It was a busy week at the day job and then in the evenings as well. That means I didn’t get the chance to do some of the research and testing that I kind of need to do before continuing with Funkatmyer. I did manage to get a little study time in for the test for the day job. And that was about it until the weekend.
I don’t really want to push forward too much with Funkatmyer and I guess even Walter until I decide how I want to handle the Christmas card. That means that when I got to the weekend I wasn’t really ready to work on any current projects. So. While I’m doing my research and testing and deciding what I want to do about that I figured I’d take a moment to play with Blender and see what I can do in it now that I’ve had a little practice in other programs. Which I think has helped.
I have been taking stabs at Blender for a few years now. I’ve purchased some books and not gotten far with them and even tried following an online tutorial. I still didn’t have much luck. For me, Blender has had a really steep learning curve. However, in the last couple of years, or so Pluralsight (and possibly Digital Tutors before that) have created some Blender tutorials for specific processes like modeling, rendering, rigging and such. So far I’ve watched the relatively short course called “Your First Day in Blender”. This was great. It showed me a few things that I hadn’t grasped before and also pointed out a few really cool tools that I wasn’t aware were there.
So with a bit of modeling practice now and that tutorial done, I figured I’d try creating a character in Blender. I usually just create coffee mugs or teapots. No, really. I think that’s all I’ve ever done with Blender. So time to try something a little more complex. I decided to try a bi-ped humanoid character. Normally for something like this I would start with a sphere. This time I started with a cylinder. It was the method used in the tutorial I watched to create a weird worm thing so I decided to give it a try. It looks like it’s going to work out ok. At least so far.
One of the things I like with Blender is that for the end caps on the cylinder you can leave it as an n-gon and then go in and cut it yourself. You can do that in 3DS Max and Maya as well. However, I haven’t found where when you do that you can just go from vertex to vertex and if you cross and edge as you do that the program just creates any new points you need. It might be there but I haven’t seen it. Blender does it. With no fuss or muss. This is fabulous as far as I’m concerned. So, following the method used in the tutorial, that’s what I did. Then I went in and started shaping the head. I did have a couple of false starts. But finally I got the hang of what I was trying to do and I got the hang of moving around. Which is something.
Another of the differences of Blender as compared to some of the other programs is the way it renders. The start scene includes a light and a camera and it uses the camera for renders. I didn’t feel like messing with that and trying to make sure there was enough lighting at the moment so for now, my images are all just screen shots. That’s why in some of them you actually see the wire-frame over the solid view. In the ones where you don’t see it it’s because I switched to object mode before I took the screen shot. It gives you an idea of how it’s looking so far. A couple of things that I want to do are to remove the left half of the object and then apply a mirror modifier so that I only have to work on the one side. And I may also add a subdivision modifier so I can see it smoothed out more. For now though, it’s coming along.
I’m going to have to make time to get my research and testing done this week, or maybe next, so that I can get on with Funkatmyer and then get to the Christmas card. This week will be a bit tight though. I have an opportunity to get to see and play with PlayStation VR. A day job colleague has it and has offered for me to come try it out, and she wants to see what TEKKEN 7 is like in it since it’s supposed to be VR capable/compatible, something like that. I’m probably going to make myself sick. I get Video Induced Motion Sickness with first person shooters and the last time I tried VR I had the same thing. So I don’t expect to last long but I get to try it. Also, I need to get my study done for that test for the day job. It needs to take priority so I will likely spend most of the week doing that. With luck I’ll get back to some modeling by the weekend again. Wish me luck.