Evan's Blender Adventure

Posts

Head Sculpt

This week I decided to use Blenders sculpting tools. I didn't document my process as much as in my other posts, since I was closely following a video tutorial so I could get the gist of what I was doing. However, the general process is: subdivide a cube, shape it into a head-shape, extrude a neck out, mesh for more polygons, dig our eyeholes, add eyeballs, shape a nose, shape a mouth, add ears, then tweak the proportions, add more flesh, and finish the details. Knowing the general anatomy of a human head will greatly help when adjusting the proportions. Sometimes you look at it and it looks creepy and alien until you move the nose a little up and it looks fine again. After multiple hours of smoothing and undoing, here is the final result! Not too shabby if I do say so myself. I have experience sculpting an actual clay head, so the skills transferred over. I'm most proud of how I sculpted the lips, especially the corners. Surprisingly, I had the hardest time with the eyelids, a...

Update Post

I haven't done anything recently, so this is an emergency update post. I am cashing in my free week pass to review the posts I've done. The first week I posted my proposal. It was a very excellent proposal, maybe even the best. The second week I posted "Barrels". I did some simple modeling and experimented with Blender's shader nodes. The third week I posted "Robot Arm". I followed a tutorial and modeled a robotic arm. I rigged it up and used some modifiers and constraints. I ended the post by coloring and animating it picking up a ball. The fourth week I posted "Walk Cycle". I tried some new settings in Blender and had a lot of difficulties making a walk cycle. The fifth week I didn't post anything. This post is about 4 days late, so it's a good thing there are no hard deadlines each week. This week, I'm either going to make a post about me sculpting something in Blender, or I might animate something else. Whichever I feel like I c...

Walk Cycle

I'm back again with another late post! This time we're looking at walk cycles. A simple walk cycle is based on 4 key poses: contact, down, passing, and up. These poses are timed at specific intervals so that certain frames called inbetweens can be put in between. This makes for a smoother motion and also makes sure the action takes the right amount to time to happen. The picture below is of a template for a walk cycle at 24 frames per second, which is the standard for animation. To do this in Blender, I wanted to first make some changes. When I made animations before, I used a setting called interpolation. Interpolation takes the keyframes (in our case these four poses) and fills in the inbetweens for us. However, I wanted to try a different setting called constant. This has no interpolation, and just holds the frame in its entirety until the next frame. I have to pose every keyframe myself without the software doing it for me. It also makes the animation look choppier, which I...

Robot Arm

I began writing this post in a frenzied panic as I realized I had forgotten to make a blog post this week. I quickly looked up some Blender tutorials on concepts I hadn't worked on before and found one on constraints for a robotic arm. Since I was on a tight schedule, I followed the tutorial to quickly get something rough done. After, I would add details and things not in the tutorial to up the quality. The model is very basic but following the tutorial helped me learn some good practices when making models. Keeping certain parts separate and using "snap cursor to selected" to add parts in object mode before changing them in edit mode is very important when your model has multiple things that aren't joined together. Constant swapping between edit mode and object mode is confusing at first, but it's very useful if you want to do something like have the origin of a cylinder be at its base rather than the center. The arm has some hydraulic-looking things that use con...

Barrels!

For my first project, I was unsure of what to make. I didn't want to start something that might end up being too complex, so I looked online for some inspiration on a simple creation to do for this week. I stumbled upon a picture of a scene with some wooden barrels in it, and they clicked with me once I saw them. "Barrels...yeah, those would be good to make," I said. (Okay, I didn't really say anything, but for my narrative to be compelling let's just say I did). And so, I opened up a new project and started working. The mesh for this is reasonably simple to construct. You add a cylinder to the scene, enter edit mode, and make a bunch of loop cuts. Loop cuts are a quick way to divide up a mesh into smaller portions. Think of it like slicing something into thinner pieces to work with. Then, you resize the cuts to make the once uniform cylinder into a big, bulbous, barrel. After that, separate rings of faces around the top and bottom of the mesh to make them into t...

What is this?

One hobby I have is using Blender, a 3D graphics software. The thing is, I rarely actually try and make stuff in it, whether to practice or to make a project. This blog is to give me some motivation to actually practice Blender creation. Every week I will have to make something in Blender that challenges me in some way. If it didn't challenge me, I'd probably get away with not actually learning or improving over these next 8 (or 7?) weeks.