The Blender Materials Library
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The Blender Materials Library |
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| Tutorial 2 | Animated Materials and Textures: | ||||||||||
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The animated textures
in the Library make use of Blender's Materials and Textures only, with
texture parameters controlled by IPO curves to acheive the animated effects.
They are not quite as effective as particle effects, but I think that
the ease with which they can be set up and the quicker render times make
up for this. For some excellent examples of how to acheive flames and
other effects using Blender's particles, go HERE
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(1) In this tutorial we are going to import the 'flame' texture into a project, apply it to a suitably shaped object and then add some lighting effects to improve the realism of the scene. (2) First the 'flame' model. Open up a fresh Blender project with 'ctrl+x', and add a cylindrical mesh. Extrude it a couple of times and then scale points until you end up with something that looks a bit like the figure below.
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A 'flame' model
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(3) Now hit 'Shift + F1' to call up the 'Load Library' menu. Hunt around your hard-drive until you find the matlib.blend you downloaded and select the file. Now you'll see a menu of all the different types of objects that Blender uses, with 'Material' about half way down. Select 'Material' (4) Now you'll see a list of all the materials contained within the matlib.blend file. Hopefully the names are fairly self explanatory, but if you want a visual reference, the 'Thumbs' page from this site is included in the download. (5) Choose 'Flame' from the 'FX' selection with a right click. It must be a right click rather than a left, and the material you have chosen should become highlited in blue. We only want one material, but if you needed more its just a case of 'right clicking' until you've highlighted everything that you want. Then hit 'Enter'. (6) Back in your scene, select your flame model and go to the Materials menu with 'F5'. Now if you hit the little minus key, the material that you chose should be sitting there in the drop-down menu. Select it and it wil be applied to your model. Now render a still by hitting 'F12'
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A 'flame'
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(7) OK, so far so good. Now to animate our flame texture (x) In the same way as you did to import the 'Flame' material, hit 'shift+F1' again, but this time select 'IPO' from the list, then right-click on 'Flame IPO' and hit 'enter'. (x) If its not already selected, right-click to select the 'Flame' object in the 3D view. (x) For this next step, it is best to open a new viewport so that you can see the 3D window and the IPO window at the same time. Go to the button to the far left of the window header and click on it - this should give a pop up menu depicting the different types of views available in Blender. We want to open the 'IPO window', which is the little graph icon second from the bottom.
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c IainH 2001
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