3Daily - aweji
polycounter lvl 7
I am brand new to this stuff and have zero art background. I am posting here because I want to try and force myself to do something each day. This board's challenge thing can give me an excuse to force myself to try and get at least a little bit better with this Blender thing. I'm pinning this post to the top of every page as a reminder. The actual entries will start with my first reply.
edit-- Also, if this actually sticks then this thread should end up as a nice example of the newbie's progression from zero to garbage.
edit-- Also, if this actually sticks then this thread should end up as a nice example of the newbie's progression from zero to garbage.
Replies
I used a youtube tutorial by searching for soda can. I gave up halfway through when he started doing the lid of the can. Too hard for me. Maybe in the future or something, I guess.
but I can't figure out how to do the other end of it. I think I'll need to use two or three or four objects? But I don't ever see people in tutorials work with more than one primitive thing...
Still haven't learned how to carve out vertices along edges so that I can do the bottom of that soda bottle or do a handle for this cup. I guess I need to learn more about the hotkeys and functions, but I feel very comfortable at least with the basic Grab, Scale, Extrude, and Loop Cut buttons.
Started that BlenderGuru playlist on Youtube and finished the modelling section of it. I imagine tomorrow I'll have done the material thing so that finally my posts will have color or whatever and look prettier. Up to this point I only ever knew how to use Grab, Extrude, Loop Cut, and Scale. I learned how to use whatever the B, A, Z, C, O, and Shift+D button functions are called. I also was told that I should always use Modifiers whenever possible because they're really good apparently. I also learned about the Cycle Render, as you can see.
This donut used the Subsurface (which I already knew about and use for the Soda can thing) and the Solidify modifers, which in hindsight I think I could have used for that cup in my previous post to save some time.
This was later on in that same tutorial thing to go with the donut or whatever. It's technically January 10th now so it still counts as a daily, I'm sure.
I also learned how to use Shift+D on a Lamp thing so that I can have multiple lights.
The letter I for inset thing and the F button to make new faces are probably exactly the kind of thing I needed to know to complete the bottom of that soda bottle, which I'll try to go back and do soon, hopefully.
I'm almost done with that tutorial now and since it looks so different compared to yesterday and the day before, I figure it's worth making a post about both of them together with all the changes that the tutorial guy had me do. It looks nice, but I worry that I won't be able to do this as well if I try everything on my own. As the guy said in the Youtube playlist, this very much a "color by the numbers" situation for me rather than me being not terrible at Blender stuff.
This is the most complex 3D mesh-thing I've ever attempted to make. Because of that tutorial I'm almost done completing from yesterday and the day before, I am realizing that even though I'm becoming less bad at Blender, I am still terrible at modeling. So I think I'm gonna need to do a modeling tutorial or two if I want to feel like I'm getting any better.
What I would suggest is that for objects with multiple pieces like this shopping cart, you could model some of the parts separately. For example, If you separated the wheels from the body, you could get a better result for both of them, and at the same time they would be easier to model.
If anybody with more experience knows more about that and disagrees, please, I would love to hear your opinion I want to learn too.
Anyways, keep watching those tutorials and doing stuff!
I was late on posting this one sadly
I hope adding the lights and stuff is alright to post as a new daily entry because the rules are supposed to be that I just make something... I learned about the different kinds of lamps you can use etc. I also learned about how the sampling and rendering stuff works so that I could fix that grainy looking stuff in the previous pictures. I also realized that I hadn't set the cup's shader setting to 'Smooth'. It's not really making an actual object, but it's still something I did with Blender today at least.
The left donut isn't placed very well and looks unnatural imo but I'm just happy to be done with the tutorial so whatever I guess.
Today I also started an Intermediate Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, & Animating Tutorial that I found on Youtube and didn't look too complicated. I suppose the next few days will probably be me posting my progress through it on here because there are apparently 6 videos in the playlist.
Also the stuff I've done so far in this thread has for the most part been supermarket themed. That's because I was doing a game jam as the 3D Artist guy for the team even though I had absolutely zero experience doing it, which was part of why I was motivated to try and do stuff and which is also what led me to finding this 3-year old Polycount abandoned forum account and thus this forum that coincidentally had this challenge board at the very top of the forum list at the time. Here's a link to the finished entry we made
The previous post was late and in my timezone it's the evening of the 17th so it's coming shortly after the previous one. I followed along with the character modeling tutorial that went straight into it and didn't teach the basic controls. Thanks to the previous tutorial I did by that BlenderGuru guy on Youtube (the one with the donuts and the cup), I was able to apply that to keep up with this Intermediate level tutorial. After finishing the modeling phase of it, I used the lighting skills I learned in that first tutorial to do the yellow-front and blue-back area lamp thing to make it look nice like this!
I really feel like I'm starting to get the hang of this Blender thing. It feels great!
I did the second part of the tutorial from yesterday but I ran into a problem with doing that UV mapping stuff. The Ambient Occlusion Bake thing doesn't work at all and returns an error for me no matter how many times I try to go back and start over again. Also when I try to take the exported UV layout and color over it in GIMP then open it in Blender, the model isn't textured at all for some reason that I don't understand. I guess I'll have to go without textures on my guy or whatever and just continue to the rigging and animation sections tomorrow.
Also this 3Daily thing has been pretty effective for me now and I think it has stuck for like two weeks with me here. This top hat was really fast to make and I only did it because the UV seam marking and the texturing didn't work out per the youtube tutorial so I felt like I had nothing to show for my effort today. Since this thread or whatever requires an object every day, I didn't think it'd be fair to post the exact same thing twice. Thus, a top hat.
There are one thing I find very usefull : when you unwrap your model, (in a UV window) create a new image with "Generated Type : Color Grid" and select "Texture" in the 3D Edit window (protip : move your mesh to a layer without any lights).
With a color grid is very easy to see what is right or wrong in the UV.
I tried to recreate my own computer mouse in Blender, but there are some things I couldn't figure out how to do. For example: how to cut out the middle mouse wheel section of the mouse, how to round out the buttons so that they appear more rounded and smooth (the subdivision modifier divides the mirror modifier badly, so I don't think I can make the buttons more rounded that way.
I'm still not good enough to model things well on my own without a tutorial, sadly. Hopefully one day I'll be able to just look at a reference thing in real life and just sit down and make it in Blender and make it look nice.
On January 20th I tried starting a few different tutorials but for each one I couldn't really get myself going. I tried making a Super Nintendo game cartridge but I fell into the same problem I had with that soda bottle early on at the beginning of this thread, which is that I didn't know how to carve out the edges I needed to continue properly. After that, I guess I got discouraged and fell out of my daily habit of spending a half hour or so doing something.
Also with that character tutorial, I tried to follow along with the skeleton bone armature stuff to rig the character properly, but when I got to the IK bones and re-parenting phase of the video I started to get different results from what the guy in the video was getting. That was also super discouraging, too. Bones were appearing that I didn't think I created, things were rotating when I thought I was grabbing them... it was all super confusing.
So yeah, that's my post-mortem for what it's worth to the one or two people who were actually paying attention to this. All in all, though, I feel that it did help me a lot because instead of having zero skill with Blender now I'm just garbage, which is a big step up for me and coincidentally was my goal all along per my OP.
If you realized that you don't like 3D modeling as much as you thought you would (happened to me with concept art), well, that's good too, you can focus on trying to learn more things until you find what you like.