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Hi!, this is Jaime Finat and I'm going to show you how to create a basic medieval tower :-)
First of all, let's activate Screencast Keys
Press 'N' and configure Screencast Keys at the menu
Open Google Search Bar and look for a stone wall texture
Configure advanced search to filter results to an adecuate image license
Select the texture which best fits your project
Then save it to your hard drive
Back to Blender, create a cylinder with 32 vertices
Now, remove top and bottom caps
Grab the cylinder 1 unity in object mode on 'Z' axis to set it to the floor.
IMPORTANT: In object mode, create a torus with 32 major segments.
Set minor radius to 0.02
Then grab it 2 units along 'Z' axis to align it to the cylinder's top.
With torus selected, get in edit mode and remove upper, lower and internal faces from our geometry
You can try to select those faces by using sphere selection or box selection among others
There are several methods to do this, but maybe the fastest would be by selecting edge loops
Select both objects and press Ctrl+J to join them
Select lower edge loop from torus
Holding Shift, select upper edge loop from the cylinder
Now, brigde that two edge loops
Check if topology is correct by simulating a loop cut along its faces. It has to expand the cut to the torus too.
You can also check geometry merging by pressing Ctrl+L with one geometric element selected and it has to select all elements from your geometry
In edit mode, add a new torus to the current object. This way saves the join step.
Set minor radius to 0.04 and repeat lasts steps until both geometries are merged
Now, we're going to apply a symmetry modifier to save work.
First, in edit mode and top view, we remove the left half of our geometry.
Next, still in edit mode and top view, remove the upper half in the same way.
Now, back to object mode, add a geometry modifier named "Mirror" and check 'x' and 'y' axis.
IMPORTANT: the object has to be on the center of our scene to apply symmetry axis correctly.
Let's extrude along 'Z' axis the upper edge loop to create the base of our battlement.
Repeat the extrusion to create a second face loop on the top of our geometry.
Next, we're going to loop cut and slide the first extruded faces. Drag the cut line to set it close to the bottom edge of the face
Add more vertical detail to get a better control of the battlement extrusion and mirroring.
Now it's time to select the faces we're going to use for create the uper setoff. In object mode, grab the object -2 along 'Z' axis to set tower's top on the floor.
IMPORTANT: in this kind of cylinder extrusion, it's important to set which pivot center you are going to use, and mirroring will distort our results.
Select individual origins at pivot center menu and extrude selected faces.
Note that it doesn't fit exactly along symmetry axis.
Select the bottom edges at the center of each battlement and grab them a bit along 'Z' axis.
Let's fix extruded faces that didn't fit each others on symmetry.
Select the couple of faces that doesn't fit on 'X' symmetry axis and set pivot center to "3D Cursor".
Then rotate and set them to a correct orientation.
Repeat the same operation on 'Y' symmetry axis and check "Clipping" on modifier's menu.
In object mode, grab the tower along 'Z' axis to leave it as it was originally.
When we extruded the battlement, a vertex has behave in a weird way, correct it to have a more regular mesh.
Remove internal symmetry faces because we don't want to duplicate that geometry.
Then, extrude the cubes which would be bowman's protection.
Grab the central edge from that cubes on 'Z' axis to make a sharper battlements.
Make the tower taller by translating in edit mode the geometry which represents our reliefs and battlements.
Apply mirror modifier in object mode to create the geometry we're simulating.
The result looks fine but, what could happened if we would have forgotten to check "Clipping" box at mirror modifier attributes?
Undo until you have your modifier unapplied and try to grab a vertex on any symetry axis. Note that it's movement is constrained to that axis.
Uncheck "Clipping" option and try to move same vertex. This is a very usual problem, so let's see how can we solve it.
Select two of that non-merged vertices, press 'W', "Merge" and "At center" option. This will join two vertices in one at the center of the distance between them.
Repeat this step for each couple of non-merged vertices.
You can modify merge limit at mirror modifier panel before applying, but be careful, if you use a large amount, you probably would lose some details.
