How to Create a Suspension Bridge in Blender

can everyone and welcome to a new tutorial on Belinda guru it's been a while since I uploaded a new one and because you know with the launch of the nature Academy and everything but it's finally here so yeah let's get into it I originally planned for this tutorial to be on a street scene and this is kind of a street scene but yeah I decided it was gonna take far too long to model all the buildings and things like that so I just turned it into a suspension bridge instead so yes we're gonna be learning a number of different things in this tutorial biggest one I suppose is complex modeling so this is quite an unusual looking shape quite hard but yeah I'm gonna show you very simply how to do that using arrays mirrors and the curve modifier as well as that we're also gonna be you know modeling things like this hand barrier here a couple of street lamps thrown in the road bit of texturing on the barriers and things like that as well the background by the way is 100% just an image if you didn't know that already but yeah so hopefully gonna learn a couple of new things and have a bit of fun so let's go ahead now and get into it so open up a new scene now in blender and the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna model that road so I'm gonna replace the cube with a plane okay and then just looking at it from the top view mode I'm gonna scale it by the Y axes like this just somewhere to about there looks pretty good and what I'm gonna do now is jump into front view mode and I'm gonna model one of those barriers okay so really really simple I'm just gonna use the Box tool just select those vertices right there and I'm gonna extrude it upwards then extrude it across and extrude it downwards like so and then just to give a little bit of a footpath then I create an area like that a little bit of a raised lip they're probably not even gonna be able to see this in the render but it's alright so something like that should be fine because I'm lazy and I want to save time I'm gonna what am I done there oh okay well it's only just that's great isn't it let's try that again box tool extrude let's check okay now it's so I don't know what happened there because I use the Box tool before anyway let's just do that quickly again and just rate it upwards and then extra it downloads anyway you get the picture umm yeah so I'm lazy so I want to make it so the barrier is on the other side so instead of modeling it myself what I'm gonna do is go to the modify here and then select mirror now it's gonna mirror that based on that origin point right there so what we need to do is take this vertice here and make sure it's in line so it's in the middle of our objects so turn on clipping and now if you just slide that vertice all the way along its gonna stop when it hit to the middle and now you can see we have a perfectly mirrored road okay now I'm gonna save this just so that it is safe from crashing and I'm gonna position the camera now so just jumping into front view mode if I hit ctrl alt number pad zero it's gonna snap the camera to my location provided the camera is selected first and I'm just gonna change the aspect ratio of the camera as well so I want it to be about 1000 by 1400 like that which is a little unusual I normally just stick to the 1080p but I want to get kind of a bit more of a vertical scale type look to it so that's what I'm doing it this way and another cool tip which is something I learnt very recently from I think it's blender architect comm there was a little tip there if you go to the camera options if you got underneath here underneath display you've now got these composition are overlay options so if you just turn on thirds you can see that it now puts this little grid over the camera view which is really really neat because previously always had to try and guess where the rule of thirds were if you don't know what the rule of thirds are basically try and make things that are on these four points there be the focus of the scene so I want the end of my to be the focus so I'm positioning that little cross there about there and then when the rest of the bridge is above it it's going to fill up the rest of the scene so just kind of a rule of thumb to go by okay and now that we're up to it let's go ahead and texture that road so we want to obviously give a different texture to the barrier than we do the road so what I'm going to do is select these vertices right here and in fact those vertices there as well I'm gonna hit P and then make it a separate object okay and I'm also now gonna select these over here and make that a separate object as well you could have modeled them individually if you wanted to but it just saves us time because now it's all perfectly mirrored and everything so that's alright I'm just gonna fix up that because that is a mess okay not even gonna see that anyway okay so first things first gonna texture that road so we're gonna have to UV unwrap the road first and because we're using the mirror modifier it's always good practice apply it before you try to do any UV unwrapping it's just gonna save problems later so do you view unwrap it I'm just gonna drag that across there divide it and select UV image editor open image and the one that I'm going to use is called roads 72 this is one I grabbed off CG textures comm so in top you wrote up in top view I'm gonna hit you and then select project from view now I've got an exact kind of copy of that right there so I now just need to scale this up until basically it's there so I want just a little bit sort of on the shoulder of the road there just to fill it up so something like I think something like that should be fine and now if I just go to the materials add a new material turn the specularity off add a new texture image and then just select that same texture and set it to UV if I'm going too fast for you I apologize just that we've got a lot of things to get through in this tutorial so there you go you can see the road is now textured and now I've closed that shouldn't have done that anyway now we're gonna texture the baryon okay so this one's a little bit harder but it's not that hard okay just go move across okay so with the barrier selected I'm gonna hit you but I'm gonna choose the top option unwrapped okay it's given us this here so I'm just gonna hit s X 0 s X and then 0 and basically what that's doing is it's just flattening it because it was a little bit crooked before so it's now perfectly flat just makes it yeah a little bit better for unwrapping and the texture that I'm going to use is called at least I think it's nice not that one wait where is it something something let's pull up my little viewer here so I can see okay it's concrete new 34 anyway I'll put links there for you so you can get them yourselves okay so I'm just gonna select one of the side barriers there now I'm going to hit that little button down there and that's going to make it so that it shows us which ones of the barriers are selected okay so front view okay there we go that's probably what I did before actually when when I was extruding it I