Hi there,

I've uploaded another free material on BlendSwap:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/architecture/stone-dark-tiles/

This is the same stone I've used in my last project (see below). It uses two different UV channels for diffuse and displacement, just open blend file and you'll see it.

In order to reset all UVs in the displacement channel, I used this useful command via python console:

• bpy.ops.uv.reset()

Just select all polys and type this to get all vertices disposed in your UV/editor.

This is a render preview:

I hope you'll find this useful and interesting as it is for me!
Textures are packed with blend file.

Pietro

Material: Aluminium Hedar

Hello,

I've just uploaded my first material on BlendSwap:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/architecture/aluminium-hedar/

You can download it and use for your works. Textures are made by me and realeased under CC.

 

this is the reference:

It's done in Blender 2.63, for Cycles and uses displacement in order to achieve best result.

Of course, you MUST unwrap your model to manage textures.

Post here you're works if you wish! I'm curious about your feedback!

Ciao,

Pietro

A little work

Very very small work, but it's summer and customers are waiting for September in order to start with projects...
Anyway, I consider this a remarkable work because it has been done entirely in Blender 2.6!
I used QCad (3.0rc5) and AutocadWG (on chrome) to prepare DWG files, Blender to match the camera and model, and Cycles for rendering stage.
Postproduction and photoreplacement with Photoshop.

Before...

I wish to post some screencast in order to show you my workflow with architectural projects.
First, I import DXF files with plants, sections, ... already cleaned and lighter than architect's version. I put them in the right position and begin to model over the reference.
As everyone usually teach, you have to study a little before: take your time to study the project and to identify symmetries, similar volumes, and all those elements that you can represent as instanced objects. This will save lot of time after.

During modelling stage I begin to separate objects with different materials, assigning materials with diffuse similar to the final shade. This is useful for shading stage.
Once I've modeled almost everything, I start to texture models that need this work. For example, as you can see in the image I've modeled all that 'columns' as single objects but during the shading process I decided to slice them.

Here I got a big object subdivided into lot of 'bricks'. I choose to do this beacuse of the material's feature and because in this way I was able to use my script very easly.

A few word about bushes and green stuffes: I've imported some models and I've used particle systems in order to get them scattered on surfaces.
I MUST thanks this guy: Agus3D on BlenderArtist beacuse he found and shared a usefull technique to manage tons of polys.
Have a look to this wonderful thread:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?249664-UPDATED-.bend-19-Billions-of-Polygons-not-a-ridiculous-number-anymore 

I want to share my shaders and textures with little tutorials about "how I did it". Please be patient, it requires time :-)


Greetings from Berlin,
Pietro

CAD on Linux: a case study

Warning: this review is currently "work in progress". I'm updating it.


Hi folks, I'm currently working on a little task (some plants 2.5D, you can see some of them on my flickr portfolio http://www.flickr.com/photos/pietrograndi/sets/72157622248043397/).
Actually I rarely accept this kind of work, but I thought this could be an hard test for CAD on my linux laptop for a rainy Sunday :-)
So, let's test it.


Input files format: Autocad 2012 DWG
Converted to DXF 2007 with Autocad WS on Chrome - Linux Ubuntu 11.10 x64




FreeCad http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page

• no DWG support
• ok DXF support
• crash on a 1.6Mb DXF
• unable to use it, I think it's the worst cad I've used on Linux

LibreCad http://librecad.org/cms/home.html

• no DWG support
• ok DXF support
• crash on a 1.6Mb DXF
• unable to use it, too slow

QCad http://www.ribbonsoft.com/en/

2.0.5-free version

• no DWG support
• ok DXF support
• it works, but I'm a registered user: why couldn't I use the commercial version???

QCad http://www.ribbonsoft.com/en/

3rc2 - commercial version

• unable to run (tgz and bin packages)
• error: ./qcad-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
• I've buyed it in 2011 and use it on windows 
• in the official forum this issues are "Discussion moved to bugtracker: "  and of course, nothing changes.

• UPDATE:
• I have to apologize with Ribbonsoft: on their website I've found this solution: "Ubuntu 11.04 64bit requires package "ia32-libs" to be installed."
• installing "ia32-libs" through Ubuntu Software Center solved the issue
• Ok DWG support - Autocad 2012 - VERY GOOD!

At the moment I'm working on QCad 3rc5, commercial version.

As soon as I'll terminate my works I'll post an update. I usually use it on Windows.


here's a screenshot:

UPDATE:
Finally I've found QCad really useful and reliable: for about 30€ you got a good software. Obviously, you won't think to substitute Autocad, but for a 3D artist who use CAD only for cleaning and export purposes is the best choice in my opinion. It's just a bit slow in viewport but not so bad.


note on other products:
LibreCad and FreeCad were unusable for my work.
I've tryed Draftsight on Windows and I think it's one of the best but I was unable to find it for Linux 64 (can someone suggest me were I can find it?) and it's not free for commercial use.
AutocadWS is really cool and free but it's good only for opening and converting DWG files.
I wish to test BricsCad but anyway it's too expensive.
BRL-CAD: I'd like to have the time to compile and test it. Maybe in the future...

Pietro