42 Willys

Model in progress:

Edit mode…

On-screen render.  The model is only partially done – no materials or textures applied yet, still have to do interior, undercarriage, and tons of tweaking to match my reference images.  This took a couple of hours to get this far on the second attempt to model this.

Fluffy Bunny

The course module I’m working on is helping us to create a Fluffy Bunny in a scene.  We haven’t started on the scene yet but I rendered out a basic bunny after adding a couple of cameras:

This is a 1080p render of my bunny, normal camera (35mm)

Another image, but from a camera with a 300 mm lens.  There are a bunch of settings to play with (depth of field, etc) but that will come later.

Wide Angle.  I think this one used a 10 mm lens.

The hair is a little wild, but I didn’t really spend much time optimizing it.  Basics are good enough for now (the tweaking will come in future projects).

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so doing “good enough” models is sometimes a challenge (but it allows me to keep moving forward without getting too hung up on anything).

My 1st Blender Animation

I hit the mid-point of my Blender course so thought I’d take a step back and press some of my “knowledge” into action.  To that end, I drafted out a one-page diagram of what I wanted to do and set out to do it – finish a model “just good enough”, build a basic low-poly landscape (with a mountain and a road), and animate the model and camera.  The 180 frame render took about 2.5 hours to finish; I then imported the frames into Vegas and rendered out the animation.  Here’s the result…

 

New Projects

I’ve been working hard to make a shift from pure video editing to a combination of video editing and CGI, Modeling and Animation so am trying to learn Blender. Here’s a screenshot of the completed project from Section 4 of the course – Low Poly Chess Set. We modeled and textured the chess board and created and coloured all of the chess pieces…

So far the course is going well.  I’ve tried a few others but found major flaws in each of them – so I may go back to them at some point, but for now, this course is meeting all of my requirements.  My biggest issue last spring (when I last worked with Blender) was the piecemeal method that I was doing – I was just jumping from one interesting thing to the next but Blender is so complex that I just confused myself.  So I looked for a beginner’s course and found this one – and although parts of it have been review, so far it’s all making sense and my tool kit is growing.