Free Wood Textures

Here are some great wood textures that are available for Free and are great for texturing 3d objects. These textures are from the 3dmd.net website and can be used in accordance with their license.

New and Polished Wood Texture Collection - can be used for texturing various furniture


Old Painted Wood Texture - can be used for 3d texturing old wooden staff like wooden fences, wooden benches and so on.

Old Wood Texture With Scratches And Cracks - this one is great for texturing wooden houses, and various dry woods in nature.



I hope you find these free wood textures useful.

How to texture 3d objects for beginners

Here I will try to explain how to texture 3d objects to absolute beginners.
I'm not a beginner, I have over 10 years experience with 3d graphics so I may use uncommon words that for me are self explaining but in reality they might seem unclear. So if you have questions please ask them in the comments I will try to respond to them.

Lets start:
Before you apply your textures to an object, you have to apply a UV mapping to it.
How to create the texture itself I will show in another blog . Here you can find free textures and photos to start your 3d texture.

What is UV mapping?
Well UV mapping is a way to tell the computer what part of the texture will be shown on what polygon. This process is also called unwrapping the 3d object.
It is possible to apply multiple UV maps to an object one for every texture.
This is useful for many different situations that I will discuss later.
After you have added a UV map you have to apply the material or shader to your object. Different 3d programs do it in different ways so I will not concentrate on details. I will rather discuss the principles that will allow you to work with any 3d program commercial or not.
In short some programs allow to drag and drop the material to your object, or apply it through a menu where you click to assign material to selected objects. There can be a situation when you have to click on assign materials button then select the object to which it will be applied.

Now if you applied the material correctly your object should be the same color as your material.
If it is not try switching the modes of your viewport to show textures. Or try to apply the material again.

How to create great 3d animations for beginners

If You are reading this blog it means that probably you are a 3d animator or you want to become one. If you are a beginner I want to assure you that 3d animations is easy. In fact my credo is that everything is easy if you are doing it the right way. If you are not a begginer and you do not agree.. well your comments are welcome. :) You can also discuss different animation topics on my 3d animation forum.

What you don't have to do to become a good 3d animator is learn the entire 3d software package. I knew a guy that learned Maya for 2 years. He knew how EVERY tool and option in Maya works but he couldn't create a basic walk cycle animation.

First rule: To become a good animator you have to animate, everything else is irrelevant.
The more time you spend animating different objects the greater are your animation skills.
After reading the entire article you will see why 3d animation is easy and everyone can learn how to create nice 3d animated movies.

I will not discuss specifics of different 3d software packages here, this informations is discussed in detail in the manuals that come with each 3d package.

Instead I want to discuss the fundamental principles that if used while working on your 3d animation will lead to great results.

Lets start from the very basics.
To create a basic 3d animation You have to:

1. Position your 3d object
2. Create a keyframe
3. Move to a different time or frame in your animation
   
4. Repeat the steps 1 - 3 for different positions and frames.

A keyframe is a way to tell the computer: At this time in animation the object should be in this specific position. The computer will calculate the movement of the object from one keyframe position to another and so on.

But there is more to great 3d animation than just moving 3d objects around and it is how you move them that is important. :) The best way to understand what I'm talking about is to try and animate a bouncing ball using the above method.

Probably the first thing You have noticed while animating the bouncing ball is that it does not move realistically. And you are right the ball will usually move as if it doesn't have mass at all.
That is because the 3d objects when animated don't have information about their mass.
There are dynamic simulation tools in some 3d animation packages where the artist can give a mass to an object and create different forces that will move the objects very realistically but this is another large topic that requires special attention.

So what is mass and how do we show it in animation? From the physics class you may know that mass is a property that shows the quantity of inertia an object possess. What it means is a larger object with a higher mass will start and stop slower than an object with a smaller mass under influence of the same force. When I say start slower I mean it will gain speed slower or will have a smaller acceleration. The same goes for stopping slower - everybody knows that braking distance for a heavy truck or bus is much longer then braking distance of an easy car provided they moved with the same speed before braking. But not everybody knows that a train has to start stopping 1km or half a mile before the station to be able to do it.

As a result to show the 3d object's mass in an animation a 3d artist must control the variation of speed with which the object moves. In real life no objects move with constant speed but planets and stars. So if the objects in your 3d animations move with the same speed they will look unreal.

to be continued...