didn't select it wasn't in wireframe mode which is why I wasn't selecting the vertices behind it anyway a little tip for you make sure you do that okay so I'm gonna position this to be about here okay these vertices I'm gonna move up to be here and the other ones on this side shouldn't even matter because it's um it's gonna be on the other side so am I gonna be shown to the camera so doesn't even matter I could probably you know what let's just do that I'm going to leave that face because you don't need it so there you go and uh what's happened there all right so let's crude it up a bit I wouldn't have seen that if I and then deleted it there you go okay alright that's good enough so I want it just basically so that this edge that's right there is at the top because you can see the way these leaks are kind of streaming down it so if you had it the wrong way around obviously the the leaking type of fact is going to be the wrong way around so anyway now that's done I'm just going to extrude it along the x-axis so that's s and then X and that's extruding it like this and it's gonna be just kind of a little bit of a play around to make sure you get it right but something about there now if we just add a new material very quickly set this texture image I've Goods gonna choose the same image let's just do that concrete new UV and let's hit render okay so that's not too bad if you find that it's stretching kind of that way kind of like it's kind of being torn apart then you just basically want to extrude that out just a little bit further yeah just kind of you have to play around with it to get the effect you want but that looks pretty fine there's a little bit of like repeating texture there that you can kind of see but it's not that noticeable if you wanted to you could create a second texture and overlay it over the top of it but yeah that's looking fine so far so I'm now gonna do a little bit of lighting so changing the default lamp here to a Sun lamp like so I'm gonna change the energy to two and I'm gonna make the color just slightly yellow like that and I'm gonna rotate it to be about there and now if we render this you can see we have this result I might just turn it just not that yellow cuz that's possibly a bit too much I'm not sure I've got that efflux program turned on and I'm recording this at nighttime so it's changed the colors of my monitor to be kind of yellowy so it doesn't hurt your eyes as much and so this looks really yellow on my screen right now so I just probably turn it off but anyway that's all right okay so that's looking not bad you can see that there's only one direct light source at the moment which is a problem we want to make it look like there is you know sky lighting because in reality in you know nature if you look outside you'll see that there's the direct sunlight but then in the shadows you'll like a blue tint and that is the sky lighting the shadows so to get that effect underneath the world settings here we're going to turn on environment lighting which is a relatively new feature of blender and I'm going to change it from white to sky color and the sky color is this one here which is Zenith color which makes a lot of sense of course and I'm gonna turn that color there to be you know kind of a bluish color like so something like that change the energy to a point five set set the gather to approximate and the reason I'm doing that is because I want to turn on indirect lighting indirect lighting is so that you get bounce lighting off various objects which and it currently requires a proximate to be enabled I'm also going to turn off fall-off which basically defines you know how far bounce lighting can go higher it goes then the less distance the bounce lighting can travel and also to speed up rendering this is something probably a lot of you don't know about but there's that era of value right there by default it's set to 0.25 change that to 1 okay and that's going to speed up rendering a lot and you're not really going to see any big side effects at least in a scene of this size okay so you can see that it now has a little bit of a light bluish tinge to it so I'd say that is looking quite good and if you want to just as kind of an extra thing well I'm going to turn on ambient occlusion as well let's turn that up hasn't made much of a difference there but to fake the ambient occlusion just a little bit more I'm gonna add a new texture this is something I do quite a lot just faking ambient occlusion set the texture to blend underneath the colors turn on ramp and then what are we seeing material let's hit flip and then make that white material there black instead set this to vertical okay and then change the mapping to UV and then let's turn that down to about there and now you can see on the barrier you've got just a little bit of a darkened kind of look to the barrier and that's faking ambient now obviously that's a bit too much so I'm gonna turn that back a bit and also turn down the influence amount to 0.5 or something yeah something like that anyway you can play around with it just to get you know a nicest-looking result something like that I'd say that's looking quite fine so far alright so now we're going to be modeling the barriers okay alright the Barrows the sort of a handrail so this is really easy to do but just I don't know probably little bit time-consuming I suppose just add a cube first of all I'm gonna scale that down and let's see I'm gonna extrude that up and I want it to be just slightly higher than the actual Road barrier and then I'm gonna rotate it inwards like this this is just a really simple hand barrier design that I got off a kind of a reference photo okay so something like that and then if you go to the modifier turn on array make sure you've got it coming out of the the Y amounts or something like that and then let's turn that up to about 15 okay you might want to dial back the amount of distance in it so that a small child couldn't fit through it too easily I just want those rails there to be a little bit thinner so a little bit more not that much okay so something like that is pretty fine and I might just turn that Bayou up a bit if you get them too close together and you can't actually even see through the gaps from the position of the camera so yeah something like that is fine and I'm also going to add a cylinder turnoff cap ends and let's set the vertices to 16 doesn't need to be too high res so something like that let's position that at the top there okay set it to smooth shading right there and then this one here as well and you want to be just out of it just a little bit so that when we because we're going to be using an array modifier on these to kind of push it out to the rest of the bridge so something about there so that there's the same amount of gap there as there is there and now if I take this I'm going to duplicate it turnoff arrays and I'm going to enlarge it and this is just going to be kind of like one of those support beams just somewhere like that and let's just drop this in right here okay cool so I'm gonna turn on a raise I mean not turn on I just hit apply