Gothic tracery tutorial - part 1 (modeling)

hello everybody my name is Justin in this tutorial we will create the gothic tracery such as this one so first step is modeling inside blender 2.8 beta second step is texturing inside Photoshop by following this tutorial you can make any type of treasuring you like for the purpose of this video we'll be creating the one with the number three now let's go ahead and save the image inside blender entered the front orthographic view by pressing 1 and click shift a to create new mesh let's go ahead and rotate it along the x-axis 90 degrees and scale it up also scale it along the x axis so it resembles the ratio of your drawing create new material for it and rename it and enter the shader editor graph where you can drag and drop your image and connect it directly to the base color let's go back to the 3d viewport and this is the result let's go ahead and create a curve now I'm putting the drawing slightly backwards because it was covering the view rotating the curve along the x-axis again and before we edit it let's go to object settings and turn it to two-dimensional and crank up the resolution to about 50 this is crucial because we'll be using this curve as our guide for the curve modifier now in edit mode I'm changing the position and scale and rotation of vertices also changing the type from aligned to free which gives me more freedom of movement I can create a pointed arch for example okay in the edit mode let's go ahead and select the bottom vertex and press shift S and line the cursor to the selected now the 3d cursor is there let's exit the edit mode and go to objects at origin and set the origin to that very 3d cursor you can create a new shortcut blender 2.79 that was aligned to assign to ctrl shift alt and seek adding new curves and change their shapes I keep in mind that I can only edit them in the edit mode I should not scale them especially non-uniformly in the object mode if I do that the modifier curves want to work properly later on if you want to connect to vertices select them and press F you can duplicate the curve in the object node then enter the edit mode select everything and scale along the x-axis with a value of negative one this way you create a mirror image of the previous curve for the inner circle you have to create the circle that is exactly in the center and align the center the 3d cursor to it then you can use the pivot to the 3d cursor in order to create a result at this point I'm just refining the positions of vertices and the cool feature is that you can select multiple in the object mode and then press stop to enter the edit mode and you can basically edit them all at once but there are still separate objects next step is creating a cross-section as before I created the curve and the Bezier curve and right now we're all working in the top view which can be accessed by pressing seven and I created a few circles helpers to guide me through this through this section so there is nothing new here I'm just I just keep on adding new vertices extruding existing ones and repositioning them changing their type from time to time so now the resolution of the curve I'm working with is much lower than before remember before we had about 50 now it's let's say ten five something like this a low value because it's very important to keep that the cross section as low poly as possible once I'm happy with half of the intersection I can convert it into the mesh so as it is converted into mesh I can refine vertices manually one by one and then when I'm happy with their result I can just select everything rs.50 to copy it and mirror it on the other side with the negative value minus one and remove there or dissolve the vertices in the middle because I don't need them anymore let's exit that top or graphic view and select everything in the edit mode and press e to extrude it now we have the long trim let's go ahead and select the bottom edges and make mark them as sharp and as seen do the same to the top ones now I'm selecting the edges that are going to be sharp and marking them as sharp I'm changing the shading type to shade smooth and turning on the outer smooth normals and cracking up the value of the angle so I have the influence on which edges are sharp and which aren't I'm adding several segments to the trim remembering that an ever dream that I make should have the same amount of segments let's select the top border and press alt f2 fill it in the viewport displace let's show the normals as you can see some of them are broken so that select everything by pressing a and press shift' and which basically recalculates normals the rule is that if your model looks like a hedgehog then normals are decent now when you have old trims ready select them and apply their transforms or apply the rotation and scale remember that your trims should have the same amount segments and should have the same height now is the time to texture it or unwrap it sense so you basically need a seam on the top border on the bottom border and you need a seam that goes along the trim then you can press you to unwrap it and from my experience I find that angle based is not that good for non-uniform of faces so you probably should use conformal method of unwrapping once you're happy with the UV set you can go ahead and export the UV layout as a PNG make sure that you select all UVs and you select the fill opacity 0 okay so now is the time to begin using the curve modifier so aligning all the other curves and I've prepared all my trims they are already unwrapped and they are ready to texture I just keep them in a stack nearby so I can always reuse them I keep them unchanged and I just duplicate them moving them directly to the same spot where the curve ordered is and applying the curve modifier then I'm changing the orientation axis to Y and now any change I make to that particular trim which follows the curve is gonna affect the trim before it is curved if that makes sense so basically if you for example scaling it along y axis you're scaling the original mesh the original trim not the one that is converted but you can preview it by selecting those two buttons on the modifier tab near the display in the render and display in the viewport so once I'm happy with how this thing looks I can apply the modifier and begin applying other changes to the vertices such as as you can see here keep in mind that at this point it's always good to if you if your texture is stretched to reduce the stretching and in the UV editor as fast as possible because if you forget about it later on move to the next thing you will end up having strata texture and you won't even realize it so I'm using the same principle for every single trim choosing the right trim for that for the job duplicating it repositioning it exactly to the origin of the curve and then applying the modifier the curves modifier which would then makes that trim follow the curve and then I apply some basic changes for example for the pointed arch I need to scale it slightly along the y axis I also need to make sure that there is an edge look directly where their angle changes in the curve here in the edit mode at the very top of the pointed arch I selected the edge loops deselecting some of them and marking them as sharp so for the circle I'm using the curved modifier and I'm scaling it along the z-axis so it completes the circle precisely this way when I convert it to the object I can select the faces the depth in the end the bottom cup