Blendtuts Tutorials

Cycles is the brand new render engine in Blender. It's a physically realistic and unbiased render engine, and it comes with a set of new features, like a new material system and options. In this tutorial, we'll make an introduction to it, going throgh things like setting it up, lighting and adding materials to a scene, a simple material created using nodes, depth of field...

Normal Maps store information about light direction, allowing our simple model to look as detailed as if it had millions of polygons. In this tutorial we'll explain how this maps work, how they are projected, and how to bake them and see them on the 3DView. Then we'll take a look at how we can bake more types of textures, as an example we'll bake the Ambient Oclussion from a high resolution mesh. This technique is very useful for videogames, in which our polycounts are limited, and this way we can display much more detail than real polygons!

Everyone knows that Blender can be used for modeling and animating in 3D. But it can actually do much more things. One of them is painting textures right over your 3D models, and you'll learn how to do it in this tutorial. Of course you can paint textures into Blender, but even if you prefer to do it using 2D painting softwares, this feature can be an invaluable help. You can place details on your 3d model, and use that painting as a reference... or even for correcting seams on your final textures. What you use it for is up to you! :D

Grease Pencil can be very useful for making annotations and references, sketching them right onto the 3DView. If you don't know it yet... you'll discover a great tool with some interesting posibilities, like 2d animation over the view point, for using it as a reference and start moving your character!