How to create your own Gas planet using Blender and Photoshop/GIMP

This tutorial consists of 3 main sections.

Section 1: How to create your own diffuse and bump map for the gas planet surface.

Section 2: How to set up a scene in blender for your gas planet

Section 3: How to create a transparency map for the rings, and render the final image.

All of the above sections require blender (I am using version 2.56) and Photoshop, or Gimp

For this tutorial you will need a general knowledge of both blender and Photoshop (or Gimp), and hopefully a bit of common sense.

(Click to see full resolution)

To read the rest of this tutorial, you can download the free, 20 page PDF file HERE.

This tutorial was created, and kindly shared by Jon Dawe.

PaintDotNet Tutorial for Blender-How to create highlights on your support images.

Here’s a short tutorial demonstrating how to achieve this effect on screenshots that you share:

The tutorial:

Mentioned in the video:

zScreen: A fantastic free screenshot taking program.

PaintDotNet

How to use a custom Blender theme (2.49)

So you’ve been using Blender more and more, and you’re starting to get tired of the default look of the interface. You look around on the internet a bit, and you find someone sharing their neat little theme. It comes in a file, which when opened looks like gibberish. What to do?

Check out this tutorial to learn how to change the look of your own Blender.

‘Proxy’ Meshes

A little bit ago I was building a super highpoly brick wall. I was planning on baking the normals to a lowpoly object to use in a game. But long before I had even half of the wall done, Blender’s interface starting slowing down because of the high poly count, until it was like swimming through frozen molasses. I wondering if there was a way to make these highpoly bricks temporarily draw the lowpoly models to improve performance. So I asked about, and Scott aka ‘Yodaman921′ gave me a great idea which became the basis for this tutorial.