I've decided to make a sketchbook, that will double as a timeline journey of my CG Cookie experience. Showing my learning progress and my final results for some of the amazing courses on here. I will also post my WIP's and personal projects for those who want to take a look.
So without further a-do , I present my Journey, from joining CG Cookie back in early 2015 untill the present 
MAY 2015 - Jonathan Williamson's "Introduction to Hard Surface Modelling" Tutorial - My result :
My first adventure into the world of both 3-D Modelling and Blender. At the time, the fundamentals courses did not exist so this seemed like a good place to start. If you are new to this, like I was , then it will seem very overwhelming at first, because there is so much to take in. But stick with it as Jonathon does an excellent job of explaining it all, and this tutorial is so well planned out because It takes you through so many features and techniques of modelling whilst still keeping it as simple as possible.I would thoroughly reccomend doing the following fundamentals courses first for modelling: https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-basics/8
https://cgcookie.com/course/mesh-modeling-fundamentals/3
and then following them up with The Introduction to Hard Surface Modelling tutorial that can be found here : https://cgcookie.com/course/introduction-to-hard-surface-modeling/5
Here is my result from playing around with the character ball from the Animation Bootcamp. It is not polished as much as I would like because I made a big mistake right from the start in that I made each letter an individual object and animated them as they were. This meant that every change to the timing of the ball would require me to go through every letter , one by one and adjust their timing to match . In hindsight, I should have made a rig for the letters and used bones for each one. But when I first started it, I was only planning to animate a few letters - but as usual , I got carried away . So , its full of issues, but has served its purpose as a way to get lots of practice in the graph editor and dopesheet and put what I have learnt so far from the Animation Bootcamp to good use in a small personal project
Oooh, lots of Polybook updates today :)
Ive finally got around to bringing all of my posts over from the old forum, so now I can get back to filling it with new goodies.
First up are some early tests of the protagonist , "Huw" , from my Point and Click adventure game that is in the works, titled "ColourBlind"
Here are some early rig pose tests of the Low poly version of Huw. Note that there are no details yet as I have not baked the high poly sculpt for the normal maps. Also , the texturing is purely temporary for testing purposes :
And also, the first attempt at a walk cycle with the rig. I was going for "slumped" , but I pushed it too far and he looks a bit un-natural in my eyes. But I'm happy that the rig is performing well, some weighting issues to sort and then I'm going to get on with normal maps and proper texturing:
And also , a new project I have started recently. I am attempting to model this :
Here is the initial block-out that I have so far :
Mat, I love looking at your Progress man.
Your work and Progress is Inspirational and I'm so glad to call you a Friend. You have helped me through so much and I'm Great full bud.
Keep up the awesome work Bud:)
IM BACK!!
Some of you may remember me , I was a very active part of this community back a couple of years ago, but life took priority and I had to take a very long hiatus from CG Cookie and my CG projects.
To cut a long story short, I got married, and we started trying for a baby. We got what we wanted, and more when it turned out to be twins! As great as this all was, my Wife and I were VERY un-prepared for two babies at once, especially since our little house was nowhere near suitable - so I put my CG projects on hold to remodel most of the house.
Cutting to the present , our two beautiful baby girls , Yvaine and Seren were born on the 2nd April and are now already 5 weeks old.
Now that things are settling down with them, I am managing to get a couple of hours a night on the computer to get back to the world of CG so I just wanted to tell those of you who remember me that I am active again , and once I remember how to use Blender, Substance Painter and Unity , I will be able to return to creating my projects that have been gathering dust for nearly two years ...
now what was it again......E to extrude?
frikkr Welcome back man and CONGRATS! I'm excited for you and your growing family. Hope you guys are well rested and looking forward to seeing any future projects you have going on.
frikkr Love your sci-fi helmet and Flump 😬 looks like you did lots of awesome stuff back in the day, hope you have fun picking it up again and a late congrats with your twins!
ssmurfmier1985 Thanks for the kind words :)
Keep an eye out for updates , I will try to keep my polybook as current as I can with my projects.
So I am very much out of the loop with Blender, and with 2.8 just around the corner I have dug up an old abandoned project from years ago that I am going to use to get the hang of things.
Meet "Kriegshuhn" (which is apparently War Chicken in German)
My vision for this is that it is an experimental Mech developed by the German army in WWII . After researching some of the real prototypes that they made - some of which were crazy , I wanted to design what they may have come up with had they attempted a Mech back then. This model has no concept art , or initial sketches, it is all just made up as I go, and the initial blockouts profile looked very birdlike , so I went with it. After all, loads of German armor was named after animals : Tiger, Panther , Elephant... so why not a chicken?
Im really glad I'm going to resurrect this and actually finish it because I put a lot of hours into it , and its also partially rigged, so Im looking forward to finishing and animating it whilst picking up 2.8 along the way :)
Here are some WIP shots of it at present, a lot of it is still in the blocking stage though :
Currently, I am modelling the engine :
ssmurfmier1985 Ha yeah , but I started it waaaayyyy before the challenge began , and I easily have 100+ hours in it form years ago, so it would be unfair to enter it into the challenge.....
WIP - Treasure Chest
So I've finally finished the modelling stage of @theluthier 's new Blender 2.8 course that can be found here : https://cgcookie.com/course/modeling-texturing-shading-a-treasure-chest-in-blender-2-8
As usual , I have tried to come up with my own design , although I have to admit that a lot of the design is a mashup of several treasure chests I found on Artstation as time is a lot more limited for me these days and I was keen to get on with the course. Still , I wanted to try and do something of my own rather than copy Kent's model exactly because I find it a lot more fun that way.
I had to be a bot more creative with the hinges because of the massive overhang from the lid.
I've also gone ahead and rigged the lid to open with a bone, and I added a key because you cant open a treasure chest without it :)
I am now ready to move on to the UV unwapping stage but I wanted to share the model as it is so far :)
Textures painted and dirty vertex maps baked. Ready to start setting up the shaders and get this thing rendered :)
Shaders roughly set up and ready for some test renders and tweaking :)
