Going through the CORE series and posting my results as I go. I've been trying to get into 3D asset creation for years but have had trouble creating things. I'll model a low poly character after several failed attempts only to find that my topology makes it deform poorly, or I'll see an environment photo I want to recreate then get stuck on making believable foliage. I have even tried to animate characters already made and rigged up but struggle to make motions fluid.
I'm not particularly uncomfortable with Blender's UI and terminology after being exposed to so much basic training. However, I've found that my lack of solid fundamentals have made learning intermediate and advanced subjects difficult and stops me from acquiring the skills needed to really advance to where I wish to be. My goal is to be able to create both realistic and stylized characters and environments for both games and film, and to be able to rig and animate them for use in my own projects and a team production environment.
With that in mind I intend to fully go through the entire CORE series here at CGCookie and do every assignment and exam that's offered. I want to practice everything that's taught in the hopes that it converts into skill that I can use outside of the course.
Snowman made by following the CORE series Intro to 3D Modelling. Made an empty as the top parent of the original snowman then duplicated the tree to create two more that I repositioned and tweaked to make them a bit different. Changed materials to be emissive to make it easier to take a picture without messing with lighting.
I love that they are all different and I love your composition of the render.
Sci-fi crate made by following the CORE series Intro to 3D Modelling. Like the instructor said I added more surfaces to it than what was done in the video and tried to make it more interesting to look at. Added some color lighting for the render in the hopes of making the surfaces pop out more.
A soccer ball made by following the CORE series Intro to 3D Modelling. I pretty much followed the tutorial 1:1 although I subdivided the starting icosphere with its Add panel and not after the fact. This might have been why when I was selecting the areas for the white part of the ball that I had to select a triangle face (which was the center) instead of a single vertex before growing the selection area. I'm not 100% sure why there was a difference but otherwise it was the exact same process as the tutorial.
Re: the football, you're on the right track with deducing what happened. It's just been subdivided more times than the tutorial ball regardless of whether it was done in the redo panel or via subdividing the mesh.
If anything, it'll look smoother as there are more verts. But it'll just be more processing that blender needs to do. Although with a small model like this, it's not going to make any difference. Just something to be aware of when working with large scenes or objects, especially when you start having fun and add modifiers π€π€ π€
Ps. I'm subscribing to your polybook. I agree with Omar's sentiment towards your humbleness of wanting to go back and dig down and learn the fundamentals before jumping into the deep end. I can actually relate to his comment too, where I did try to make a big robot before taking any of the fundamental courses and very veryΒ quickly realised I had no idea what I was doing.
Keep it up and give yourself all the time and patience that you need, it'll absolutely pay off, and I look forward to seeing your progress!
A hard drive made following the CORE Hard Surface Modeling. Struggled a bit with getting the shading to be smooth on areas with N-gons but got a result that looked good enough for a render. Will probably re-visit the videos talking about N-gons and smooth shading again but I'll likely be avoiding any N-gons where I can. This time around I got them when beveling which I know I'll be doing often, so I'll be focusing more on fixing bad shading results and why they happen.
So after a good night's sleep I came back to the hard drive to figure out why I was having shading problems. I felt like I was using the modifier's correctly but it just wasn't acting right. That's when I went into edit mode and saw that the bevel modifier wasn't behaving like normal and realized that it was because my object's scale wasn't applied that I was getting shading artifacts. Haha sometimes it's the simplest thing.
Thanks for the encouragement Omar and Harris!
Coffee cups made following the CORE Subdivision Surface Modeling. Made the red one following the steps in the tutorial, then did the blue one with the same method but with a different design. The brown tankard I did using a different method with the solidify modifier and a curve for the handle as the tutorial said to try making a cup a different way than what was shown. Even got to use what was taught about edge creases for the handle bib to make it form to the mug even with the subdivision surface modifier on it. Lastly I made a little plate for the original cup. You may not be drinking coffee out of that last cup but who's complaining :) .
CGCookie logo made following CORE Subdivision Surface Modeling. This was a great learning experience for me as it helped me think about edge flow more than I ever have before. I didn't quite follow the tutorial step-by-step as I was trying to do as much as I could alone and refer to the video as needed, so my topology ended up being a bit different (namely between the eyes) but overall I'm happy with the result. Added the eyebrows and eye gleam just to get a bit more practice with tracing a reference image as well as doing creases to get sharp points on a subdivided object (eyebrows had some sharp ends). Also wanted to try and get it to match the colors of the reference so I extracted the color codes from it and used them in the materials.
