Learning Blender: my WIP

[McFly]

Hey guys,

I haven't posted anything new since finishing my Tomahawk and I haven't done much 3D work since then either. I've decided to learn Blender so I watched a few video tutorials to get familiar with Blender's modeling tools. I gotta say I enjoy Blender 2.5 (haven't d/l 2.6 yet) a lot.

I then looked around on my desktop for something to model as practice and found an old firewire card. I decided to give it a go.

New resolution to avoid repeating past mistakes: finish any started project. So I'll take this one to completion.

Hope to get some time soon to continue working on this.

C&C welcome!

Latest update: 2013/03/13

[needse]

looking kool mcfly

[Kage]

Nice I've been tempted to learn Blender, as a means of adding some particle systems, etc that Modo can't handle.

I've downloaded each release of Blender but never actually really took the time to learn the tools. Maybe you will be my inspiration to do so.

[McFly]

Thanks needse!

Hey Kage. Give it a go. blenderguru.com and blendercookie.com are pretty much all you need to get going. Not sure how often I'll update this thread with actual WIP images so you'd better not wait on me to give you motivation!

[McFly]

Trying to get better with lights and rendering... Still a long way to go.

Here's my kid's toy I modeled a while back. I still need to model a hammer and some wooden bits he can punch in the middle section of the toy.



And a 50% colour test (yeah, I know proper materials and textures):


I'll try to play with physics engine next time to randomly place different parts of the toy.

[McFly]

I watched Andrew Price's intro to Cycles renderer and thought I'd give it a try.
Here are my tests with 300 passes, hence noise on the chrome bit. I definitely need a new computer!

Cycles is VERY cool.

[needse]

looking good mcfly
maybe up the spec a little bit on the black plastic to get a little shine it looks a bit flat at the moe

[McFly]

Thanks needse.

How about now?

[needse]

Yeah nice just the gold bit now put some reflection on it

[McFly]

Doodes! Long time no update.

Finished my card:


Update on my kid's toy (not too happy with textures!) :




Question about UVs.
What I am doing and I think it's not the right technique: I unwrapped the center piece (made of two cylinders for top and bottom, 3 "legs" and two plastic rings = 7 objects), textured it. So I have one texture for 7 objects. I then separate objects so I can move them around freely.
Then I did the same thing for the second piece (made of 3 smileys, 3 cylinders for the legs etc).

I guess I should merge all objects I want to texture so I can work with one texture sheet and avoid any texture scale issues.

What do you say?

[needse]

your card turned out really well mate

[NinthJake]

Looking good mate, frankly I do not notice much issues with the texture scale, however the floor texture looks a bit low-rez.

And yes, Cycles is amazing, especially considering it is developed by only one guy and is not even a year old yet

[McFly]

Thanks NinthJake! No way I am going back to Max/PhotoShop/Windows. I'm hooked to Blender/Gimp/Ubuntu now.

So I finally got round my issues. I unwrapped everything again and much quicker than my first try, which is a good thing!

Here's an update, I'll damage/dirty everything next time. At least I've nailed colours and textures (minus floor) look better IMHO. I'll get a higher res floor texture too.



Thanks for watching.

[Kage]

I think you're picking up Blender very quickly indeed. Keep at it

I'm glad myself that I switched to Modo, but I don't think I could ever make the switch to Blender

[needse]

lol i like this little thing
very original model well done good job dude