and the top cap and remove them and then merge those vertices not them by the distance moving the trim to the curve using the curve modifier and at this point it would be nice to go into edit mode and reposition some of these edge loops and also add additional edge loops where the geometry is not sufficient here I'm going to move this edge loop using the proportional editing so I'm moving also didn't adjacent a little edge loops there for the texture of stretching is lessened and I'm moving them to the places where the angle changes in the curve I'm also scaling it along the y axis while still in the curve modifier for this part I'm going to lower the of this particular curve and convert it to the mesh now I just grab those vertices and extrude them and then I can reposition them manually one by one so it fits the gap let's reposition this thing and unwrap it angle base for meshes like this is the best option now I'm gonna turn on the solid if I modifier and as usual I'm gonna use the sharp edges let's go ahead and remove the unneeded faces and unwrap the in the faces inside I'm gonna do the same thing over here creating a two dimensional curve with low resolution converting it into the mesh grabbing the vertices and extruding them then making sure that these vertices on the outside follow the shape of the tracery around it adding some knife cuts to add a bit more meshing in this area repositioning along the y axis and extruding in inwards adding the sharp edge so there is a nice sharp angle mudding additional edge loop by pressing ctrl R so it creates a nice shape like this this doesn't look very good because we should make them sharp and now it looked much better at this point I created a new image with the UV grid and applied it to this object as an image in the shader graph in the shader editor and now it allows me to make sure that the texture is not stretched roughly the same size and it looks decent so the goal here is to see to be able to see the grid of actual squares not rectangles so I'm achieving that by scaling along the z-axis those trims in the UV view while looking at the 3d viewport and and how the results look the result looks like for the inside for the rosette I'm using also curve modifier but here before I applied the curve modifier I repositioned those vertices along the y axis I can use proportional editing but as you can see I'm also selecting the rock pieces so I have to hide them in order to make sure that they're not being moved while using the proportional editing voila now I can go ahead and press alt D to duplicate this as an instance when I move it I can see that it slightly overlaps so I can adjust just one of them and the other one will follow the same transform once I'm happy with the result and the texturing is correct on this element I can duplicate it so it fills our rosette I'm going to do this by pressing shift D our tapping in 45 and then pressing shift are several times for the inner circle of the rosette I'm using the same method as before selecting the right trim moving it to the curve and then applying the curve modifier however before I apply it I have to scale it down especially along the z axis which makes the texture stretched in this particular case I also have to rotate the trim 90 degrees along the y axis removing this interfaces and the merging vertices were the two ends of the circle meet I create eight-sided cylinder rotated along the z axis what 22.5 degrees rescale it and reposition it so it matches the tracery and then I'm just extruding and adding edge loops and making sure that this octagon remains equilateral so while scaling it I have to scale it uniformly along the x and y axis now I'm adding sharp edges turning on the normals out a smooth option high value of the angle then icecap the base which is improvising because I don't have reference for that it turns out to be quite good basic idea of creating this column is when you have the cylinder you look at it from the orthographic front view and you keep on extruding the edge loop so from time to time you have to go to perspective view to see how your column looks in 3d for texturing you have to create a seam along the length of the column the seam on the very top and very bottom also create additional seam just above the bottom the base of the column and just below the top of the column for the mesh like this is good to use the conformal type of unwrapping for the middle of the column and the angle based unwrapping for the top and the base last step is going to the 3d view with everything visible and then selecting edges edge loops around the border of your mesh so basically you select the ones that define the shape then you duplicate them by pressing shift E moving them outside and separating it from the rest of the object this is how it looks now hide the original mesh and this is what we are and will always end up with just an outline of the tracery readjust the topology to create enclosed loops of edges in this case they are enclosing the stained glass so we're trying to recreate exact shape of the stained glass we need only a half of this because the same glass will be symmetrical and for the in the rosette we just want need one piece because now then we gonna grab it and repeat it the whole thing at this point select those borders and fill them with faces if you fill it with their triangles by selecting the border and pressing alt F remember that the triangles should not be very stretched if they are non-uniform that most likely the texture will have issues so for this main arch I'm creating the rectangles by selecting them and bridging them then I add additional loops just to make sure that I have a more uniform and rectangles not stretched okay so this is final result of the stained glass let's go ahead and select everything and unwrap it with the angle based option now I can rotate eyelids and reposition them in the UV view so as you can see there is a lot of space on the left side and this is for the future designer then I'm exporting the UV and I'm ready to begin texturing so that was modeling of our gothic tracery with the stained glass I will soon release part 2 of this tutorial where are a texture it and create a PBR material before I end this tutorial I would like to highly recommend checking the Unreal Engine marketplace where I sell some of my asset packs and one of them made the front page the Gothic island and this model this app asset pack actually consists contains meshes that are very similar in style to what I created in this tutorial and I'm gonna put this particular stained glass and tracery in this pack as well so it has cathedrals buildings and also recommend checking the this model on the sketchfab and other models that I sell there yeah so the cool thing about Sketchup is that you can preview the model very thoroughly check it out what the hell is going on how it's made and you can see the textures as well if you for example go here just select this element you can see how the texture for the stained glass looks like how the texture for those trims look like and for the Stonewall and etc you know stuff like this or for example we can check out the raft you know and other PBR mops yeah so this is that I highly recommend checking it out so see you

Channel: ConradJustin

Views: 44,210

Keywords: gothic, modeling, blender 2.8, blender, tracery, stained glass, window, architecture, medieval, design

Id: vXAYt2h_Tto

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2019