Final Project

My final project for the character design/white wall project.  The focus of this project was to get a compelling, non-"stereotypical" 3D character model.  This character was sculpted as a high poly model, then retopo'ed into a low poly character and rigged, suitable for animation.  As for the white wall aspect of the project, I wanted to work with the strengths that blender had.  For me, I think that has to be the dynamic lighting that can be changed so easily.  It seems to me to have the best of both worlds of painting and photography.

I found this project to be pretty time intensive.  Of course, half of that was learning new techniques; I am sure I could do this again much quicker.  There was one thing I wanted to do:  I was going to add hair, but neither the comb function nor the soft body physics were providing what I wanted.  Outside of that, only marginal things were left off.

Here is a progress shot, back when her armature was not working quite well.  Still, I kind of liked this, and it definitely influenced my idea for the final composition.

And another progress shot of the finished sculpt, before retopo.

Project 1 Touch-ups

Here is the final pic for Project 1 after the critiques. A list of things changed:

-Added smoke

-Repositioned overall composition to show the entire mobius, center the train

-Unwrapped and retextured the tracks

-Reduced the size of the halo lamp

Project 1 Complete

Its done!  My.  This project had a lot of hurdles to overcome.  I'm pretty happy with the end result.  Things I wanted to do but couldn't:

-Add an alpha layer text with letters to the train

-Add smoke from the train (I have spent a gross amount of time attempting this)

-Clean up some textures.  Probably shouldn't have gunned so hard for the smoke.

Project 1 Progress and Sculpting fun

Here is my progress on our first project so far.  I still need to texture a lot of this, add a few more cars, and play with composition, but I feel as though the modeling is finished.  

And here is another sculpt mode render.  I am enjoying this a lot and want to try making a low poly version of one of these soon.

Sculpt Mode

Here is my result for fiddling around in sculpt mode for about an hour.  Definitely a different experience.  I didn't finish this, but would like to continue to play around with this style of modeling some more.

Mantis

Here is the finished mantis model from the tutorial.  It was pretty helpful, although they covered some parts I was a little shaky on.  I feel like the color ramping is pretty intense in this render and he used several selection techniques in the video I would like to learn.
Here is the final render.  I had to use an image I found online, since I don't own a camera, but I would like to continue to unwrap and texture the mantis.

Yafray

I couldn't get Yafray to work on my computer, so here is a really high end blender render (took like an hour and a half) to compare it to when I finish.

The Loneliest Robot

He is only pretending he has a friend off screen.

Bee

This was a pretty hard thing for me to make.  I finally got my model to a place I liked, although I think it was kinda of messily constructed, which made unwrapping a real chore.  I ended up having about 8 different islands.  That said, the texturing is a little rough.  I really wanted to make the wings more translucent, but was unable to figure it out.  Maybe I will try again in a bit.

Cup 2.0

Redid the textures, should be higher res.  Also added a plate!  Maybe some food and beverage should go here next...

Textures!

The first foray into textures. After a few mishaps, I got the ball rolling. The cube is pretty boring (its supposed to be paper, looks like marble). The marble cup, however, I am pretty happy with. I tried to through a window shadow in for fun. My goal is to add a convincing liquid into the cup.

Tentacle Array/ Pinecone Array

The pinecone gave me trouble, trying manipulate individual points after arraying it. Doing more abstract things like the tentacle was a bit better, since I didn't try to change any vertices after arraying.

Homework Week 1

This is a pretty easy object, but I really wanted to try and work on reflections and materials.  I experimented with adding a mirror in the background, but the light and shadows became a little wonky when I did.  Still, this is pretty fun!

My Screwdriver

Test Post