Hello!
I am very new to blender and I have attempted to create a car. I have outlined it and added paint. The problem that I am having is when I add paint it doesn’t do the full 3d paint, where you can’t see the lines. It only paints the lines of the car instead of the whole thing when I get off of edit mode and go back to object mode. Also, when I made my tires they turned out great until I added them to the car… then they looked like a barrel instead of the tires I made. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
car_3d.zip (116 KB)
Unfortunately, I can’t quite work out what you’ve done so I can’t offer specific advice, but it’s clear you’re still really getting to grips with the program. That’s not a criticism - blender has a very steep learning curve, and it can be really offputting to start with! But I’d strongly recommend looking at some beginner tutorials to get your head around modelling and materials. I started about a year ago, and found BornCG’s tutorials invaluable to getting up to speed, find them here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLda3VoSoc_TR7X7wfblBGiRz-bvhKpGkS - my favourite learning site is probably CG Cookie, who have recently introduced a blender for beginners course: https://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/blender-basics-introduction-for-beginners/ closely followed by Blender Guru, who has recently done a basic introduction to materials in cycles: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/basics-realistic-texturing/ (although that might be a little advanced for you at the moment).
I can give you some broad strokes advice to get you started, but I can’t recommend highly enough that you go through some basic tutorials to get your head around modelling in blender. It is horribly clumsy at first, but you’ll get the hang of it.
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There are two rendering systems in blender, and they are really very different from early on in the process. The “old” way is Blender Internal, the “new” way is with a raytracing engine called “Cycles”. There are a couple of ways that Blender Internal is still better than Cycles, but for most things Cycles is better. Cycles relies on a very different way of thinking about materials and textures, so it will be pretty confusing if you try to learn both. Almost all of the modern tutorials assume you’re using cycles these days.
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In terms of “painting” your car; it’s important to understand the concept of “materials” in blender. When you first create an object, it has no material, so you can’t really “paint” onto it very effectively. Most of the time when you’re looking at objects in the 3d viewport, they don’t show any particular material, apart from a shiny grey placeholder. There is a button at the bottom of the screen with a little circle on it; that menu shows which display mode you’re using - selecting texture, material or rendered will show the materials applied to that object. Currently you only have one material defined, which is the tire rubber material. If you access the materials panel on the right hand side (the one with the little sphere on it), you can see the materials for each object. In the panel, I can see you’ve added four material slots, but they haven’t been defined; to do that you need to select the slot and press the “new material” button underneath, at which point you’ll get options to set up that material.
Different parts of the mesh are assigned different materials. By setting up quick materials in the slots in your file, I can see that the first slot is the material for the car body, the second slot isn’t used by any geometry, the third is your tire, and the fourth is the rims of your wheels. You can assign a material to different parts of your object by going into edit mode, selecting some of your mesh, selecting the material you want that part of your mesh to be, and then pressing the “assign” button.
Oh, a note on nomenclature, since it’ll get very confusing if you don’t get this distinction: a MATERIAL is the surface quality that the rendering engine uses to display your object, and a TEXTURE is a (usually) two dimensional image. Materials often (usually, but not always) make use of textures, but you always need a material in order for blender to know what colour an object is.
- In order to “paint” onto your mesh, you need to have an image to paint into, a UV map so that blender knows how to relate the image to your mesh, and a material that tells blender how to convert the image into a surface material that can react to the light. Strictly speaking you can paint directly onto the mesh with vertex paint (where each vertex is given a colour value, so you don’t need an image texture or a UV map), but you’ll still need to tell your material what to do with the vertex color information. I can tell you how to do that in cycles, but not blender internal. (Hint: use cycles.)
Again, I think you really need to work through some tutorials. It’s a bit of a slog, but it’ll really put you on a solid footing. And don’t give up! A world of awesome 3D art is ahead of you!
Also: use cycles.