Taking a quick moment with this tutorial to give a preview and explanation for a totally awesome new feature in Blender 2.49, which should be released soon. There is a release candidate for Blender 2.49 available on blender.org, so you’ll have to download that to follow along with this tutorial. The feature I’m talking about is Etch-a-ton, which allows sketch-based rigging. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that’s certain to help speed up and simplify the process of rigging in Blender. This tutorial walks you through the basics of how to use it. Of course, there’s a lot more to this tool that what I can show in 10 minutes, but this should plenty to get you started. As with before, you can download this tutorial directly to your computer and it has also been uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Have fun!

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This is an extension to the Modeling an Eye tutorial in Chapter 5. Here I show you how to use material indices to to rough out some of the basic materials on the eye, including the lens, iris, and pupil. There’s a touch on 3-point lighting here, but that’s more of a topic for another tutorial. As with the other tutorials, I’ve uploaded this one to both YouTube and Vimeo… and there’s a link below to directly download the .mp4 file for your own personal use. Enjoy!
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This is a quick tutorial on using a UV Sphere to model an eye. This is the basic eye that I typically always start my character models with. It’s a good starting point and it renders quite nicely. You can watch the tutorial in the player below and there’s a link at the bottom of this post if you’d like to download the tutorial for yourself. This tutorial is also available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Check out the Adding Basic Materials on an Eye tutorial in Chapter 7 to see how to get this model ready for render. (more…)