Blender Modeling: Low Poly Water

Hello Blender Folks,

In this tutorial we are going to create Low Poly Water and render it in Cycles Rendering Engine inside Blender. This is what we are going to achieve today:

Open up a new Blender File, i.e the Default Scene with a cube, lamp and a camera as shown below.

Change to Cycles Render:

Go to the top Menu and change to Cycles Render from the Blender Render.

Delete the default cube:

Select the Cube and press X or Del key to delete it. You can also delete it from the Outliner Panel. Right click on the cube and select delete option.

Create a Plane:

Press Shift + A and select Mesh<Plane to add a plane or you can add it from the T Panel’s Create Tab. Rename this plane to “WaterLayer” in the Outliner. It is a good practice to rename your objects in the scene.

Scale the Plane:

Now scale this plane up-to the size of the Grid.

Subdivide the Plane:

Press Tab key to go into the Edit Mode and then Press W to open up Specials menu and select Subdivide. Now increase the number of cuts to 30 as shown.

You’d have achieved the following result.

Press Tab key once again to exit Edit Mode.

Create a Cloud Texture:

Go to the Texture Tab in the Properties Panel and create a New Texture and change it to Clouds and leave rest of the settings as default.

Add a Displace Modifier:

Go to the Modifier Tab in the Properties Panel and add a Displace Modifier and then select the Texture that we have just created. Change the Strength value to 0.100.

You can play around the settings till you are satisfied and get the result something as below.

Duplicate the Water Plane:

Press Shift+D to duplicate the water plane and then press Z and then move it down and scale it a bit till you get something like this.

Also don’t forget to rename this new plane to “WaterBed”.

[Optional: Subdivide the WaterLayer plane one more time to get a good view.]

Add Materials to both Planes:

Select WaterLayer plane and go to the Materials Tab. Add a new material. Rename this material to “WaterMaterial”.

Then select WaterBed plane and add a new material for this as well and rename it “BedMaterial”.

Change the setting of both the materials as following.

 

Change World Settings:

Go to the World Tab and change the color to very light grey or close to white. Make sure  Ambient Occlusion is unchecked.

Render:

Now just press F12 key or go to Render Tab and hit Render button. And we will get the following result.

Disabling Ads in uTorrent

uTorrent is a lightweight torrent client for Windows, Mac, Android and Linux. The application is awesome but sometimes it annoys you with the the sponsored ads that keep showing on the interface.

Now most of us want a clean interface and not boggled down by the ads. So here is what you can do to disable these ads.

• Go to Preferences in the Options Menu. Or simply press Ctrl + P. This will open up the Preferences dialog box.
• Go to Advanced tab (choose from left hand side hierarchy) as shown in the following figure. You will see the list of options available in this.
• Now, enter “offers” in the Filter Tab without the quotes and you will see the list of options that has ‘offers’ keyword included in them.
• Scroll down and look for the “offers.left_rail_offer_enabled“. You will see that its value is true.
• We want to disable this option so change its value to false and press OK.
• Similarly, disable “gui.show_plus_upsell” as well. And if you want to close the top ad bar, disable “offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled“.
• Restart uTorrent.

And voila you can see that the ad box has disappeared. 

Enjoy! 🙂

Blender Tip: Render Border!

Hello Blender Users,

The more experienced Blender users might already be familiar with this tip but the new users would definitely benefit from this tutorial. It is always important to check your materials, textures and lighting while working on your complex scene. And some of the new users would just render the whole scene to check their progress which could be quite taxing for your system (if you are like me and don’t have a high-end beast of a workstation). Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt if you can save on some processing.

For the sake of this tutorial, I’m using the default scene of Blender.

What we are going to do is use Blender’s inbuilt feature called ‘Render Border‘. To use it follow these steps:

• Press N on your keyboard to make your N-Panel visible, where you can set the object’s properties and such.
• Now tick the Render Border checkbox, (just above the 3D Cursor) as shown in the picture. You can see that after you have marked it, the Viewport got a red dotted border. This enclosed area tells the Blender to render it. But we want to adjust that area, which we will adjust in the next step.
• Press Ctrl+B to enable the custom selection to adjust the border. Now you can select the area you desire. I’ve selected the area as shown below. If you want to change your selection again use Ctrl+B.
• Next you need to change the display of the objects in the Viewport Shading from the menu that you can see just below your actual viewport. Select ‘Rendered‘ from the menu as shown.
• Now you can observe that only are enclosed in the render border is rendered leaving the rest of the viewport as it is. Even if you rotate your scene or anything it will remain undisturbed.

Go on now, save some processing and time while improving your productivity. Hope you find this useful.

Till next time!