renderingendorphins

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Another Day Off! Whatever!

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day Off. Deserved!

[renderingendorphins-blog]

1 Week Mark!

I’ve spent roughly 22 hours at this. Some quick reflections: I would like to start doing ‘landmark’ self projects every week or so. I will try to concoct one tomorrow, or just finish one of the little things I started at various points.  Maybe I’ll just make a lamp or something.  Or a set of cutlery and a piece or two of furniture. I need to go back and get my approaches to materials and textures properly in order.  I was most impressed with the hammer tutorial I did, and I want to get the methods explained there down pat.  It was a little overwhelming at the time, but I have spend enough time on this software now that I think I would properly absorb it this time.  Proper use of Textures, Materials, as well as shading clearly has the tendency to make all the difference in the world on many pieces. I should start thinking about how to regiment my learning journey from here on out, now that I am familiar enough with everything to have a better idea of what needs work, what I might want to focus on more, how long things tend to take, and what tends to just be a waste of large sums of time.

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day 7

Today I spent over an hour playing around toying around and putting together a flying saucer, something I wanted to do for fun for a while for whatever reason.  I only got so far before I hit a couple walls that I’ve hit before, mainly with lighting and object transparency for actual light and scene pass-through.

Conveniently, the tutorial I did today answered this.  I did a Arabic-looking lamp tutorial, and the creator had some nice insights on this stuff.

A cool trick was an alternative way of duplication.  By holding ALT + D, then inputting the rotation details, whatever which way one panel was edited in the future would have the same effect on the given parts Alt-Ded’ counterparts.

For the glass panels, I chose ‘Emission’ as the surface type when creating the glass panels’ material.  This gave it its initial glowiness. 

One of the persistent issues I was puzzled with before was that I couldn’t get any of my actual lights to glow properly.  I learned to fix this by enabling bloom when enabling Bloom when Evee is being used.

The majority of the light settings were configured between the Object Data Properties tab on the light object itself, as well as 4 subsections found in the Scene tab.

Not too too bad.  I still couldn’t figure out how to make the rendered background totally dark, but don’t want to spend any more time on this today.

Today time in blender today:  2.5 hours [60 minutes building UFO / 90 minutes on the lamp tutorial]

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day 6

Looked at a tutorial quickly on how to create an egg, in the hopes of learning an easy way to create the shape for my midcentury egg chair.  That payed off.  The creator demonstrates the approach of properly adjusting the middlemost vertex in conjunction with Proportional Editing (’connected’).  Just a couple of minutes could have saved me over 2 hours yesterday.  (yes, wasting time in this fashion is now a mortal sin for me.)

Another tutorial I looked at was about making a cute low poly landscape shot *to be fulfilled* Object Data Particle properties On the topic of not wasting time, should I, at this point, be seriously considering how productive my current approach is to learning this software in the longer run?

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day 5

I ended up hyper-focusing for and wasting 3 hours strenuously trying to cut the proper hole out of a midcentury egg-chair I’ve been trying to create from scratch.  Sometimes it gets easy to become lost trying so many little alternative approaches to what is ultimately not working.  I have to remind myself that from time to time, grinding is not the answer, and I’ve got to consider another approach to the problem.  Only when I did this did I have the willpower to learn the function and power of the Boolean Modifier. 

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day 2 (1/2)

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day 1 (2/2)

I did a tutorial by 

The Subdivision Surface Modifier, possibly the most commonly brought-up modifier in Blender tutorials, made it easy to turn an already beveled sphere into something like this tutor4u about modeling a medieval battle hammer kinda object.

Using the Sphere Transmormation, I could turn the flat, square end of the hammer into something resembling a circle. (Click ‘mesh’ + ‘transform’ + ‘spere’)

The X-ray vision view mode made it possible to both see and select vertices and edge on the opossosite side of the mesh, something I’d previously wasted time switching all the way to wireframe mode in order to achieve. (Alt + Z)

Insetting close to the tips where rivets tend to show up helped smooth out the geometry, and make the object seem more realistic.  I did 2 insets close to the edge to create a desirable effect. (’I’)

[renderingendorphins-blog]

Day 1

Yesterday I did the first part of a wonderful tutorial by Grant Abbitt.  He has a 3-part series for creating an old-school medieval looking well.  3 useful tools stood out to me in the video, one of them being the Simple Deform Modifier.  Using the Bend version of the Simple Deform at 360° , I was able to bend a few bricks I drew all the way around and meet with themselves on the other side, creating a perfect spherical shape.  From there it was easy to finish the rest of the stone well structure with some duplications, rotations, and scaling.

Next I learned a skill that feels like it will be a very essential tool many times going forward.  Proportional Editing allowed me to affect a greater general area with my moving/scaling, with the scope of affect being determined by a sphere of influence that is resized with the mouse wheel.  It made it exponentially quicker to remove general uniformity to objects in an area, as it saves you from having to edit each little section one by one. 

The third thing I took note of was Metcap, a feature found in Viewport Shading window.  By selecting a Metcap light affect, I was able to cycle through different viewing styles until I found something that complimented the editing I was doing, effectively making it easier to see what I was creating.