Looking for a Blender Tutor

[Baro 44]

Hi everyone, been a very long time since I posted here (since sc4 days) but I've been trying to get into modeling for skylines.  I can't afford 3dmax and really don't care for sketchup, so I've been spending the last week trying to learn blender.  I'm having a lot of trouble though because most all the tutorials and resources out there are just general tutorials, not really focused on making things for skylines, which have a few requirements and obviously a lot of "best practices" and tricks to make things efficient and do night lighting and all that.

A few of my friends make models for skylines, but they all use 3dmax and photoshop, not the poor mans blender and gimp like I'll be using so can't really help me that much.

What I'm really looking for is just someone I could maybe chat with in some real-time setting and help me through the basics of the process from starter-box to in-game asset.  I've watched youtubes on the subject, read articles, but they always gloss over important steps or I'm just not getting things.  Just hoping to find someone or a group of someone's who could chat on irc or google or what ever format and give me some real-time help here and there.

[Tim The Terrible 586]

Hey man! I also use Blender and GIMP just for CS so I'm willing to help you out when I have time  I started a year ago and I know the basics now, but it's enough to make a nice asset for CS

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Hi Baro. For years I would open Blender and close it due to a headache. Then one day I found this great course by a college professor and I was up and running with Blender in one weekend. The course is from previous versions but the basics are still very relevant. It's broken down in short to the point videos and also provides downloadable materials. I highly recommend this http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html

[Baro 44]

Thanks for the replies and PM's from people!

I figure I might as well ask some random questions here too for anyone to answer.

First of all, for those of you making buildings in blender,what's your general workflow?  How do you go about actually modeling?  I've seen in tutorials people importing reference photos and things then sort of drawing in 2d over top, then some how making that all 3d, I'm not sure how to do that all.

Everything needs to be one object,  but can I make parts separately then join them together later?  For instance if my building needs a pillar,  can I make one pillar,  UV map it, get it looking good, then just duplicate that?  How would that work then for joining and how would I then do the texturing for the rest of the building?

I understand UV unwrapping as sort of cutting the thing so it unfolds like a paper model, and I can do that with a cube, but when things get more complex I can never seem to figure out how to cut things quite right.  I watched a tutorial where someone was doing it and he was using all sorts of crazy techniques I didn't understand and doing projections and all sorts of fancy stuff.  For the most part I just want to make some brutal boxy buildings with some insets here and there for windows and doors,  should be simple enough. Can I just grab all quads facing me and get it projected based on the straight-on view onto my texture, then do that on all 4 sides and the roof?  Obviously that would create 1 pixel stretched textures on the insides of any door/window frames, but I figure I could then just go in and unwrap those separately?  

I more or less always know what I want to do,  but blender is very unintuitive and depends on so many extremely long hotkey combos.  Like just to change the centre point of my object to be on the ground requires a quite a convoluted process. 

[Baro 44]

So I'm trying to just get a texture on a plane and I can't even figure that out, even after following tutorials on doing exactly that.  It ends up just black.

[Baro 44]

Ok so I sort of figured out materials,  sort of.  I actually made some sort of a cube and then played with the UV mapping too.

 

Now my next big question is how to you snap things?  For instance I made the above cube,  duplicated it, then moved it eye-balling it right next to the previous cube.  I of course couldn't remove any duplicate nodes since it wasn't 100% aligned.  I had to delete the cube and duplicate a new one making sure to move it exactly 2 units over.  But if this cube was some wierd shape, like 2.54 units wide, and I wanted to move the other cube (all part of the same edit mode object) over so that the faces or nodes or edges or what ever snapped, how would I do that?

[Avanya 2,605]

I'll try and answer your questions as best I can

When modelling I usually have a few reference pics, which I use for dimentions. Most of the time I guess at the measurements compared to doors (as they are roughly the same size on all buildings). I start with a cube, delete all but one vertex and then extrude the walls from that (first I do width and length, then height). From there I start adding detail. I mostly move/extrude along one axis at a time and type in numbers to get the same sizes. But that's just how I like to do it. If you hold ctrl while moving or extruding it will snap to increments (depending on your zoom level), which is very useful.

