Drennyn's Polybook

Course submissions and general experiments

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  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    CORE | Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling: Sci-Fi Crate viewport render; added detail to latch and crate body

    SciFiCrate.png

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  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Hi Paul, that looks great!

    Here's a little tip: you might wanna play with the Viewport Shading Options a bit; especially the Cavity will make a model like this look a lot better (just Solid Shading, not even Preview or Rendered View, so you don't need any Materials):

    Cavity.png

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  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    Heh...Yeah, I have that turned on but ran into what looked like shading artifacts, so tried to hide my inability to resolve them by using the rendered view.  Have no dupes that I can tell, played with the bevel settings for an hour, gave up and switched viewport modes.

    SciFiCrateSolid.png

  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Oh, that looks like some Smooth Shading 'artifacts'...

    Has nothing to do with your modelling skill.

    In the Object Menu you can choose a Shading Option and here's an example of the difference (I'd use Auto Smooth or Shade Flat for the Crate if I were you (Blender 4.2)):

    Shading.png

  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    Yep, tried "normal" Shade Smooth and the newer Shade Auto Smooth modifier.  Looked at normals...really can't tell what I did wrong or if it's just my eyes playing tricks on me.  Wasn't really part of the lesson so didn't want to dive into any more than I already did.  Interestingly enough, if I render in cycles, lines on the mirror axes look even worse.  Lemme look again...

    (...intermission...)

    Bingo...found 'em...extraneous faces.  Problem solved.  Thanks for not letting me give up. *smirk*

    FoundTheIssue.png

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  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Oh yes! Those sneaky interior Faces (well, they are interior, when using the Mirror Modifier 😉)


  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    CORE | Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling: Modeling a Soccer Ball

    Do any of them have stripes?  I think they should.

    SoccerBall.png

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  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    The stripe is a huge improvement!

    Send it in as a proposal to the International Soccer ball Association.

  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    CORE | Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling: Modeling a Hard Drive

    Even after looking up aluminum's IOR and messing with shaders in both EEVEE and Cycles, it still looks..."rendered".  AgX, Filmic...hmmm.  Some shading artifacts on the 1000's of holes, but was so happy they didn't crash my machine I'll live with them.  As for smoothing the hole cuts, changing the angle of the hard drive's auto-smooth didn't effect anything even though it was the last modifier in the stack and the boolean was above.  I needed to smooth the cylinder used to cut the holes.  Not sure why I couldn't reproduce what Jonathan showed in the course.

    On the plus side, getting better with the compositor and gaining a lot more muscle memory in general.

    HardDrive.png

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  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Really cool Paul; I think it's very satisfying to look at!

    True, the material could be better, but... this is a modeling Course.

  • Omar Domenech replied

    Wow Paul you are productive. Great results all over in practically no time. Keep on rocking those CORE courses. 

  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    CORE | Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling: Modeling a Coffee Cup

    Well...decals should be easier.  I found that if I let a monkey bang on my keyboard and mouse he'd eventually find the proper settings on the shrinkwrap modifier for things to work, so that's cool.

    Added a spoon.  Experimented with some Fresnel/shader mixing for the top coat on the ceramic mug.  (Used my favorite NSFW mug for reference.)

    CoffeeCupCollage.png

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  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    CORE | Fundamentals of 3D Mesh Modeling: Modeling a Cookie

    Chocolate chips are the best, right?  With some icing for eyes and teeth?  The main cookie deforms pretty well so the hours of moving vertices around, ripping here and there paid off.  Towards the end of the night though, I filled in some remaining gaps with grid fill, which seemed to do in seconds what I had been trying to do manually for a while.

    Is it possible for modifiers to operate on a collection or a parented hierarchy of objects?  If I wanted to twist the "whole" cookie it seems I'd need to put all the geometry in a single object and deform that "uber" cookie.

    CGCookieCollage.png


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  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Hi Paul, nice to see you going a bit further with the cookie 👍🏼

    Modifiers on a Collection is not possible in Blender (at least not at the moment...and tbh. not something I'd expect any time soon, if ever).

    Joining Objects with CTRL+J is probably the best option.

  • Omar Domenech replied

    You can also use a Lattice with the Lattice Modifier. Here is a lesson where Chunck applies such technique:

    https://cgcookie.com/lessons/the-lattice-modifier

    And a lesson from the Modifiers course where Paul explains it in detail:

    https://cgcookie.com/lessons/lesson-7-lattice-modifier

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  • Martin Bergwerf replied

    Oh yes, I forgot about Lattices.

  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    Aha...I see what you're talking about.  Joined objects together, used a lattice to give the cookie some curvature on the top...which really can't be seen because I then...deformed with a modifier:

    CGCookieDeformed.png

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  • Mechanought replied

    Awesome work, and quick work too! Really well done. 

  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    Session Practice: Graphic Landscape

    My take on the assignment...the temple of Kukulcán at Chichen Itza.

    • Added a tree line; learned I can't draw trees
    • Clouds drift slowly
    • Night-time fire glow at the top of the pyramid
    • Raised the camera angle; needed to add a ground plane

    http://www.regalmedia.com/video/GraphicLandscape.mp4

    (Might have to right-click below and Show Controls)


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  • Paul (Drennyn) replied

    CORE | Sculpting: Sculpt a Stylized Shark (2024)

    First (worst?) sculpture ever; stylized hammerhead shark.

    OMG I cannot sculpt. Wish I can blame the fact I'm using a mouse, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with the fact that I have no artistic skill whatsoever.

    Wow, is this different than modeling. For the life of me I could not get the tools to affect the surface to match the idea in my head. Resizing brushes, adjusting falloff, masking, smoothing, repeat. End result looks like a preschool class of little fingers went to town on it before the clay dried.

    http://www.regalmedia.com/video/Shark.usdc

    Shark.png

    Self feedback:

    • This was a lot more fun than I expected, but was also hell o' frustrating.
    • Smooth, flatten, relax...for the life of me, couldn't get any tool set up to "smooth the surface without majorly adjusting the volume". Wishing there was a tool that lets you lay down a Bézier curve and fit part of the surface to it. I'd build up macro shapes only to more or less undo them by smoothing. Just could not find a "good" size/threshold/falloff that did what I needed as situations changed. I wanted to reach into the display and mold the clay with my hands--just couldn't find a tool to do what I wanted.
    • In hindsight, maybe picking the hammerhead wasn't the best choice for my first sculpture. I redid the eye stalks/sockets five times this week. The fins and tail about three times. Clay strips, smooth, inflate/deflate, crease/pinch, argh!