QUICK TIP: MAKE YOUR GRAPHICS CARD DO THE RENDERING
04
ADD DETAILS
Press Shift+A, select a circle, and change its
sides to 4 on the bottom-left. Switch to the Edge
selection below and select all the sides, then press E
to extrude it and hit left mouse button immediately.
Press S to resize the new polygon, and make it twice
as big. This way you will get a ring. Switch to Face
Select, select all faces of the ring and extrude it a bit
higher. The sucker is ready, select it, duplicate with
Shift+D, and using Grab, Scale and Rotate, place the
suckers on the tentacles. It’s a bit of a painstaking
process, but with patience you will get the best results.
Also create two spheres for the eye and pupil using
Shift+A, and place them in the right position.05
MAKE IT SMILE!
Now you should make your creature look
cute – let it smile! Switch to Object mode below and
press the Apply button at the Subdivision surface
modifier, and switch to Edit mode again. You will see
how the polygons have changed. Now press K – you
will activate a Knife tool. Draw out a wide-open smile
on the creature’s head, after you’ve finished hit Enter to
apply changes. Select all the polygons you’ve cut with
Shift, and extrude it twice – first a little bit, and then
more. You should get a deep, cute smile. To smooth it,
apply modifier as in Step 2. Also create two cubes for
teeth and place them in the mouth in Edit mode.06
PA INT THE MODEL
Change the display mode below, from Solid
to Material – so you can see the changes you make.
Go to the Material inset on the right and choose New.
You can change it to any colour by clicking the colour
box. First, make an orange one – the whole model
will now be in this colour. Then click + at the top –
with this you will be able to create one more material.
Make it green for the tentacles, select the polygons
you want to paint in Edit mode, and click the Assign
button. You can create as many materials as you
want, like white for the eye and black for the pupil. If
you want to select the whole object, like one of the
suckers, select any part of it, and press Ctrl/Cmd+L.07
MAKE REFLECTIONS
As you are going to place the creature in
a water puddle, there should be a physically true
reflection, so you should create a water surface in
Blender and render it. Switch to Object mode,
press Shift+A>Mesh>Plane. Using Grab and
Scale, place it under the creature. Now go to the
Modifier inset and select the Ocean modifier – it
will create waves on the plane. After applying the
modifier the plane becomes much bigger – use
Scale to make it smaller. To make the water
glossy, and reflect light, add a new material as in
Step 6, and change the surface above the colour
box from Diffuse to Glossy.08
RE NDER THE IMAGE
Switch to the Camera View at the bottom of
the screen, select the camera border with the right
mouse button, and using Grab and Rotate, place it
the right way. Keep in mind the photo where you are
going to place the render, so the perspective will be
the same. The default light source in the scene is the
Sun. Select it, go to object data at the right, and makeit brighter by adjusting the Strength parameter.
Now press F12. You will see how your model is
rendered in real time. Also, you can press Esc to
abort the render, or reduce samples from Step 1 to
make it faster. After you are finished, hit Image>
Save As Image at the bottom left of the screen to
save your render.If you’ve got an up to date powerful video card you
can switch your render from your processor to it.
To enable GPU rendering, go into the User
Preferences in the Main Menu, and under Systemtab, select the Compute Device to use. After
this change CPU render to GPU in render inset.
This way you can render multiple times faster
than with your processor.Photo manipulation
82 The Professional Photoshop Book
080-085 Creature Tutorial.indd 82 06/10/2015 15:46