You can totally model your asset in several parts and then just join them together in the end. I find that easier at times myself. I suggest merging them all into one before doing UVs and textures, as they need to fit on the same texture anyways.

As for UV unwrapping I don't really use the projection stuff. I cut it up to get shapes I can work with (often adding or removing cuts as I lay it all out). I usually cut windows and doors out completely can put them somewhere else on the texture. That allows me to have fx 2 doors using the same texture space and have wall textures overlap, as there are no windows or doors on it. I've got some shots of UV maps and the seams I posted for someone else. You can always have a look and see if it helps you. At least it might give you an idea of how I do it and hopefully will help you find a way that works for you

As for the textures showing black I suggest deleting the default light source (if you use textures and not materials). That lights it all up, so you can see everything. Materials need light though, so if you use that you'll want to have some light sources.

For hotkeys you'll learn them with time, but otherwise there's this huge collection of them all.

[Drosovila 86]

There is an option to snap to specific increments (small magnet in the bottom bar) but I personally dont like it. I recommend you learn using the 3d cursor.

You can move it to any verticle, face, object etc., snap objects or geometry to it etc, really powerfull tool.

If you want to flatten sth. Just scale it by 0 on the x/y/z axis.

Cant go into more specific stuff because Im on mobile and theres already a lot of great advice in this thread, but feel free to ask me anything / add me on steam if you want

[Baro 44]

So last night I started my first "serious" project.  I'm trying to make an urban wall to wall highschool, something that won't look out of place in a dense neighbourhood.

I think in terms of geometry it will be pretty ok.  Maybe I need more detail, I'm not sure, but I'd prefer to keep a lot of the detail just in the texture work.

Here is the prototype I'm more or less basing it off

 

Any advise on what to do next would be greatly appreciated it

[merc187 46]

I made a crappy tutorial series several months ago.  It starts with the basics and quickly and poorly goes through how to basically create a model, create a mediocre texture, and import it in game.  I go through details such as how to set your screens up, how to UV unwrap, how to texture, and how to export to Cities Skylines and import an asset in the asset editor.  It's not nearly as advanced nor do I have the skills as some users have here - but maybe watching some video of the process can help you.  Feel free to ask me or the community any other questions - lots of great talent and skills lurk about here and I was able to do the same thing when I started a year ago learning blender & asset creation myself.

 

Good luck!

 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgPCPy7HK4iRVuQyBuVTKXORvyxHnhyoQ

 

[Darf 1,439]

Although google earth is a good tool to get the basic measures of a building, I would always have a look in streetview to see how it looks and base my model on that. You will also need to cut your model into pieces as to be able to effectively use your texturespace.

[Lost Gecko 481]

On ‎21‎/‎06‎/‎2016 at 11:55 PM, merc187 said:

I made a crappy tutorial series several months ago.  It starts with the basics and quickly and poorly goes through how to basically create a model, create a mediocre texture, and import it in game.  I go through details such as how to set your screens up, how to UV unwrap, how to texture, and how to export to Cities Skylines and import an asset in the asset editor.  It's not nearly as advanced nor do I have the skills as some users have here - but maybe watching some video of the process can help you.  Feel free to ask me or the community any other questions - lots of great talent and skills lurk about here and I was able to do the same thing when I started a year ago learning blender & asset creation myself.

 

Good luck!

 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgPCPy7HK4iRVuQyBuVTKXORvyxHnhyoQ

 

You call it crappy but it is perfectly sufficient for total beginners like me, your series got me into it, so thank you very much!

(By the way, I can't figure out how to smooth faces like you did for the shading, I'm trying to do the same as you but it doesn't work... I will probably start a thread to avoid polluting this one but it got me thinking about it...)