and then I'm gonna group all these objects together and I'm gonna delete this little poll that's in the middle there so just delete that okay so now I've got everything looking nice on a turn on smooth shading and when you get that you get these polls have this weird kind of look to it so turn on an edge split modifier set the angle to 88 that's so you get that nice smooth effect there and on the rail itself but you also get the nice cut edges as well and then once you've done that we're gonna turn on another array and we're going to make this apply to the Y amount like that and if you haven't so it's stacking up there it shouldn't be like that so the rotation is around the wrong way so let's hit control a and then hit rotation okay cool awesome so now you've got a little handrail very very easy simple design just takes you know a little bit time-consuming it's not that hard you can see I'm just stretching that out to the length of the bridge very very quick very very easy okay now we want the exact same thing on the other side in fact just to keep things consistent I'm gonna rotate it and put it over here where it should be really because you've got you know the modeling on on all the others the modeling is on that side so I want the same thing to be on this one as well that's why I'm putting it here and now you've got that there you want to make sure that you get that origin point in the center as well so you can see that my 3d cursor is already in the center there so if I just hit ctrl alt C then you can say origin to 3d cursor and it put that little dot there and now if I turn on mirror it puts it exactly in the right spot on the opposite side so looking good so far I'm just going to quickly give this a material nothing fancy let's just turn that hardness up so looks kind of like shiny paint and specularity down a little bit as well give that a quick render and that is how the scene is looking so far so I don't know there's some kind of weird looking shadow going across there I was probably from there yeah the railing above it but yeah it's not looking too bad so far okay cool so now we're going to do is we're going to be modeling the bridge itself so this is getting into the complex stuff now now I'm gonna be using a reference image that I actually purchased so I can't actually share this with you but I mean I'm putting it on the screen here so you can probably nope not that one you can probably see it anyway so let's just nope not that one either um where is it okay this one yeah there we go so I believe this is a footbridge in Ontario Canada I think I've said that name on Tonto row onto oak and I think that's how you say it but yeah it's really really cool um I had a look at a number of different suspension bridges you know reference images and stuff on the internet and this one looks really cool look it's kind of like a roller coaster kind of if you flip it up the other way it's yeah I don't know just looks quite cool so I thought it'd be fun to make so yeah let's create it so what we're going to do is we're gonna do pretty much a similar thing for the handrail so we're going to be modeling one segment and then we're going to be you know using the array modifier to make that go across the length of the bridge so what we want to do is model one of those segments so I'm gonna move to a new layer right now I'm gonna add a cylinder now this is obviously going to be that thick cylinder there on the side so I don't leave vertices at 32 that's alright but I want to turn off cap ends okay okay just so that it's hollow down the middle there and I'm gonna get a drink excuse me because my voice is getting cracky excuse me alright turn on smooth shading and we want to extrude just scale it then hit they're so hit s and then Y and then just scale it to something about there it's important you do that or else when we model these little support beams here the its it's going to be off a little bit so make sure you scale it just you know something like that is is fine and now what I want to do is just bring back the rest of the scene here and you want to make sure that these poles here are you know relative to the bridge okay so you can see they're way way too thick at the moment so I'm gonna scale that down to I don't know somewhere about there I think is quite fine that's yeah that's a little bit too small anyway something like that is fine and you want to position it so that it's just a long side the edge of the of the little bridge there along the footpath and you wanna make sure the origin point is in the center okay because like I said before we're gonna be using you know mirrors arrays and stuff like that okay so jumping back to our little layer over here so what essentially we want to do is just model this beam there that beam there and then we're going to use the mirror modifier to basically create a nice little crossover effect so kind of model that little support beam there so I'm gonna add a cube all right scale it down and let's just scale it along the y-axis okay x-axis something like that and I'm just gonna rotate it to about there it needs to be a little bit thicker a little bit of playing around to get it right no I like it better the way it was before okay okay so something like that I think then just place it about there then grab these vertices right here and if you go to down here under orientation if you turn on local then hit that little button there you can now just scale along the orientation of the object now that's not gonna work if you've rotated it whilst in edit mode so if you don't have that effect it only works if you rotate things like this whilst in object mode that you get that kind of that little local thing which works really neatly so okay so you want to make sure that this support beam is crossing over the edge of that green line there because that is essentially where that is gonna cross in right there so you want to leave a little bit hanging over on the other side so I think let me just say I think maybe I need to actually scale this up just a little bit further let's do that now all right push that in a bit here we go yeah we're getting somewhere alright so that's why I said you had to make sure that this is extruded upwards a little bit as well at us it's not really going to match the reference image there okay but once that is all fine and dandy I'm gonna select that object that object and then finally the tube there as well and I'm gonna hit ctrl J now that they're all one solid object if I go into modifier and then add a mirror modifier you can see that it's created this little nice effect there that you can see so it looks quite cool I don't know I think it's there's way too much of a crossover effect here actually so I am just going to quickly scale these things back again just a little bit and I don't have that local thing anymore so I'm just gonna do it by eye which is annoying but there you go okay so a little bit of fiddling there anyway that looks looks fine and dandy so we want to create just that little kind of a fill in the middle there so very easy just add a plane drop this in right there