Tutorial Time: For beginners
@dhalsims commented on my post [Hi, lovely :D] and I thought I’d show you through a post instead of a private message [no hoarding knowledge you beasts!] This is a super simple method that Luna used to use when she was still in the community. If you ever pop open one of her models, you’ll see the textures are just simple images, and I was always baffled how she did it. When I first started modeling, I tried [and failed, and failed again] to create models from images and they either looked like a hot mess or they were wayyyy up there in polycount from trying to get every nook and cranny.
I wrote this as if you’re just starting out in blender before, so if you’re more advanced please forgive my rambling.
So, here I introduce, the knife tool in blender [I don’t use milkshape, so please don’t ask lol]
Why on earth would I want to cut something to make something? Shh, let me know you.
You’re gonna start with this:
Yep, that’s it. Add a plane, UV map it so you can put the texture on it. I scaled mine so it wasn’t stretched, so just figure out the general size you’d like and hit edit mode for that plane. On the left side of the screen you’re going to want the tools section. Look down the list until you find the knife button.
Click it, and it’s going to give you a little knife with a green dot. Go around your image and trace the shape with the knife tool using small clicks. [Note, every click will be a vertice]
Trace your shape all the way around the edge, and when you connect the last one, you’re gonna have a string like thing. Don’t panic, just hit enter once those are connected and you have the random line attached to your mouse. It’s going to give you a cut-out like this.
Well crap, you say at the giant hole in your picture… No, just wait. Patience.
Select the vertices around your basic shape. [Shift/Alt Right click people, don’t be like me when I started and select every vertice by itself. Save yourself time.]
Now, you can do this 2 ways. Either duplicate those vertices, or [in edit mode] press P/Selection to remove those vertices from the plane. Either method will do.
Now press F to fill in that space, and unwrap it. No need to go marking seams, just press unwrap, it’ll match the shape.
Press E to extrude that down. If it’s gone wonky, right click to release it and use your blue arrow to move it straight down so it’s not at an angle.
You now have a basic shape. Hold on, there’s a few more bits. Go ahead and delete that plane, you won’t need it anymore. [Remember if it’s attached to the mesh, select the vertices of the plane and then delete]
If your mesh looks like this [ignore the UV mapping, I fiddled with mine] just go to MESH in Edit mode, and go up to NORMALS. Hit Flip Normals to get it to flip directions.
Now the rest is UV mapping and getting it to where you like it for your textures. I’m not going to go over that here, but I highly recommend watching videos and studying UV mapping. On a platform like the sims, you can do amazing things with textures without having astronomical polycounts. Now one more thing, to give your mesh a little oomph, you can bevel. One pieces like this, I use it regularly as meat isn’t supposed to be flat. Select the top of your mesh, and hit ctrl/B. Be gentle, it’ll take off with you. Drag that out until you have a slight bevel to your edge.
As you can see, since you UV mapped it beforehand, it already added that in for you.
And there you have it. A simple mesh, with textures straight from google image search. AND: Look at that number! :D [70]
Now go do great things! (: And tag me so I can see your CC! :D
NOTE: I am not an expert. There are other methods that you can use to do similar projects, there are methods that will get you more detailed results, but for a low poly, game-ready item, this is how I do it. If this helps you, let me know I did something for the world today :D [Kidding, but kind of…? lol] I hope it helps, and happy modding!
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