Correctly setting up blueprints so they’re usable in your modeling work-flow can be a frustrating task to say the least, but in today’s Quick Tip you’ll learn how to do just that. Sasa Posloncec will show you the best place to find and download blueprints, how to correctly separate, scale and align them using Photoshop and how to get them up and running inside 3D Studio Max. Get started after the jump!
Discover the Design For Place features and specifications, and download the plans and elevations.
If you decide to build, adapt or use Design For Place for your project get in touch. We are keen to collect your stories, pictures and videos to share on the site—and hope to provide options to interact with other users building with Design For Place soon.
Design For Place showcases sustainable, modern design. The architect-designed house plans feature a large main bedroom with a generous walk-in-robe (WIR) and ensuite. There is also an open plan living and kitchen area with cathedral ceilings, bathroom and laundry. The flexible, functional floor plans are available for longer blocks in two size options: 3 bedroom plus study (Option 1A) and 2 bedroom plus study (Option 2A), both include a single car garage.
Features include the dramatic ceiling line, extra highlight windows, and generous room sizes including a study capable of accommodating two adults working together. The study can also be used as an additional bedroom.
If your block has north to the street a 3 bedroom + study courtyard house (Option 3A), is also available (floorplan only). Central courtyards assist in providing opportunities for north-facing glazing on the majority of living spaces, you will need to develop elevations and full plans for this option.
Other features include:
The 3 bedroom + study (Option 1A) is a single detached dwelling suitable for a typical suburban block of just over 500m2, with north to a side boundary. The design is aimed at providing a compact, energy-efficient and flexible home.
The 2 bedroom + study (Option 2A) is a single, detached dwelling suitable for a typical suburban block of just over 500m2, with north to a side boundary. The design is aimed at providing a compact, energy-efficient and flexible home that appeals to families and ‘down-sizers’.
For details of all the materials and finishes view the full specifications.
The key features of Options 1A and 2A are:
| Option | Bedrooms | Study | Garage | Bath | Area (m2) | Garage (m2) | Total area (m2) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 bed + study (1A) | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 172 | 22 | 194 |
| 2 bed + study (2A) | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 141 | 28 | 169 |
Until the day when desktop holography becomes a reality, 3D will remain the wholly grail of the graphics world. But 3D can be a very technical craft. And each 3D program has its own idiosyncrasies, making it all a bit daunting.
I cut my 3D chops on many programs that are now long dead and forgotten. Blender is one program I’ve wanted to learn for many years. I’ve even downloaded and installed it a few times, but fell short on the follow-through to learn it. Writing this article is my personal impetus to finally get to learning it. Perhaps it can be your impetus as well. Let’s see where we can take this in just 24 hours.
Blender has many qualities that include years of steady development, a prized commodity in either commercial or open source projects. This has netted a broad range of capabilities, beyond even its full range of 3D modeling and animation tools.
For example, Blender has video editing, camera tracking, compositing, and even game creation tools all built right in. The fact that it’s open source and completely free is also an unbeatable perk! (Though donations to the Blender Foundation are a good idea.) With all this power, Blender’s toolset is often directly compared to top programs in the 3D field costing thousands, like Mayaor 3ds Max.
Naysayers may complain it lacks centralized support, since there is no commercial publisher with a help staff. However there is ample support onlineon many sites, and even a real time IRC chat option. This means nights and weekend support too! Plus, the Blender community can be uniquely generous with its help.
The other knock is Blender’s much smaller market share, which means there are perhaps fewer companies looking to hire Blender artists. Having said that, know that this is changing and there are sites like the Blender Network that specialize in matching Blender artists with employers. And even mainstream job sites are getting more Blender savvy every day.
None of this is even an issue if you run your own shop or are just doing your own thing. Then all that matters are the final renderings. And few clients know or care about all this techno-geek talk.
I went up to Blender’s website , clicked on the ‘Download’ link, and chose between the installers available for Mac, Windows, Linux and even FreeBSD. (And made a small donation while there!) Installation was almost crazy-easy, and fast. Which is common for most open source programs.
Once installed, I booted it up like a kid on Christmas morning. The splash page had a number of links, including one to the official Blender manual online. The manual is an excellent resource, but perhaps a bit better suited to those that already have an introduction to both 3D and Blender.
Upon first viewing, Blender’s interface can be overwhelming. But it isn’t as complicated as it first looks. Once you understand the logical thought process it becomes much less daunting. Logic-wise it’s rather similar to Adobe programs like Photoshop or InDesign.