and turn on clipping position it somewhere about there you can actually delete one of the vertices as well and then just create a face off those three vertices so don't normally do it but since it's you know tiny little object like that it's fine and to add a plane in right here turn off clipping okay put that in push that across and just to make sure these are you know perfectly aligned hit s X and then zero and that's just gonna align them like so okay so I'm leaving a little bit of a gap between the tube and that little plane as you can see there in the reference image there is one that's why we're doing that but otherwise I think that looks pretty fine and we're just gonna add one more support beam just across this you know from there to there so I'm just gonna add a cube scale that down well what is that what I didn't let me ride a plane but we did all right a cube is that across and here we go all right we're getting there eventually slowly but steadily we're getting there okay turn on clipping again it's a lot of repetitive stuff to create something like this but you know it's just one of those things okay cool so now you've got that set up one final thing we're going to do is move these planes so they're at the top of our little design there so just up there like so okay so underneath it you can see there's that little cutaway area and then on top it's almost flat alright so now I've got that set up let's add an array modifier set it to be along the y-axis again if you have this problem when stacking just hit control a rotation and you basically want these two areas there to connect which currently is not going to do we want that beam there to be inside that beam so what you gonna have to turn that to below zero to something something about there and you can see that it's nicely packed away and so that we don't have any overlapping areas between our two tubes what I'm gonna do is just grab this tube right here and then just push it back till it's in line there and then turn on merge and that'll make sure those two very are tax groups merge together okay and I want to make this array count to be about 12 something like that I'm gonna go into edit mode I'm gonna move all of these back now and you'll notice that because the reason I'm doing this is you'll have a look at the reference image here and you'll see that it the pattern goes that way and then once it reaches the top it flips it there's a bit of a gap and then it creates the pattern that way so that's what we're going to be doing here so with these modifiers set up I'm going to add another one set it to mirror and make it mirror along the y-axis and you can see we've got almost the exact effect that we want okay so that's not too bad one fine mmm nice you can't really do that can we nope all right so we have to apply the array modifier first so go ahead and do that hit apply all right and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take these actually no I forgot it I knew there's one other thing so I'm actually bring back the array okay we need to make sure that we add some loop cuts in our yes cylinder there because once we add because we're going to get in that curve defect so we want to make sure there's some vertices there for our you know curving to actually take effect to anyway hit apply there and now I'm gonna extrude that just so that they connect together turn on clipping and they'll snap together like that so you can't move them anymore so that is our scene currently that's the the bridge so far if we just bring back the bridge just so we can see how it looks in scale it's not too bad it's alright okay so that's pretty good now what we're going to do is get that nice curve effect so to do that I'm gonna add a curve go to curve and then path okay this just gives you a nice flat looking curve like this I'm gonna scale that up so it fits it to about there and then go into edit mode and I'm just going to drag these vertices up there push them apart a little bit just to get you know a nice arc shape very similar to a you know suspension bridge I think I'm gonna be sure if it's a suspension bridge someone on Twitter saying Angie that's not a suspension bridge that's an arc bridge or something I don't know there's you know cables dangling down it looks like a suspension bridge to me so anyway so now I've got that Donna let's to make it so that it follows this curve we need to add a new modifier curve as you might have guessed and then just select the only curve that is there so if you have this problem basically just have to move the curve around until you get it so that it's it's matching up being perfect okay now you want there to be an area so if you bring back the bridge you'll see what I mean let's just drag these a lot a bit okay now I want there to be first of all I wanted to be more of a curve okay so something about that is fine but yeah I want there to be an area because you want it to be sleek arse and stuff to be able to pass underneath it so if you had it so that this was like flat down there obviously no cars and stuff can go underneath this so you want to make it so that these poles extrude out just a little bit further beyond it sort of yeah just so there's that nice area underneath it so to do that um well let's just first drag these up a little bit further maybe just a little bit further even still okay and now going back into edit mode with our object here and I'm just gonna take these this end row of vertices and I'm just gonna drag that down to about there just create a few loop cuts along there just by hitting ctrl R dropping them in like so now you've got a nice little curve a nice little arc and you've got an area where there's no none of that you know you know manifold structuring stuff or whatever you want to call it okay cool so it's looking it's looking not bad so far so let's just I'm gonna pull the camera back a little bit see maybe just yeah I'm gonna have to actually increase the length of our road and everything so let's just do that now might screw up the texturing just a little bit but not too much so that's all right yeah it should be fairly fine I think I've got that array around the wrong way okay cool so I'm just gonna push this camera back a little bit so just press G and then why to move it along the y-axis and then with the camera selected there what I'm actually going to do is I set the focal length to be 28 and what that means is basically you're gonna get more of the scene within view of the camera so it just kind of makes it look more like a fish eye lens so if you set that like all the way back like that then you get ya like this really weird effect but yeah anyway so talk about 28 should be fine I think okay so again looking at the rule of thirds I want that cross to be right there in the roadway I think about there and I might also to give a little bit of vertigo to the viewer now I just think it looks quite cool to have it you know at this kind of angle as the reference image yeah it looks quite cool anyway moving along now let's create these cables coming down from it now one thing you'll notice with this