SHADING PHASE:

It feels so good that we’ve gone past the modeling phase already.  Now we tell our tin can how it is made and what it is made of.

In this stage, we’ll just quickly add some basic materials and shading to our current object and distinguish some of its parts for later texturing.

Let’s go ahead and select our main tin can mesh in Object Mode and press F5 on your keyboard or click the Shading (F5) button then go to Materials sub button to activate the materials menu. Go to the Links and Pipeline tab and click Add New to create a new material block.

Rename the currently added material into “metal” and adjust the material settings accordingly (as seen in the screenshot below). The only settings I adjusted are the color, specularity, and reflectivity.

Copy the same material settings to the opener and the circle object (I don’t know what it’s called). But instead of manually selecting each and every object and then adding or browsing through the materials menu, what we’ll do is just link whatever settings the main metal material has such that when we change the material, it will readily reflect those changes to the other objects as well. We do that by first selecting the objects that will inherit the material, then select last the object that has the reference material, in this case, the main soda can. Then press CTRL+L on your keyboard and choose Materials.

If we do a render right now, here’s how it will look like:

Initial Render

Not that convincing yet. But we’ll deal with that shortly.

 

Two down. Next thing on the list: textures.

TEXTURING PHASE:

During my career in 3D, texturing has been one of the things I’ve been very scared of, probably because I was just too reluctant to learn or even know it and another is the concept of another dimension called UVW, which seems pretty daunting at first. But somehow, I got over it and am very happy that however scary it seemed to me before, it’s how lovely it is to have now.  Hopefully though, even with just letting you see a tid bit of info about basic texturing, you get the idea.

Right now, we’ll just deal with some basic procedural textures and image textures with decent UV mapping techniques.  Let’s get it on!

With our main tin can body selected, switch to Edit Mode if you haven’t yet by pressing TAB on your keyboard or accessing it through the Mode dropdown on the bottom part of your 3D viewport screen. Rotate your view and select the back-most part of the vertical edge loop that we’ll use. Then press CTRL+E and choose Mark Seam. What this will do is tell Blender that this part of the mesh is where the unwrapping and unfolding will take place and tear from. After applying the Mark Seam, you’ll see a thick line drawn across the edges you’ve selected. Confused? See the screenshot below.

After we’ve marked the necessary edges and seams, we can now proceed and select parts of the mesh that we want to be unwrapped.  But before that, let’s just go ahead for awhile and add some procedural textures to the metal material to simulate the brushed metal texture.

Let’s go back and head over to our Shading (F5) > Materials menu and browse over to the Textures panel and click Add New to create a new texture slot.

After this, head over to the Texture Buttons (F6), rename the texture to brushed, choose a Cloud texture, and change the Noise Size to .005 and the Noise Depth to 4.  Leave the other default values as it is, we might not need them.

Let’s get back to our Material Settings and scroll over to the Texture panel and head over to the Map Input tab and the Map To tab. Under Map Input, change the mapping as seen in the screenshot below. Under Map To, make it affect the Col and Nor options which stands for Color and Normal (or bump mapping) respectively. Change the Nor value to something low like 0.20 and also change the color to something a tad darker than the original color of the material.

Doing a render now, this is what we see:

Basic Render with Procedural Texture

 

Now we can go ahead and proceed on UV mapping an image texture to the tin can body itself. Since the last time we went into Edit Mode, we’ve created an Edge Seam to derive our UV mapping from, so we’ll take it from there.

Select all of the vertices that we want our label/sticker to be wrapped on, as exemplified here, the four middle rows of vertices are selected.

Split your screen so that the left most side would have our model and the right of it would be the UV/Image Editor Window. While at the UV/Image Editor Window, open and browse the image that you want to be wrapped on the body of your can by going to Image > Open on the header menu of the window.

Hover your mouse cursor over to the 3D viewport and press U then choose Unwrap. What this will do is intelligently unwrap your selected edges according to how you marked your seams and will preview the selection on your UV/Image editor window.

Right now, the way Blender unwrapped our selection is already good enough, but looking closely at it, we see non-straight lines which we do not want since we wished for our texture to be mapped correctly according to the lines that our object represent.

We fix this by selecting the necessary vertices in the UV/Image editor, just like how we normally select vertices in the 3D Viewport, then press S for Scale, and if you want it to be straight horizontally, follow it up with a Y then press 0 to straighten it, and if you want it vertically, do an X then press 0.  After everything has been straightened up, select the whole set of edges and scale them a bit such that they’re not touching the border because this might cause problems later if we disregarded doing that.

But still, something just doesn’t look right now. Even though we’ve actually corrected the edges the way they are now, their size is inappropriate for our label. If we are going to see the mapping right now, we’d see only half of the word “Pepsi” since that’s only where our selection is at. To address this, simply select all of the edges and scale them along the y-axis (while at the UV/Image Editor Window). That should fix it.

Now, if we’re going to render our can, we won’t see anything but the same thing that we saw on our last render. Why? Because we haven’t told Blender yet to use the image we uwrapped our mesh on; how is it going to be mapped and where. Go to Edit Mode and select the vertices that encompass the parts we used for the unwrapping awhile back and go to Editing (F9) then go to Links and Materials tab and click New on the right hand side to create a new material index. This is a very important part here. If we didn’t do it, our mapping for the image would go haywire, so I highly suggest you follow me on this. You’ll notice that after pressing the New button, a new name appears above with the current name of our material appended with a .001, what that means is that a new material datablock has already been added. However, nothing is assigned to it yet, so while at the same place in the Links and Materials tab and the vertices still selected in our 3D Viewport, click the Assign button to make this group of vertices be a user of the newly created material. This technique is called material indexing, where a single object could have multiple materials assigned to it depending on the way its mesh is constructed.

Let’s head over to the Material options once again and rename our newly created material into something more appropriate. Let’s name it “label”.  And create a new texture, name it “pepsi” and make it an Image Texture. On the image options of the texture, click on the drop-down menu and browse for the image we just opened before.

Then finally, choose the mapping options. Map it to UV and just enable the Col option.

Before we do a render, it’s a good idea to pack our images into our blend file so whenever we open our files elsewhere, the images that come along with it stays intact.

Do this by going to File > External Data > Pack into .blend file (you’ll notice a gift box icon appear on your header after doing this) and in the UV/Image Editor press the Gift box icon.

So now, if we do a test render, here’s how it will look like:

Render with Textures

 

Almost there. Next, we light up the scene better. Let’s go!