Advice on modeling urban street environments with Blender

doodlebox · Nov 2014

Hi there!

I'm looking to get back into 3D modeling. In the past I used 3DS Max, but I'm looking at using Blender now. Does anyone have any advice when it comes to creating urban street environments? Or just any advice on using Blender?

Cheers!

-Tamara

Equanim · Nov 2014

Understand that its UI approach favors hotkeys, not menus. When you're looking for a feature, it's often best to just google the documentation first before hunting for a menu for it.

JedTheKrampus · Nov 2014

It's also a good idea to look through the menus (especially the ones at the bottom of the 3D view in Edit mode) and see everything that's there. If you find something that you want to use in the menu and it's indicated there that there's a hotkey for it, CLOSE THE MENU and press the hotkey. (If there's no hotkey, you may use the menu.) This will help you learn hotkeys more quickly, which is slightly important, especially if you want to be able to model as fast as Blonic the Hedgehog.

As far as the specific situation goes, the same old advice applies: look for reference of inner-city streets and see the small details that make the scene what it is. It's almost always a good idea to make the environment at least partially modular, as you'll save time and run into computing constraints further into your project than you normally might.

If you're planning on rendering in Blender, Cycles will likely serve you better than the internal renderer, especially for environment art. This is the basic node setup for a typical normal-mapped opaque dielectric material in Cycles:

A normal-mapped metal material is much simpler:

If you want the metal to be even more realistic you can of course influence the specular color with a Fresnel factor, although I find that the difference is too minimal in most cases to bother.

Of course, you can always hook up both diffuse and specular maps if you need both metallic and non-metallic materials.

Make sure that your specular color is around .04 for your non-metallic materials, of course.

doodlebox · Nov 2014

Equanim wrote: »

Understand that its UI approach favors hotkeys, not menus. When you're looking for a feature, it's often best to just google the documentation first before hunting for a menu for it.

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll be mapping as many as possible to my mouse and Orbweaver!

doodlebox · Nov 2014

JedTheKrampus wrote: »

It's also a good idea to look through the menus (especially the ones at the bottom of the 3D view in Edit mode) and see everything that's there. If you find something that you want to use in the menu and it's indicated there that there's a hotkey for it, CLOSE THE MENU and press the hotkey. (If there's no hotkey, you may use the menu.) This will help you learn hotkeys more quickly, which is slightly important, especially if you want to be able to model as fast as Blonic the Hedgehog.

As far as the specific situation goes, the same old advice applies: look for reference of inner-city streets and see the small details that make the scene what it is. It's almost always a good idea to make the environment at least partially modular, as you'll save time and run into computing constraints further into your project than you normally might.

If you're planning on rendering in Blender, Cycles will likely serve you better than the internal renderer, especially for environment art. This is the basic node setup for a typical normal-mapped opaque dielectric material in Cycles:

A normal-mapped metal material is much simpler:

If you want the metal to be even more realistic you can of course influence the specular color with a Fresnel factor, although I find that the difference is too minimal in most cases to bother.

Of course, you can always hook up both diffuse and specular maps if you need both metallic and non-metallic materials.

Make sure that your specular color is around .04 for your non-metallic materials, of course.

Thanks for all this info and the visuals, it's going to help me a lot! I'm sure I'll have more questions further down the line as I start to get into it more - it's been such a long time since I've modelled anything, I feel like I've forgotten most of what I learnt!

ImSlightlyBored · Nov 2014

I wish I could "like" posts, because that shader post is really helpful.

Advice on modeling urban street environments with Blender

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