reference image here is that these cables that are coming down like if we used that curve modifier thing to create these cables to shoot straight down it wouldn't work properly because it would try to bend those cables kind of so you'd have like kind of it coming in like will look like a ferris wheel trying to all come in to the same central point but you want the cables to shoot straight down so you actually need to model those cables and place them by hand but it's actually not as hard as you'd think or maybe it is I don't know I don't know how how do you guys think things are anyway so what we need to do is we need to steal one of these vertices rings there because we're first thing we're going to create is this I don't know connecting joint whatever you want to call it so just taking one of those vertices Rose there by holding down alt right click to get that loop cut there and then hit shift D then hit escape then hit P and then select selection like so and now if you select at the bottom of that tube there you'll see these little ring there so turn off curve now what do I turn off there oh I think I turn off all right okay yeah so turn off curve turn off a raid just so you've got just the mirror remaining and now I'm gonna position this right at the very top there and I want it to be right on one of those kind of structured joints there okay that's pretty cool now looking at it from the front view what I want to do is remove part of that circle there so something about there should be fine but you might yeah maybe one more so like that yeah yeah okay that's before I don't know who I'm trying to talk to you there anyway I'm talking myself so I've got that looking about then you don't want them to be too big or as it's gonna be really noticeable to the viewer because that's what I did a few times it just looks awful so make them quite small something like that and I'm actually going to use the mirror modifier again so what we're going to do is make this little kind of wingnut thing there so to save time that's why we're using the mirror modifier so let me see what we have to do let's hit ctrl alt C and then hit origin to geometry and then let's move that out actually let's turn off that other mirror for the moment so that's just we've got that all right we could have just changed the axe anyway add another mirror modifier extrude it inwards like that and then set the axis for that to Y just so that you've got that happening right there okay so piece of cake so far looking at it from the front view hit shift s then set cursor to selection that just places it right of that origin point there and I'm gonna add a cylinder whoa hey that's pretty cool yeah that's happening cuz we've got clipping turned on for the mirror actually you know what let's just let's delete that and I'm just gonna add a cylinder and I'm just gonna drop it in here it's just so it's a little bit easier to work with if you have it as a separate object okay so this is just that little white disc that you can see right there so giving it that kind of effect and scaling it in like so I'm just placing it at the end there like that now gonna duplicate it skeleton was again so we've got that and this is going to be that painted little ya wingnut I keep calling on wingnut some of us what they're called anyway you get the picture okay so to create that kind of little handle coming down there what I do is just take these vertices at the bottom extrude it downwards like so extrude it a little bit more and I'm just gonna rotate it in slightly and actually for this actually need to make it so that it's this part of this object there that's why we've got the mirror set up by the way so as we do this extrude it inwards a little more you can see we have this effect right there so this is probably way too much detail that you'd need for this but you know can't hurt so what can hurt it can hurt your time anyway I'm just gonna make a little wing nut there as well again it's probably way too much detail I don't know why I'm doing this I just kind of sometimes I like try to create things like really quickly low poly and then I regret it later because it looks fake like I should add in more detail but usually the opposite is the case all right sit ctrl J for that and now we've got that mirror effect happening nicely make sure you turn on the or add an edge split modifier so you don't have that smoothing effect that was happening there yeah okay so it's looking pretty good now we need to let's just apply some quick materials to it so I'm just gonna call this let's call it base white all right we're gonna use this same material for the rest of the bridge as well turn up the hardness come up to 40 minutes in this tutorial Wow yeah I know it's gonna be a bit of a long one and it doesn't look like it needs to be like you think suspension bridge it's quite easy but no no no no no no you know I requires little bit more work than that okay so now we need to add another one let's just duplicate that base white one this is gonna be that gray kind of winner look to it gonna make it a little bit shinier and let's apply that to this part right there hit a sign you can see it looks quite cool and well not really apply the mirror and now I'm just gonna add from the top view here a nice quick cylinder turnoff cap ends scale that down scale it right down okay and this is obviously going to be that pole that shoots all the way down from the top to the bottom okay like so turn on smooth shading and we're just going to make it part of that other object there so here ctrl J and yeah there you go so to get this pole there so I'm just gonna hit ctrl L gonna give it another material let's call this Chrome not the browser you know the real Chrome the one before Google came along turn up the hardener so it's nice and shiny and maybe give it a little bit of a fresh nail as well just so it's not completely reflective so you know something like that just because you can see in the reference image there those poles a little bit shiny so that's why I'm doing this and make sure you hit a sign on that object there hit a sign and there you go really easy yes as I said that's a lot harder than it should be I know it's a big pain anyway um let's put this let's hit alt G and that just puts it right in the center there if you go into edit mode then just drag that across and then just place it in the right place and I just ensures you get the origin point exactly where it needs to be so that's why I'm doing it in this way okay and then just add a mirror modifier very easy okay cool so now basically what we want to do is we want to duplicate each of these objects so that one of them is that every one of these support joints now if you hit shift D and then duplicate it across it works and you can see that works fine but if you edit one of these and you go oh yeah this pole there mmm I'm gonna make the pole light shorter because I'm weird it doesn't affect the other one like that so that's a problem you want to make sure that you can edit them all later on very easily so quick shortcut alt D now what that's doing is it is duplicating