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 the metal hoops of the barrel. Extrude, then smooth, then bevel, et voila. Once the mesh is complete, it's time to put some textures on that baby.

A barrel!

A broken barrel.

For the textures, you could just make some new materials for the hoops and the wood, set a base color, maybe tweak the roughness or metallic sliders, and have a decent barrel, but what's the fun in that? Instead, let's go a step further and make our own custom textures. And not just any image texture, but a procedural one. A procedural texture is one that is created from just math, rather than using an image file. Procedural textures are some of the most fun you can have in Blender. All the magic is made in the node editor, where you connect black boxes to each other until something cool happens.

It would take too long to explain everything to do in the node editor in this short blog post, but I'll give you a quick run-down. Basically, the texture is just a stretched and recolored noise texture. A noise texture is just that, random noise. You take this noise texture--which you can resize, change the detail, phase-shift, etc--and after stretching it vertically, plug it into a color ramp to make it from all rainbow-y to all wood-y. And for a final touch, you can take a wave texture and use that to make a bump/normal map for the wood, which makes it look like there are gaps in between the planks even though there really aren't any!

A decently decent barrel.

Procedural wood!

Nodes, if they interest you.

After making the wood look all pretty, the metal looks too bland now. Let's add some rust. Take a noise texture, and run it through a color ramp again. This time, make it rust-y instead of wood-y. You can reuse this noise texture for everything else in this material, too. Just connect more color ramps and you can make it rougher, bumpier, and more metallic only on the rusty bits. And why not give all the metal a little bumpiness as well to give it more character.

The neat thing about procedural textures is that it's all non-destructive. You can always go back and just tweak settings and it all just works. This entire rust texture is based on a single noise texture node you can modify by moving some sliders. Want a new rust pattern? Just rotate the texture (which is 3D, by the way (you can even get 4D textures!)), resize it, change the detail, or distort it, etc.

Tasty rust.

A noise texture's all you need.

This first project is relatively simple, but it did still challenge me somewhat. I don't have much experience with modeling, and only some experience with procedural textures, so this was a good refresher for my fundamentals.

Final render!