Evan's Blender Adventure

For my final post, I had to have it uploaded quickly, so I decided to go back to my head sculpt and do some rigging on it. Maybe I could fit in a bit of animation too. To start, I first had to remesh my sculpt. The current head has around 1 million faces, which is way too many for anything other than rendering a still image. Trying to animate with that would make my computer burst into flames. To remesh, I used a program called Instant Meshes. This uses some algorithm to change the mess of a mesh my original head is to one that is 50 times smaller and is made up of a bunch of neat-looking quad faces. If I had done this by hand by making a brand new mesh over the original, it would be called retopologizing instead.  Now that we have a lower poly mesh, we can add some bones to it. However, when I try and pose the bones the head is deforming weirdly. This can all be fixed by changing the weight painting. The weight painting is a representation of how much influence each bone has on th...

 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...

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...