it but it's duplicating it so that they're linked okay so if now I edit this one here and I say I'm gonna make that small you can see that now edits both of them because they are linked you can see there in the little object there it's got a little two next to it so that is a benefit of hitting alt D instead of shift D so there is a little tip for you so I'm just going to do that for each of these really really simple you could use an array modifier if you really wanted to but it would be way too confusing to set up and it's just one of those things where it's easier just to do it yourself if you want to go almost there if you're getting bored I apologize that is just how it goes Abdi Abdi alt D yeah that's enough okay cool so now this seems looking a lot nicer let's go ahead and hit render now and we should see something that looks better yay awesome okay well one thing we're gonna do now is we're gonna add a bounce light so you want to make it look as though the light is bouncing off the road and coming up here and hitting the rest of our little bridge so to do that I'm gonna add an area lamp so lamp area drop that in right there rotate that by 90 degrees so it's facing directly upwards change it to area shape is rectangular let's make the Y size drag that all the way out so that it fits the length of the bridge and the X as well so it's somewhere about there and then let's position that just underneath the road like that now it's a point you put it underneath the road because what I'm going to do next is I'm gonna move our lamp to be on just on layer two like this and I'm also gonna move the barriers and the handrail to be on layer 2 as well reason for that is I want this lamp here to just affect this bridge they're the barriers that are coming up so there and then the handrail as well but I don't want it to affect the road so I don't want it to have to try and pass through the road to apply lighting to the rest of the scene so having that lamp there just hit this layer only because everything is on layer 2 you could turn on Ray's shadow if you like that is fine and now let's go ahead and hit render again and look at that it looks absolutely horrible because the lamp energy is set to 1 let's turn that back to ya point 1 something like that I think should be a bit nicer yeah I mean it's not perfect but maybe just turn it up a little bit more it's kind of like you don't want to overdo it but you also just want to try and get a little bit more lighting in those places yeah that's too much maybe one point well no point one - let me just check out the indirect lighting turned on our that's another thing you know set the indirect lighting bounces to two and that'll just put a little bit more lighting and kind of these little nooks and crannies there at least that's what you hope it does and then it doesn't do it but yeah let me just have a look check everything here so you got a shadow that's coming up yeah actually I think that's part of the problem let's turn off shadows for that bounce lamp let's turn that off and I think that should actually give us yeah you don't have that awful kind of shadow problem happening there also turn off specularity as well because there shouldn't be any specularity from that lamp because it's bounce lighting it's kind of like overall lighting so yeah that's not looking too bad I'd say that's it so it's pretty good I'd say I mean could be better but yeah whatever that's all right okay cool so the background let's drop in the background so the image that I'm going to use is one that I added before accidentally just one right here and that is a background from seedy textures calm if you wanted to you could go ahead and you could try and create these mountains yourself and you could also join the Nature Academy and you can learn that but no we want to save time because you know it's kind of like a secondary element to this image it's not like the center you know focal point of the scene it's not the point of it so we're saving time we're gonna use an image don't be afraid of using images I mean you know it's good to get practice and all that but sometimes it's good to finish an image as well so oh sorry I didn't explain what I just did there okay all right so I'm using a script called the import images as planes I did a little mini tutorial on that recently as well but basically what that means is you can now go file import images as planes then just select the image you could turn on shadeless plain dimensions as well then just hit import and it automatically chooses the correct dimensions for that image see it matches that one there perfectly otherwise you'd have to try and guess it yourself and then you can just rotate it so that it fits everything like this and you'll notice it's already applied the material turned on shadeless for you everything is done really really simple really easy I'm just gonna push that into the background a bit because I'm going to duplicate this bridge a few times in a minute and if you haven't set the background image disappears that's because you need to turn up the end value for your art your camera so the clipping value okay so now let's scale that up I'm gonna rotate it a bit as well I don't think I did that from my image but you know that's alright as you know what no I don't like that I don't like that at all let's just scale that okay so you know I don't know how this is gonna look let's give it our render hopefully it looks alright yeah that's not bad I mean it's alright I mean this part here is really annoying me so we're gonna fix that soon as well no we're gonna fix that now so let's do that so we want to make it so there is a little support beam going across there a lot our reference image if I can remember it this one oh you can't even see it but any but let's assume there's a little beam there it would be silly if there wasn't so jumping into edit mode right here I'm gonna just grab one of these beams right there no just you why they connected ah because they're merged okay all right well let's mm-hmm don't want that one I just want don't and connect unconnect ah that's really annoy me let's just duplicate okay that's alright alright drop that in there and there you go we have a support beam really quick really easy okay so other things you could change the lighting around those beams there is a little bit too extreme so I'm gonna have to turn that down maybe a point oh did it again Oh point zero eight okay because you want that lighting to you know hit the tops of it there we aren't to be like really really bright around the other bottom because obviously it's brighter towards you know as it gets closer to the lamp you know let's you could fill around that if you want maybe just turn it with sky lighting just a touch environment lighting by the way has an advantage over just using a sky lamp like just duplicating a Sun lamp because that's how I used to do it like just grab that Sun lamp duplicate it 90 degrees then make the color like a blue color like this is like how I used to always do my sky lighting probably that is that you don't get you know overall sky lighting