Playing with Blender

Not a blender, the Blender. I’ve took a fancy again to one of my many geeky hobbies, and this time it’s 3D modelling. Yes, 2 Ls.

The catch with 3D modelling isn’t so much the program as it is actually having a semblance of artistic skill. I might be able to understand the concept, but there’s a fat chance in crap I can produce anything resembling art with it.

This isn’t to downplay the separate art that is learning a program’s interface, but having tried other 3D software (well..tried as in downloaded and uninstalled cause it was like hard man), Blender is comparatively easy to learn. Whether or not that’s a good thing is still up in the air.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Here’s some of the practice I’ve done with Blender over the last week or so.

Pictures, please mind the fold.

This was the first model I took seriously after trying Blender again. It came from the Simple Vehicle tutorial from the Blender 3D: Noob to Pro wikibook. Note the terrible topology.

 

 

Lately, Blender got a new hair particle simulation..thing, and naturally I had to play with it. Suzanne needs a hair net.

 

 

 

I started messing around with some sort of topology..landscape…shaping..thanks to seeing a video tutorial. Suzanne is just there. It did have a texture but it didn’t look good.

 

 

 

Also, here’s the wireframe just because I think it looks awesome.

 

 

 

 

I did another tutorial, this time modelling a house. I tried to light it all cartoon like, but it’s really overkill.

 

 

 

 

The textureless (well, colorless) version. You can probably start to tell by now I really love my ambient occlusion.

 

 

 

And finally, something I just started yesterday. A Miami 80s-style heavy concrete bungalow.

Naturally it’s colorless. It’s all lit by ambient occlusion, save for the fact the materials emit a bit to make them whiter.

 

 

The lit version of the above. I tried adding buildings in the background but I never could get them to scale right. They always looked too close even though they were a country mile from the camera.

 

 

The obligatory wireframe. Note again the terrible modelling. Reaally don’t need that many faces. I didn’t plan it out before I built it (classic mistake huh ) so I had to subdivide in order to redo some of it.

 

 

 

So, that’s my Blender experience so far. I used to play around with it, but this is the first time I’ve took it even halfway seriously.

Side note: The pictures in this post were hard as hell to arrange. Yes I know they’re unevenly spaced. No I don’t know how to fix it. Visual editor my ass. It looks nothing like how it shows up on the page..*ahem* WordPress isn’t all glitter and gleam now is it? I had to use IE to align the pictures correctly. Trying to manually code stripped out all the tags. Trying to use the visual editor in Firefox stripped my extra spaces. Fun.