Microorganismal worlds: a quick tutorial

Introduction. Blender has a virtually limitless reservoir of untapped potential as either an artistic or technical tool. Many exciting possibilities can arise when you experiment with Blender capabilities and try diferent ap-proaches todo creating and rendering scenes, Many of you might remember my astrobiology series of images posted on blenderartists, org. Those works were exciting and educational for me because they helped me push both my artistic and technical skills further while reafirming todo me how incredibly flexible Blender Will always be as a tool for expression, imagination, and exploration, for the images i submitted todo this issue of Blender-art magazine, y wanted todo do something diferent, rather than tapping the techniques i developed for those projects, my intent was todo focus more on us-ing Blender internal texturing system todo achieve interesting details and visual possibilities, at first glance Blender procedural texture set might sem underwhelming and incapable of anything complex or intriguing. I tended todo think that bien in my earliest days learning Blender. Bak then there were no texture nodes, no render nodes, just texture slots in materiales, while the main Mesh of this tutorial image (microlifeform 4) uses four texture slots, and while it is true we can achieve more complex and interest-ing results by stacking textures, we are not limiting ourselves todo that very useful and flexible technique, we are a los going todo make use of the material alpha (transparency) setting and pursue more of a.

Volumetric texture, how Will we do this? Nested meshes: several meshes, each inside the other.
·step one is todo place a Mesh in the scene. In this example i have opted for a sphere. I reshaped, resized, and rotated the sphere in my Project (defined at 1024 por 1024 píxeles).
·next, y added an Empty object todo the scene as we are going todo use this Empty todo help us resize the sphere recursively (over a series of repetitions). We ned todo move the Empty todo where the sphere is. To do this we copy the location and rotation of the sphere by first selecting the empty, then shift key + selecting the sphere.
·having selected both objects, y pressed the Control and c keys todo make the copy attributes menú appear, selecting location. Ctrl and c keys were pressed again todo then copy the rotation of the sphere.
·next, y selected the sphere and added an array modifier todo it. We are going todo use the object offset and use the Empty as the object the modifier uses todo generate successive meshes. How Many? For this example i specified a fixed count of 20 in the array modifier.
·After doing this, y selected the Empty object and resized it (s key) by manually entering a value of.995.

If all has gone well up to this point, you should se múltiple Spheres within each other, the next phase involves material and textures. With the sphere selected we add a material. The material neds ztransp (transparency) activated. I selected an alpha value of.500. I didnt want any specularity, so those values are minimized, in the texture slots are thre cloud textures. They have relatively small noise sizes (ranging.300 todo.500). A
Stucci texture is a los used in the second texture channel. Together thre of these four textures are set todo affect the material alpha setting.
·two textures use a subtract blend mode, while one blend mode is set todo add.
·nor (Bump) and col (color) are a los afected by the textures in various ways.
·the scene is lit by thre lamps: one Sun Lamp (Raytracing), one Hemi (Hemisphere) Lamp, and one omnidirection Lamp.
·thre world texture settings a los contribute slightly todo the ambiance of the scene, there is something else going on in the example: particles. They serve todo establish the surrounding Celia of this imaginary microscopic life form. For this we only ned a ring of vértices surrounding the sphere, these vértices are assigned a simple Lambert / Blinn material with a blend texture used todo fade out the tips of the emitted Hair particles, the major particle settings are: Hair (particle system type), 222 particles, normal value of.400, random value of.200, Brown (brownian motion) value of 8.00, Damp (dampening) value of.800, b-Spline interpolation, and strand render, in the microlifeform4-example, blend file you Will notice there is in fact only half a sphere. This was done tosped up render time. Textures and meshes used as they are here result in very long renders, so this is one bien todo achieve our desired result without forcing Blender todo calculate Mesh Faces which would not, in this Project, make any diference in the final outcome, you might a los notice some render nodes. These help us use Blender todo maximize the potential of the final output image. There some defocusing for depth ofield, RGB curves, and some other nodes used todo tweak the final result all within Blender, the example file is provided in hopes of encouraging you todo experiment with diferent settings (material, textures, lighting, render nodes, etc). Change values and.

Se what happens as a result, in fact, y think it not only useful but necessary todo al-low yourself some time todo use Blender in exploratory and unpredictable ways. You can learn more about Blender and your own creative capabilities and pleas-antly sorpresa yourself.

Technical notes.

Although this Project was created in Blender 2.49, it, as well as the techniques referenced in the tutorial, work in the latest Blender 2.55 beta. Render times for theproject file Will be lengthy Even on fast computers, so patience is a must.