because you know the sky is everywhere so it needs to be not in just in one direction but everywhere so environment lighting does that for you so but yeah I think that's looking at okay so far now what I'm going to do is just well I'm gonna move the camera and the Sun lamp to my layer down there and now I'm just gonna grab all of these right there excluding the background image there then hit shift D no sorry alt D again so that they're linked and make the roads so that they're touching like that doesn't matter if those poles they're overlapping that's alright you're not gonna be able to see very far anyway okay and that's just so get a little bit more depth to the image so give that a render now it's probably gonna add a little bit more to the rent times but hopefully not too much should be quite easy come on yeah we haven't rendered our sky lighting that the lamp let's do that but it's looking quite good what we're gonna do next is we're gonna add a little bit of a glare effect to our to our image so if I can just just see if I can show you just before we start it again you know you saw it at the beginning just so I can show you what I mean so what we're going to do now is we're going to add that little Sun glare effect coming off the the paint of the bridge so that's we're going to do and I'm sure you got some like nice even lighting over my bridge and then on our one it looks kind of a little bit harsher I think I think that depends on like the size of these as well I think possibly I think maybe this guy color there is a little bit extreme maybe needs to be a little bit paler perhaps you're like a little bit more down there I think anyway just guessing but yeah it's a lighting can sometimes take a little bit longer to set up but anyway so yeah so we're gonna be adding that nice little Sun glare effect that you just saw so to do that what we're gonna do is jump into our render layers over here you can see you've got a render layer set up and now we want to create a specular pass okay because that's how we're gonna fake that little Sun glare effect so down here just turn on specular okay now if you render that again what that's going to do is just create a separate pass so it's going to be completely black except for the areas where specularity is applying which if you don't know is light reflecting off objects so to show you what I mean jump over to the compositor by hitting ctrl left arrow let's just move this around cuz I don't like that and never use it turn on use nodes and normally you wouldn't have that little specular little output there but because we've checked that we now have so if we go output viewer this is what the scene looks like and this is what the specular pass looks like so you can see what it's doing that now what I want to do is just change the material yeah we haven't even applied a material to our bridge that's pretty part of it actually yeah let's do that okay huh all right so let's just make this base white and I'm going to turn up this intensity maybe turn up the hardness as well not that most about 375 that should be fine because that specular part is obviously going to be affected by how much speculators are the intensity of it and the hardness as well so before the the render pass was looking like too much specularity was applying so now it's looking a lot better there's only just like a little bit there so now we can do whatever we like to that specularity are passed there so I'm gonna add a glare node a lot of this is actually discussed in the wow factor which is an e-book I wrote on compositing but you know it's it's got a number of user so I'm just gonna throw it in here as well give you guys a little freebie show you guys how to do something cool so what i'm doing here is i'm adding a glare node now this is going to if we turn the threshold all the way down it's creating a nice little star glare effect there okay so something like that I don't I don't know six six streaks I think that could be alright and then if you've got like too many areas where the glare is affecting it you can turn that threshold up and then it will make it occur in less places and then if you set the mix amount to zero that means that'll show the specularity plus the effect that you're occurring to it we don't actually want that because you've got specularity in our main image as well which we're going to be combining soon so we're gonna set that mix amount to is 2:1 so you just get the effect and I'm gonna do similar thing with our little node here set that to relative let's make that two okay said that to why maybe yeah something like that should be fine so we want to add a mixed node to combine these two here drop them in like that hit add okay you can see the effect we've got there now and let's duplicate that add node drag that in there and then combine it with the rest of our scene and you can see there if I hit alt V no no V there we go you can see we now have a nice little glare effect occurring to that area right there so it's quite cool and I'm hitting V by the way just too so it's up V and then V if you want to zoom in and out of your background image um otherwise you know I think that is looking pretty good well what I'm gonna do now I'm just gonna be adding a few more slight touches to the scene just to make it a little bit more realistic and you can see the kind of the basic modeling and everything the scenes looking pretty complete as is but I'm gonna be adding some street lamps down the street now and also just adding a little bit of texturing to our bridge here just to kind of yeah again bringing out some of the realism so first things first let's model a street lamp very very easy to do so all we need to do is excuse me first thing we're gonna do is add in a cylinder okay I'm gonna set the number of vertices for that cylinder to 16 and uncheck cap ends okay alright I'm now gonna scale this all the way down and I'm gonna position it right next to our barrier here okay so somewhere like that you can see where that is in relation to the scene okay so something like that and you want to make it so it's thick enough if it looks too thin looks quite flimsy I mean if you're watching this tutorial you have electricity in your country so you know what a Street poll looks like you can check out some reference images online if you want to get more realistic okay so what I need to do is create a bend in this pipe there so an easy way to do that is to use the spin function which I very rarely use but it's alright it works pretty well we need to do is on position the 3d cursor kind of around where the pivot point you want it to sort of spin out the curve so right there is fine now if I hit spin it's now created a spin defect now it sides spun it in the wrong direction so underneath degrees I'm gonna set that to minus and you can also change the number of steps there if you like but I'm just going to set that to nine that's fine in fact I'm also going to delete these two edge loops right there and then just take that in peace and then extrude it right out okay so something like there should be fine I think possibly it's