The default Blender interface is made up of four areas. (A) in the image above is called the Toolbar, a collection of the most commonly used tools. (B) is the 3D Viewport, or work window. (C) is a vertical stacking of many control/preference/properties interfaces, which again, is just like Adobe products you know. (D) is the timeline, for animation work. You might be familiar with this from programs like After Effects.
Understanding these basics makes Blender all the more approachable. Although not necessarily more useable. Before looking at any instructions, I felt compelled to muck about with the buttons, doodads and doohickeys, and hoped to find my way around. But I’ll admit that I wasn’t too successful. I began to realize that Blender wasn’t quite as intuitive – at least for me – as I had hoped.
So I started to explore what alternative ways I could go about learning it, beyond the button-poking. I quickly found out there are quite a few learning options out there.
Starting my second hour with Blender, I began hunting for ways to learn it. I started out the way many of you would, by looking online for books. A quick search turned up dozens of books which included titles such as ‘Blender 3D Cookbook’ and ‘Blender Basics’ (both from PACKT Publishing), and ‘Blender for Dummies’ (John Wiley & Sons), all recently published as print and Kindle editions.
I ordered a few of these books for download. Which books best fit your learning style is up to you. As might be expected by the title, the ‘Dummies’ books take extra pains to make easing into a new subject as painless as possible, so are a good place to start. But they also tend to not go as deep as other offerings. All the books were well written and took me step by step.
And while I began learning from these books, I had to acknowledge that whether it’s our cultural evolution, or just me getting older, I found it harder to read this tech material than I used to. So I began looking for other ways to learn.
Again, I didn’t do anything different here than most of you, I went trolling around YouTube with search phrases like ‘learn blender’, which gave a return of 157,000 videos. I’m sure most had more to do with making a good smoothie, but still, there were hundreds on Blender 3D.
Some of the most popular Blender tutorial channels included Blender for Noobswith over 27k subscribers, Blender Guru with over 153k subscribers (see the amazing architecture video!), and tutor4u with over 172k subscribers.
Jacob Lewis offers a 2014 updated 10-part video series called ‘Blender Absolute Beginner Tutorial’ with about 380k subscribers. One video that is seriously worth a look is Max Coulfield’s great Blender sculpture timelapse.
I spent time finding and then watching many videos, and at this point I had clocked in roughly 10 hours of working on the Blender project, across two or three days. Trying to do it all in one day would surely have exploded my tiny head.
After viewing YouTube tutorials for a bit, I will admit to a bias against any that begin with “Yo-yo fellas… wassup?” An experience that can leave you wanting more formally prepared material.
So I finally did something that many of you might not actually do. I contacted Ton Roosendaal, the original creator of Blender, and now the Chairman of the Blender Foundation. He was gracious and we exchanged a number of emails. At his suggestion, I got in touch with Jonathan Williamson, a co-founder and instructor at CG Cookie, an online computer graphics video education resource. CG Cookie has courseware for Blender, as well as other subjects like creative concepting and Unity game development.
CG Cookie offers what they call ‘Learning Flows’ for Blender, which contains 141 separate video installments. These are broken down into 9 sections, with topics like modeling, lighting, etc. The first module in the series is ‘Blender Basics’, which they make available at no cost. It contains six videos that run about a half hour total. Over the next few days I watched the intro videos, and as many of the follow-up sections as I could. All the while popping back to Blender to try things out.
I also touched base with Anja, who runs the Blender Shop on blender.org. She provided a long list of Blender learning resources, which we have reprinted at the end of the article.
So by the time I was nearing my 18th hour with all of this, I was feeling like I was in a fairly good place. By that I mean I could navigate around the interface with aplomb, I could create, modify, and texture map models (with limits on complexity), light them, and render out basic animations. In other words, I could knock out basic day-to-day 3D work. No character modeling, video editing or compositing, I’ll leave that for another day.
If this was for myself instead of an article it would have gone faster. One book and one video series would have been fine. I’m sure you’ll keep things simpler.
So what are you waiting for? Download it now, and let us know how your learning curve goes!
A good way to learn Blender if you don’t have experience with 3D
programs is to start with Blender’s own tutorials and manual.
You can find lots of free tutorials on the internet about learning Blender.
http://wiki.blender.org/
http://cgcookie.com/blender/
http://www.blenderguru.com/
If you have questions about using Blender you can always place them on the forums.
