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Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU Public License.

You can download Blender free of charge on www.blender.org. On the Blender site you will also find a gallery with cool Blender art.

Introduction

In this tutorial, I'll explain how to make a high-tech corridor for fly-thru animations. It'll be a bit like the Deathstar scene from Star Wars.

Some techniques that will be used here include:

  • extrusion
  • duplication of objects
  • lens flares
  • bumpmapping
  • I'll assume some working knowledge with Blender. In case you find you can't follow this tutorial, please finish the Dolphin or Dice tutorial first.

    Preparation: the walls

    We'll start off by creating some block shapes to make the walls look interesting. Fire up Blender and delete the default plane.

    Next, add a bezier curve, go to the ***editbuttons*** screen and convert it to a polygon. ('Poly' button)

    Rearrange the vertices to create an interesting polygon. Add vertices as needed by holding down CTRL and pressing the left mouse button. Don't worry about creating perfect straight lines yet. When you're satisfied, select CKEY to close the polygon.

    Your screen will look something like this:

    Now, to place all vertices on a grid vertex, enter edit mode, select all vertices (AKEY), and hit shift-S. The SNAP menu will pop up - select Sel -> Grid (snap selection to grid). The polygon now looks a lot cleaner:

    Now, continue creating polygons and fill a rectagular area with them.

    Split your main view and arrange the windows in such a way, that in one window, you can see the entire shape from the front, and in the other, you see it from the side.

    Select a polygon, go the the ***editbuttons screen and enter on extrusion depth for it. Repeat this for each polygon, and select a slightly different depth for each one. In this example, I used values from 0.1 to 0.5 for this.

    Tip:For people with some memory/CPU power to burn, try setting the ext2 and BevResol values too - this will add some nice, rounded corners to your shapes.

    We now have completed one segment for the walls of the corridor.

    Duplicating the wall segment

    Select all wall shapes, and convert them into a mesh (alt-CKEY). Select all created meshes, and join them together (ctrl-J). You now have one single wall segment object, which is much easier to duplicate and move than all the single pieces together.

    Note: Do not join the polygons, because this will make their extrusion depths equal, and all the detail in the wall will be lost!

    Note 2: In Blender V1.5, there seems to be a minor bug that causes some superfuous edges to be drawn after an object has been converted from a curve to a mesh. You can get rid of them by entering edit mode and leaving it again. Okay, returning to orthogonal front view, select the wall segment and duplicate it with ALT-D. holding down the CTRL key, move it around and place it at the end of the original wall segment. Repeat this step 3 times. (You can also rotate the wall segment to create some more variation).

    Next, select all wall segments and join them together. In orthogonal front view, duplicate (alt-a) the segments, and displace and rotate them to form a square:

    As you can see, we already have a pretty impressive corridor now!

    Painting the walls

    Select a wall segment, and create a new material.

    Color:

    R - 0.073

    G - 0.618

    B - 0.8

    Next, create a new texture. Go to the texturebuttons screen, and select a stucci texture. Set the parameters as follows:

    NoiseSize - 0.012

    Turbulence - 0.1

    Soft Noise

    Return to the materialbuttons screen, deselect the 'col' button and select the 'nor' button - this will turn off color mapping, and turn on bump (or normal) mapping.

    Lighting

    Add a spotlight in the middle of the corridor, near the ceiling. Give it the following parameters:

    Type - Spot

    SpotSi - 150

    SpotBl - 0.3

    Next, duplicate this spotlight 4-5 times and place it at regular distances apart at the ceiling:

    So far, the corridor already looks pretty good, but it still lacks some realism. In particular, the lights aren't visible and some lens flares would look good here:

    Adding halos and flares

    To create a visible light, add a cube to the scene and scale it down untill it has about the size of the light icon. (Smaller would be nice, too, but that would make the mesh a bit difficult to handle).

    Create a new material, select the 'halo' button. Set the HaloSize to 0.75, Fl. Seed to 0, and Flares to 17. Other settings will generate other (and better?) results, but for now, there will do.

    Duplicate the cube and place it on the light icons. Each light will get one 'halo-cube'.

    Now, to make sure you'll never see the end of the corridor, add some mist to the scene: First, select the camera and select the editbuttons button. Select the 'show mist' button. This will add indicators to the camera which show where your scene mist will start and where it ends. Go to the WorldButtons window, select the 'Mist' button. Leave the Sta value at 0 (this is at which distance from the camera the mist will start). Now play with the Hi value to increase the mist range. Place the endpoint at about 75% of the corridor length. This will leave you some room to move in when you add animation to this scene.

    The result

    That's it for today - happy blending everyone!

    61 Comments

    1. I found the file but it looks like Blender 2.40 can no longer read it. Anyway, you don't really need it - that's the whole point of this tutorial! ;-)

      B@rt

    2. Nifty... but in 2.4 I couldn't get the shapes to do different levels of extrusion depth. All objects got changed to the same setting. I have had the same problem with the material all objects get the same settings. Also , you didn't mention that to select a poly gon and convert to a mesh you have to be in object mode.

      Thanks for the tips.

      Steve

    3. the dark one on

      Anyone here know how to create "glowing" effects with anything other than halos? I've experimented extensively with transparency, emit functions and mist but I can't quite get what I'm looking for. I'm thinking flames, muzzle flashes, laser beams that kind of thing.

      Any advice?

    4. Thank you very much!! I'm currently making the switch from Maya to Blender. Mainly I aim to make game levels and characters with Blender because.... well...... it's free..... and rocks.... and stuff. This tut helps quite a lot with that..

    5. I'm having trouble with this. When I make the polygons, they seem to connect or something. I can't select inividual polygons!

