EMOTIONAL JUNK! SKIP IF YOU WANT
So, I've been feeling very discouraged about 3D artwork and my future and myself and all that fun stuff, and I think that I personally just want to lay down in bed and sleep until things just magically change to be better. At the start of the month I was planning on doing a really big animation for the end of the year with a script and whatnot, but I gave up on the second day of the month. I think yesterday or the day before or whatever, I decided I just wanted to make a cute little Christmas-y animation for the end of the month. And so I started working on it.
So I decided that I wanted to make this animation take place in a cute log cabin in the forest.
So as you may have noticed, this doesn't look a lot like a log cabin. You might also be asking what's wrong with that snowman. Well, to explain, what I'm doing here is making a general layout using basic shapes and whatnot so that I can try and figure out exactly what I want. When I've figured out exactly what I want for this, then I'll start making it look actually decent. But while we're here, I might as well give you a little tour.
You aren't allowed to be mad about the lack of things to see, I said I'd give you a LITTLE tour. But wait, this cabin isn't the only thing that I've worked on.
Wouldn't be a forest without trees, right? Well, good news is we have trees. And look at how highly-detailed it is!!! Great tree, right? WRONG. Take a closer look at this tree.
Dear god. How low poly and horrid, right? Well, there is a valid reason for this. Polygons are expensive and we're going to be making a LOT of these trees. I tried following a CG Geek tutorial on easy low poly trees to get the branches right. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of great photos out there on pine tree branches covered in snow. I tried my best, but it just didn't look great.
Yeah, I bet you're appreciating the new tree now. Either that or you wish I kept the old tree in which case um
Point is now what I'm doing is using these little branch things as particles on the bigger branch things. Here's a photo of what the little branches look like by themselves, and what the big branches look like by themselves
The actual poly count of the big branches should be lowered because by themselves they're 33,840 polygons, which is probably not what I want for a low-poly mesh there'll be a lot of, but I'll deal with doing that later. For now, I'm going to rest.
You might've noticed the snowman and the snowy tree, but there's more. I tried to mimic the way that snow is sparkly, and the way I did that was by throwing a static image I made in Gimp into the roughness slot of the material
This got me a very nice sparkly texture which I think looks close enough to snow (I haven't seen snow up close in like 2 years so cut me some slack). I'll be using this material on all the snow-related things, and I'm hoping it'll work well. I'm going to ramble a bit at the end of the post, so I just wanted to say thank you for reading this mess, and I hope you like the stuff I make.
CONCLUSION (yes I did just now look up Christmas light colors also the emotional junk is back)
I'm going to keep working on this over the next couple days, and hopefully by the end of it I'll have a cute little animation. 2022 has probably been a better year for me than 2021 in terms of good things that have happened to me. A lot of great things have happened this year which I should be happy about, but unfortunately I don't think I've fully been able to take advantage of that because of some personal problems. Joining Twitter probably didn't help that very much, but it led to me joining this site, which I do like a lot so far. I think I'm certainly going to enjoy being on here a lot more than Twitter. Anyways, that's all from me, I'm going to go lay down and be on my phone instead of going to bed like a normal person (bit of a lie, I think a normal person would've gone to bed about 6 hours ago). Bye!