a little bit too heavy at the top so just scaling that down a bit I'm just going to extrude the little piece in like that and I'm just gonna place a cube right at the end there okay and this is just gonna be you know the little light fitting at the end again this is really low pom really low poly modeling it basically just gets the job done it's kind of like a placeholder for something better that should be there but it's on the way or something it's it's quite dodgy go into a bit more detail if you like but that's fine for the task that way using it for so turning on smooth shading and edge split as well and I'm just going to set that to 88 so you get kind of a nice you know a smooth edge around there and then the rest of the pipe the tube is smooth as well so we want to make sure that it is mirrored on both sides of the street so again hit shift see how it does that it zooms me all the way out shift see right there and you can hit ctrl alt shift see now and then just say origin to 3d cursor and it's now placed that little dot right in the centre now I can just say mirror and now it's placed whoa it's placed one on the opposite side of the street exactly where it needs to me and now as you probably want a guest we're just going to use an array modifier and you want to get the distance looking pretty good so it's just it's create a few of them I think that's pretty good distance they're actually so just where it is currently maybe a little bit closer something maybe something like that yeah that's pretty good and then just a matter of just increasing the count like so and that should be that so we'll give that a quick render now I'm assuming that's all gonna look pretty fine and dandy actually one other thing just got to give it a quick material very very quick something like that just make it a slight grayish color as well you can also give some texturing to the streetlamp if you like I did for my final scene but it's not that noticeable so yeah I'd say it looks fine as it is so alrighty just giving it a quick render now so we can have a look yeah like I said I mean it's not perfect but you can see it looks like a street lamp which is what we want okay so now we're gonna be applying some texturing to our bridge here okay so to do this it's quite a complex you know object so you know any sort of normal texturing you'd normally do isn't really gonna work that well here now you've got like a smooth tube object you've also got this zig zaggy you know support beams everywhere so yeah it's a little bit harder to texture easiest way to do it though is to are basically UV unwrapping everything so okay let's just jump over here set this to UV image on use the image editor and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit you I'll just hit reset so this is what you'd see if you just open it up cuz I did a little bit work before I'm gonna set this to if you press you smart UV project okay let's give this little box here you know what I mean it does and you know it's alright and now that what this is done is it's given just a really rough kind of choppy looking you know UV unwrapping it's not perfect in fact like it's created like a cut right down the tube which you know shouldn't really be there but you know it's alright in fact I see if I want to what you could do is I select the tube there no hit control I hit P so just sticks all of those little objects where it should be and if I just select the tube if I want to match up I hit you and then cylinder projection I think yeah it's actually gonna give us a kind of a nicer looking projection so yeah I might actually stick with that one it's not bad okay so just scaling this up so that it kind of fits you know the screen where it is right there and they're squishing it down along the y-axis if it's you know too tall whatever but yeah something like that should be fine now if I hit what we've got to add the texture first so texture panel go to image open and the image I'm gonna use is that grunge map 20 to 1 so that's this one you can see right here and I'm gonna set the mapping to be UV of course turn down the color set that to multiply and then on the contrast set that to to turn down the color like so and there you go so let's give that a quick render now and hopefully that looks fine we might need to actually do some different texturing for the support beams because it might not have texted fine like I'm pretty sure it hasn't so anyway let's give it a quick look yeah so the support beams look pretty horrible so way to fix that if we just duplicate this material let's call this beams duplicate or not duplicate but you know create a separate entity for this texture right here and then underneath mapping turn it to generated cube and then I'm gonna set that to two hopefully that should fingers crossed should look pretty fine so the text ring for the tube is looking quite good but yeah just those support beams that's what we're trying to fix now and it should be looking pretty good hopefully okay so you can see there's still a little bit of problem okay so you can see it there's still a little bit of problem with the texturing so I might just turn up the I think at the why perhaps it's a little bit tricky trying to get this to work I mean it's not that noticeable in fact you probably get away with just you know turning down the color there and you probably wouldn't really even notice it that much it's um yeah they have text it in the wrong one now so let's turn that to to maybe turn the X up you can never really figure out which direction is which yeah hopefully this will look fine yes I mean it's not perfect but you can sort of get the idea as one final step just to finish off the scene because I always do this got to do it we're gonna add a vignette so I always do this anyway I'm sure you know how to do it lens distortion node first turning up lens distortion all the way up to one then adding in a math node or is it what am I looking for math there we go send it to greater than set that to zero add a blow node set it to fast Gaussian drop that in there 20 20 20 20 20 and then a mix node setting the mix node to multiply bottom one in there tot one in there and now if you were node don't it to be too much you could turn it all the way up if you want but you know just something to sort of just bring the focus in towards the center but yeah there you go that is pretty much it in a nutshell so for my final scene as you can see here I added a few more extra element so I added a little bit of paper down the side of the of the bridge there I added a speed limit sign there according to the Australian standards of speed limit signs and yeah I mean I've got a little bit of filling of course always to try and get a better result but you can sort of see the look you've got so I hope you enjoyed the tutorial guys hope you learned a few things from it and thanks very much for watching

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 71,202

Keywords: blender, modelling, tutorial, suspension, bridge

Id: WYdtkMXM_xI

Length: 66min 4sec (3964 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2012