weld[Alt +M] the last extrusion.

Image 30

Step 30. Get in to the ’side view’ and scale the lower part of the ‘upper body’ and upper part of the ‘lower body’ as shown in image31a. Get out of ‘edit mode’ completely and add a plane [Add |Mesh |plane], position it near the side bottom of the robot body, watch image 31b for reference. press [F9] for editing buttons and enable ‘SubSurf’ button. The mesh will turn roundish.

Image 31

Step 31. Keep the view in ’side view’ [NumPad 3]Extrude the side of plane(two vertices) two times and move the vertices to look like as in the image 32.

Image 32

Step 32. Change the view to ‘front view’ [NumPad 1]. and extrude the plane three times outwards (red axis). and manipulate the vertices to as they look in the image33a image33b.

Image 33

Step 33. After the robot ’shoe’ has been done select all the vertices of the show and issue [Shift +D] move the selection to other side of the robot and after position it mirror [M] it in X axis. See image 34.

Image 34

PART 5
ADDING LEFTOVER DETAILS

Step 34. Changing the selection modes: The basic model is just about complete, we for got to add the little bump in the middle of head. Now select the head mesh and get into ‘edit mode’ Now we need to use the selection method as face as it will provide for easier selection. Press [Ctrl + Tab] and in the popup select the ‘face selection’ the view will change a bit as shown in the image. Now you can start selection the faces by right clicking on them, here you will need a group of faces to be selected so keep pressed the [Shift] key.

Image 35

Step 35. Extruding faces: Change the view to side. Extrude the faces upwards(blue axis) once. Now we need to rotate the selected faces only on x axis so we will press [R] and immediately press [X] and move mouse to rotate. Rotate the selected faces so that they look like as in the image.

Image 36

Step 36. Change view to front. Now change the selection mode[Ctrl +Tab] to vertices. And select the side vertices (three each side) as shown in image37a. Following the background image in the view-port move them down (z axis).

Image 37

See the outcome of it in the ’shaded’ [Z] mode.

Image 38

This wraps up the modeling tutorial. There are various smaller details left for the robot, they are left as an exercise for the reader. You can use use the methods provided here to create them, like the speakers in the front part of body and the tires of the robot. Make sure to read the other tutorial on texturing the robot in the learning section.

References & External Links

• .blend file

• Texturing A Robot

• Animating A Robot(Coming Soon)

Written by Gaurav Nawani, Graphic Artist at Ironcode Software

This article deals with the modeling a robot.

Part 1: Modeling the head
Part 2: Creating the eyepiece
Part 3: Creating the ear & mirroring the head
Part 4: Creating the upper & lower body
Part 5: Adding leftover details

Introduction. 3D modeling is one of the most interesting parts of the CG, but it provides quite a challenge for a beginner to the 3D modeling. In this tutorial we will take you through various techniques involved in modeling an simple looking robot in Blender. This particular robot if called ‘Papero’ and its a companion bot produced by ‘NEC’ Corporation Japan.

Starting up First of all make a search on goggle for ‘Papero’ or ‘NEC robots’ for reference images. Try to figure out how the model looks from different views. There are few different versions available but we are going to make a generic body. It would be helpful if you can get image1 from the net, if thats not possible it is also provided in the sample .blend file for this tutorial.

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 5

Image 6

Image 7

PART 2
CREATING THE EYE PIECE

Image 8

Image 9

Image 10

Image 11

Image 12

Image 13

Image 14

Image 15

Image 16

Image 17

Image 18

PART 3
CREATING THE EAR & MIRRORING THE HEAD

Finally create one more extrusion and scale it down a little. Create a duplicate[ Shift +D] from current selection and separate [P] it from the mesh.

Image 19

Step 20. Outer ear part: Exit the edit mode and select the mesh just created. As seen in the image 20 extrude it three times and once more right click and weld the selected vertices [Alt +M].

Image 20

Image 21

Image 22

Image 23

Image 24

Image 25

PART 4
CREATING THE UPPER & LOWER BODY

Image 26

Image 27

Image 28

Image 29

Image 30

Image 31

Step 31. Keep the view in ’side view’ [NumPad 3]Extrude the side of plane(two vertices) two times and move the vertices to look like as in the image 32.

Image 32

Step 32. Change the view to ‘front view’ [NumPad 1]. and extrude the plane three times outwards (red axis). and manipulate the vertices to as they look in the image33a image33b.

Image 33

Image 34

PART 5
ADDING LEFTOVER DETAILS

Image 35

Image 36

Image 37

See the outcome of it in the ’shaded’ [Z] mode.

Image 38

References & External Links

• .blend file

• Texturing A Robot

• Animating A Robot

Written by Gaurav Nawani, Graphic Artist at Ironcode Software

Aqsis 1.6 and Project Widow
Blender to RenderMan - 2009-10-20 00:20:00

Ack! I have been very behind! I recently moved (again) and am also in the process of remodeling a house as well so my time has been limited, obviously when BlenderNation reports news before we do. Not to mention the link to this site as well. Anyways off to the subject at hand.

Aqsis 1.6

Aqsis has undergone some serious changes since version 1.4 and a lot of it has been to improve it's speed and stability. Copied directly from the press release :

General optimisation and performance has been the primary focus for this release, with improvements including:

Avoiding sample recomputation at overlapping bucket boundaries.
Refactored sampling and occlusion culling code.
Enabled "focusfactor" and "motionfactor" approximation by default, for depth-of-field and motion blur effects respectively.
Improved shadow map rendering speed.
Faster splitting code for large point clouds.