Another way to detect defects on applying mirror modifier is adding a subsurface modifier.
There is some strange topology on a couple of battlements. It looks like they were cut at half.
If you check for more vertices, you'll find everything is correct.
So where is the problem?
Face select and check if you have some internal face inside your model.
If you have some, remove them from the model and you will fix those weird mesh behaviour.
So now, we have used subdivision surface to detect problems at mirroring, but it round our sharp shapes.
Let's see some methods to preserve our sharp shapes using subdivision surface modifier.
To add more detail on concrete areas, we can select that areas and by pressing 'W' and "Subdivide" we will increase detail level, but we will lose correct topology.
Another possibility is to separate our mesh in more objects, setting the detail level to different amounts in function of our needs.
We can select some face loops and inset its faces with a minumin amount, so it will help us to sharp our model easyly.
It's easy to see that we have more sharp edges where we added inset faces.
If you take a look, you can see a black point at the center of some edges. That represents a face created with "Inset" and 0 amount.
You can also add loop cuts to add detail wherever you need it
Use wheel up and down to increment or decrement the amount of cuts you want on your face loop.
By using this technique smartly you can get very cool shapes, just like a metallic look tower for TLOTR ;-P
Let's undo this to get back our original model
Now we're going to take a quick look at how to add materials and textures to our meshes.
Check "Ambient Occlusion" at world panel and set it to 0.6 to have a better illumination on our model.
Add a new material at Material panel, name it tower and set a random color and intensity on Diffuse Color menu by left clicking on the white box.
Now let's add a texture, so cut your downloaded texture and paste it on same directory of your .blend file (for relative paths).
With your tower material selected, open texture tab and with first empty slot selected, click on new button.
By default, it creates a Cloud texture and set it as color with a kind of annoying purple color.
Try to render the tower and see the result. Now try to uncheck color and check intensity or normal boxes and render again.
Switch texture type from "Cloud" to "Image or Movie" and click on "open" button to select our stone wall texture.
Once you have set your texture, check color box again at the bottom of the menu and render again to see the result with a flat projection.
It looks really horrible because Blender doesn't know how to project that image on your mesh. We have to tell it how.
We're going to duplicate our object and see the looking of basic image projections.
Ups, by duplicating the object, all the duplicates are clients of same material, so let's create an individual copy of our material for each tower.
Asign distinct projections again and render to see the results :-)
There are many, many ways to add textures to our models, we have to choose the one which best fits our porpouses.
As we can see, our tower is basically a cylinder, but on the battlement it gets more complicated
So let's map our tower's body and we will take care of the battlement later.
We have different options to tile a texture: we could preprocess the texture on GIMP and tile it there, we could use mapping size or repeat at image mapping.
Explore different options and play with parameters to see which effects you are getting with each change.
Now we're going to configure our viewport to see the results of our mapping in "real time".
Switch your viewport shading to "Texture", in options panel (press 'N') switch (Display menu) from Multitexture to GLSL at "Material Mode" and add a sun light.
You can see the mapping seems to be lost. It's not lost, but each method needs some information to map a texture and this method needs UVMapping.
This method is useful when you have to export your model and textures mapped to collada (*.dae), for example.
Make you sure when you use UV Mapping your projection is flat or you'll get some weird texture behaviours as you can see.
As you can see, by scaling UV Map at UV/Image editor window, we can get same tile result as if we were using repeat or size options, but this method is well exported to *.dae.
Now we can appreciate the texture "in real time" in our 3D viewport.
For map the battlement just select all battlement faces, press 'U' to unwrap and select Cube Projection. Then, adjust the UV Map size at UV/Image editor.
There are probably better mapping options adding seams and so, but I think this is the fastest way with acceptable results.
Now, try to play with different options like Normal check box and different amounts with same texture and see the render results.
I sincerely hope this tutorial has been useful for you in some aspect. Please, comment if there are dark points or some step is not fully explained.
Thanks for watching :-)