Words: Lance Evans
Lance Evans is creative director of Graphlink Media.
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Not all of us have the time or inclination to craft our own creative resumes, and arguably having a flashy or beautifully illustrated curriculum vitae printed on 130gsm paper is of far less importance than a well-presented design portfolio.
But your CV still needs to clearly impart key information about your career, while still displaying a little of your personality. We’ve had a search around and have found these 10 free résumé templates, each of which offers something a little different. Here goes.
This subtle yet stylish CV template features all the details you need to include, along with a neat sidebar holding a profile and references and a timeline – in which you can list your employment history. There’s also an online profile section to show just how social media-savvy you are and a software skills bar graph so you can show your exact skills. It’s supplied in PSD, AI and INDD formats.
This simple, elegant free resume template is one of many presented by Designscrazed. The design is separated into easy-to-read, clear section with an option at the bottom for you to add icons to list your hobbies and interest, which gives it a nice touch. The zip file contains three psd files to build your personal resume, cover letter and a portfolio web template should you wish. All layers are well grouped and easily edited in Photoshop.
A lot of the time, less is more when it comes to CV and resume design – and this subtle, minimal template is perfect for communicating your work history and profile in style. There’s room for a photo (we’d suggest black and white) and you can either change the background colour or print onto coloured paper for a unique and stylish CV.
If icons are your thing, check out this free template (only free for a limited time, mind) from designer Fernando Báez. A sectionalised design, complete with stylish type and icons included (you get the CV in AI format and the icons in PSD), this resume is perfect for customising with your own icons to represent your interests and achievements.
Sure, this may not be to everyone’s taste – but it’s certainly impactful. A central typographic column bursts out to boxes in which you can add your details. The resume is supplied in AI format so you can easily export a PDF – and comes in black and white so you can get creative with colours.
Again, simplicity is the key here in a type-based CV (using Open Sans) that puts profile at the top, then lists experience and education in simple boxes with left-hand sub-headers. There’s also – and this seems to be a trend amongst résumé designers – a professional skills section enabling you to grade yourself out of five on software, code and the like (stick them all to five if we were you).
This highly-customisable resume template comes in PSD and AI formats and has a Smart Object header, meaning you can quickly and easily link in an image of your choice. It’s A4, 300dpi, with 3mm bleed – so completely print-ready. Just add your logo, bio, experience and so on and you’re ready to print and send.
Keep it super-minimal with this resume template. Once again there’s a bar graph for your skills (which we’re still not sure about but some employers may like it) along with a neat icon style to represent your social media profiles and software competence. It’s supplied in layered PSD format.
Maybe you’re looking to make more of a statement with your one-pager – in which case this typographic template by Paolo Pettigiani may be just the ticket. Easy to customise and available in AI format with all the necessary fonts and icons, it’s definitely worth experimenting with.
A modern resume with room for everything you’d need to say about yourself and more, we like the placeholders for adding imagery and your personal logo or logotype in the header. There’s also a services list, skills graphs and client box. A comprehensive PSD resume that you may need to cut down to size a little.
Even though virtual reality is a big trend, not everyone knows how to do it. To help out, Chaos Group Labs just released a free VR Guide for artists and hobbyists who want to start a VR project, but don’t know where to begin.
Common pitfalls associated with VR are addressed through scientific research and production insights, culminating in step-by-step instructions that explain how to make VR stills and video.
The team behind it includes contributors from Chaos Group Labs, Legend3D’s VR division and the World Building Institute.
Topics include:
There are even sample architectural visualization examples that let people see how you can turn old or new pre-rendered content into a compelling VR experience using V-Ray. We’d urge you to check out the Salle Labrouste room: it’s quite amazing.
With a cover tutorial on modelling, texturing and rendering a realistic mech, 3D World issue 205 focuses on hard surfaces and all things mechanical.
The issue gathers together leading CG artists, including Furio Tedeschi, Tor Frick and Paul Massey to discuss how to design, model and render robots and mech using modo, ZBrush, Maya and other leading software.


Tutorials this issue cover getting started in Quixel 2, creating a dynamic dress in Marvelous Designer 5 and modelling foliage for arch-viz using 3ds Max and GrowFX. Plus, Hannah Kang updates Norman Rockwell as she reveals how to add personality to your ZBrush sculpts. All tutorials come with video, resource files and extra content.


Inside issue 205…