    6. This all stuff is great!!! Thank you everybody who made those tutorials... Im using Blender from 2 - 3 days and i can make so good things :) Thank you again, very very much. I love you guys!!! :)

    7. Geez, and I've got mist problems! When I set the mist and render the frame the render screen fills with a solid color.

    8. I started a little anim whit friends and I make this corridor for pre-anim. for our team name, and this is one of some tuto. that i use to make it.
      thanks you!
      (if you see big error in my words is because I speak french normally ;)

    9. Yes and no... it's easy, but you have to know what you do
      but our one is a very little one (5 - 8 min) and no big effect is indeer so it's easy for now

    10. Great Tutorial, the corridor came out very nice! I have a two part question: first, where is the second part covering the animation portion! And second, could you tell me why it is I have two lights for every place that should only have one? It seems that this is also the reason why the flairs come out all strange.

      FTD

    11. I have a really simply and probably stupidly obvious question. Ive just started using blender for my university project and I was trying to do this tutorial and came across a hurdle almost immediately! When i made seperate polygons and then tried to extrude one of them it extruding them all not just the one i'd selected in edit mode. How do I select just one object in object mode cos when i press on one polygon here it selects them all!! please help!

    12. Huh. this halo leaves some weird side effects like these little 'windows logos' on the ground.
      Also, you can use a single vertex for a halo, not a cube. Maybe that'll leave better results

    13. I'm having a problem with the walls of the corridor. When i go to render it, the walls aren't filled. Maybe it has something to do with the way i made the poly curves into meshes or something. I just started using Blender so I'd be thankful if i could successfully finish this tutorial.

    14. Brian, when you have a poly curve shape (made of lines), the C key should close and fill it. However if you've already converted them to meshes, you'll need to use the mesh face commands to fill them (select 3 or 4 vertexes and hit F) However it could be a lot of work if you've extruded, dup'ed and bevelled etc. with no faces! better go back and ensure your polys ar filled. unless anyone knows a quick multi-face making method?!

      Rachel - it sounds like you've made the polys inside the same object. I think you're sposed to exit edit mode before making the next polygon, apply the extrude/bevels etc, then join them up afterwards.

      I made a little anim (in lieu of tut #2), simply with a LocRot keyframe (I) at frame 1 and then the camera moved to the other end of the tunnel at frame 41, a bit of camera rotation and another locrot key frame (I). Simple but really effective. Just need a big explosion or something at the end!

      Once you're animating - I think the specific settings of the lense flares is less important. They look great when they're moving. But I do find them hard to get just right for a static shot.

    15. man..i've attempted this like over 10 times and still havent gotten the hang of it

      for some reason when i duplicate the walls some weird number thing comes up..is that meant to happen? =S

    16. WHOOT..i figured it out..GO ME..=P..

      its SHIFT + D..

      then why'd the person write ALT + A??

      must have a different version..

    17. Hey. Great tut. Had a few setbacks but got over it.
      Only one question. I am using the YafRay renderer, and it does
      not not show the halos or flares at all when I render. However everything is fine in The blender internal renderer. Can anyone help me fix this please?

    18. CrazyJack:

      I have noticed that when using a spotlight with halo you need to turn up the HaloIt: Value to 2-3 times normal before yafray will show it nicely.

      Hope that helps, Im still new to blender but enjoying it so far

    19. Ilera:

      Thanx, I have looked all over for a solution, and you are the first to be able to help!!!! Ill try, this.
      And once again, thank you!

      Blender is quite enjoyable, if you eventualy get there =D

    20. I don't know the technical term for this, but when I render the object, I end up seeing the blue all around. How do I change the 'world' to get it all black? I've followed all the instructions to a T here, but this shows up.

    21. Hello! great tutorial! However, I am using it and when I finished it, there was no surface on the top of the curves. Even after they were all meshes. The only thing shown were the edges and walls going downward. How do I fix this?

    22. Dalton krajewski: I had the same problem, and my solution to this was basicaly to ensure no double vertices were selected, and make sure you have added faces to the curves.

    23. Doosh this tutorial is top notch!!!
      I had no problems at all this is well explained

      oi ye i tried doing some other things to it aswell like giving the corridor a reflection giving it a real super future look its awesome.

    24. Hi, I have a similar problem, only even one step more back, I can't select a single polygon. In object mode the whole mess get's selected, and in object mode it's just individual verticles.
      Any idea?

    25. I had the same problem. After extruding I realised there where no faces on the meshes. This is what I did:
      created the polygons so they where closed. In edit mode: SHIFT+F fills a polygon.

    26. Puppet Master on

      After converting the curves to meshes I did not get them to be filled(i.e. the walls are hallow).How do I fix this?

    27. Spunkycomics on

      Perfect tutorial!!
      I loved it! It was easy and simple, yet the results look spectacular!

      The only trouble i ran into was with the lens flares, but really, i like it better without them.

    28. I was wondering if you would be able to add the tutorial riding through the mines but instead of in the mines it would go through ehre I ewas wondering if it could do that?

    29. ffs im new to this whole thing and i cant seem to do much let alone that god why can someone just explain it in detail step by step...

    30. well, the halo lights are showing up fine, but there is no lens flare. I'm using version 2.47 if it helps to know that

    31. Thanks For this great little tutorial its was very helpful.
      (Ps for those it might trip up (like me) you do need to be in object mode when you convert a polygon into a mesh.)

    32. great tutorial but everytime is set extrusion higher i only get a boarder around it but no 3d effect, also where can i find ext.2 ??

      mfg tie

    33. Cool! Although... I can't figure out how to do ANYTHING!! Im too frustrated and I just got it an hour ago. Please help!!

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