In addition, key feature enhancements have been made with improvements including:

Multi-layer support added to OpenEXR display driver.
Side Effects "Houdini" plugin.
New RIB parser, supporting inline comments and better error reporting.
Matte "alpha" support, for directly rendering shadows on otherwise transparent surfaces.
Refactored advanced framebuffer (Piqsl).
Texturing improvements.
Enabled "smooth" shading interpolation by default.

Now to get the point. One of the main additions to Aqsis, the MultiLayer OpenEXR, was from the request of the team that is working on Project Widow. The reason for this of course is because Blender's Compositor can use this directly, much like the way it can with it's own EXR render. This was to facilitate an easier workflow later on during the composite stage, rather than have a mess of multiple image sequences for each and every single AOV render we wanted. Also because of the talks between the Widow team and the Aqsis team, Mosaic was also built to handle this very function. In the latest CVS version of Mosaic there is a much larger menu selection of display drivers available than in previous versions. So Blender, Aqsis and Mosaic all work hand in hand in various stages of the pipeline now, rather than just rendering. Since we used Aqsis for preview renders as well, it was important for us to have the speed and stability. The Piqsl framebuffer was also a request from us working on Widow, we wanted to have the ability to scroll through images using the arrow keys rather than clicking on each render, this saved us a lot of time when working on previews and rendering dozens of images. We also tested Aqsis quite a bit through out the process, though now that it is fully released we can use the "production stable" version rather than the daily builds or sources.

Above is an example of the AOV multi layer EXR renders

Composite Nodes

During the months of pre-production of Widow, all of us would gather in an IRC chat room and discuss ideas that we wanted from Aqsis, also to get feedback over how to work with this or that in the rendering end. Planning for a renderfarm had begun and was tested over the summer, even building a new script tool so that DrQueue could use Mosaic batch output. We also had to design a lot of the assets from Aqsis in, by that I mean the process of figuring out how to make Blender work with what we wanted. There were some ideas scraped simply because of the limits currently imposed by the Python API.

So now that we have covered that...

Project Widow

This short has taken a LOT longer than planned, the idea was to get this done in 3 months starting in May of this year. It is now October. So yes things are way behind but that does NOT mean that it is stopped. At the moment it is at a standstill because there are so few of us working on it but also I have had a lot of real life situations that prevented me from devoting as much time as I want to it. There also has been quite a bit of technical issues as well. Our propsed "Arachnid" system was not stable enough to be considered as workable, it was just not perfectly solid as we had hoped. So now we have decided to use SVN once again and that is still being worked on (issues with speed mainly), the other hosts I had looked at did not offer near enough space for what we needed, so we will be using a private server located in Wisconsin belonging to a personal friend of mine.

One of the main issues we had encountered was texture maps. Sometimes when the map is pointed to a file that is not relative, it will not be found and thus not rendered. This became frustrating to the point that it was decided that all surfaces aside from the spider model will be Renderman shaders rather than a collection of images. This also supports our cause since Blender can do texture maps quite well on it's own but when it comes to displacements nothing beats Renderman. As there were to be quite a bit of it in the short it only made sense to showcase what Renderman can do quite well rather than just say "Hey it can render!" So a lot of work has been going into designing shaders that can take advantage of Mosaic's power, not just look good. Such as using the Blender material system to control the shader parameters so that different models can share a shader but each have it's own look and feel. The train above is such an example, the main body of the train itself is using one shader but the color and subtle pattern differences are controlled by the base Blender material. The only other shaders that do not share this are the wheel assemblies, but even those are also controlled in their own way by their base Blender material. In all the entire short maybe uses 12 custom Renderman shaders, including the displacement shaders, the rest are all Mosaic's power.

Blender 2.50 and the future of Mosaic

This is something that needs to be addressed as the timeline to the next version of Blender gets shorter. Mosaic as it is in it's current form, will not work with Blender 2.50. This is due to the use of Python 3 for the reworked Blender. However all is not lost since the Blender devs have started to work on the much requested Render API that we have been waiting for. This means Mosaic will need to be rewritten from scratch all over again, something Eric is not too excited to undertake since he spent the past year putting much effort and work into what it is now, though we do know that when the time comes it will need to be done. This is good news though since this will allow Blender users to render everything that can currently be done only in Blender (such as particles, animated curves and soft bodies). Currently Mosaic can output about %90 of what Blender can do natively, this is due to the limit of the data that Mosaic can access in Python. This of course is not a Mosaic only issue, ALL render exporters have this limit in Blender (with the exception of possibly Yafray). One of this sites goals was to prove to the Blender devs that having that external renderer support was a good thing, this will offer users a choice to use something they know rather than use just Blender's internal. Again we do not want to say Blender's internal render engine is bad, it is quite an amazing piece of coding and one of the best open source renderers out there. The issue mainly is choice rather than function and since most visual effects and animation studios use Renderman for the final frame rendering it would only make sense to have that option for Blender, thus making it more appealing to the high end market. This site itself has gotten the attention of many such studios and in the process some have even started to use Blender to Renderman for their own evaluation or even actual work.

So what does this mean for the future of this site? Well that is something we have a year to figure out. I do know that things will be changed, ideas are already being drawn out for the site itself though I do know this blog will be used in some form or other. I think our goal of public awareness has been achieved, that is obvious when Pixar, LucasArts, Blizzard, Dreamworks and more have stopped in on more than a few occasions. BlenderNation, BlenderAritst, CGTalk and even Blender.org have directed traffic here every single day. This site has gotten Animux some attention too, people who come here have gone to that Linux OS to check it out and in some cases are now working with them on various projects, including myself.

We have come a long way that is certain but we also have a long way to go.

Planet Blender

v2-beta4 'Turning Pages'

... where Blenderheads live. Aggregate of blogs by Blenderheads