Katana Tutorial
This is a quick tutorial well suited to beginners. It uses Blender and GIMP (with emphasis on hot-keys) but could be used for any combination of programs that make up your work-flow (Maya-Mudbox-Maya-Photoshop comes to mind) as the techniques are the same, just the hot-keys will be different. This tutorial covers basic modeling techniques, sculpting, UV mapping, normal mapping, and texture mapping. The resulting model is fairly lightweight (200 faces or 400 tris) but it looks much, much higher thanks to normal mapping. Enjoy!
Note: This tutorial uses Blender 2.5.2 which is the newest version. It is in a transitory state however and so it is not the recommended version for production use. I choose to use this version to future proof this tutorial as much as possible, as the 2.5 series marks a complete rewrite of the Blender code incompatible with older versions in any way. It is completely possible to follow this tutorial in version 2.49b as the vast majority of the shortcuts are exactly the same for the tasks we will be doing and any tricky parts will be called out in the text.
Modeling
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | ODT | PDF
UV Mapping
Sculpting
Mapping
Coming Soon!