Final Video Script: Simple Asset Creation
Simple Asset Creation
I’m going to walk you through the steps in creating a simple clump of grass. This isn’t an exact tutorial since I will not be outlining every mouse click and keyboard shortcut in this process. The asset we will be creating is a clump of grass. This process can be done in many ways, for this project, we will be hand painting a two-dimensional section of grass against a transparent background in the GIMP. After this, we will go through the steps to apply it to a flat plane in Blender in 3D and duplicate it multiple times to create a nice looking clump of grass that doesn’t load your computer down when being displayed.
Part I: Texture painting
Open GIMP
Use tablet with pressure sensitivity to draw lines of varying thickness
Make sure that you are painting on a transparent background
Change color brightness at least once to vary the texture
Open in Blender
Open first in UV image editor, this loads the image into the program for easy loading into any texture, needed for laying out your UV texture space.
In UV image editor, verify that the transparency translated over to Blender
Add plane
-edit mode, size mesh to roughly the proportions of the image
-unwrap plane to the UV editor, make sure that texture space of object covers image
Add new material
-go to texture options from material options
.select new, image, and chose your image from drop-down menu
-back to material options
.map input: UV’s
.map to: color (default)
Rotate so grass is upright
-go to edit mode
.rotate accordingly
Back to material options
-map to alpha
-bring material alpha level to 0
-check “ztransp”
Texture done
Part II
Add Dimension to the flat plane
-edit mode
.subdivide up and down
.turn proportional edit on and deform
Back to object mode
-duplicate and rotate 5-10 times, either join or group
In this section we covered how to create a simple piece of grass for use in a realtime 3D environment. We first painted the grass against a transparent background. We then brought it into Blender, applied it to a flat plane in the 3D environment, added dimension to that plane, and then duplicated the plane enough times so that it would look good as a clump of grass in your game.
