Isolation Day 11: Keep On Learning
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Educating Rita Jim
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So I’ve come to the conclusion that if I don’t set myself a task for the next 10 and a bit weeks then I may go from eccentric to full on padded wall crazy. So I’ve set my self the task of learning how to use blender.
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I’ve did a little bit of 3D modelling whilst I was at uni and quite enjoyed it, even if it was a bit frustrating at times. I then hit up YouTube to do a bit of research about what was out there and what was affordable.
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Whilst I started learning how to 3D model on 3DS Max whilst at uni, my student license expired a while back and as I mentioned in a previous post I mostly run on MacOS. So my search continued and I ended up finding Blender, and for a free program bloody hell does it pack a lot of features. I’m already interested in motion capture, though a bit of a way away from creating my own, a blender has most of the tools you need to do this.
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It also has the new Mantaflow simulation engine that looks really cool. and a load of plugin based stuff to that can help you generate terrains or even create a 3D model of any city in the world (so long as it’s on google maps or open street map).
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So I thought ‘s I’d give a simple low resolution scene a go. I settled on a simple beach scene with a load of trees as a background. After a few hours of figuring out keyboard short cuts, a bit of cursing and even longer rendering to realise something was wrong. I finally figures out what was bothering me. You have to take my word for it because I didn’t think to keep any of my early renders, but the fire looked rubbish because I’d just added a load of pyramids and rotated them to look spikey.
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I had a quick google and came across the particle system. and found at that it’s actually quite simple to use. Create a spawn point, tell it what thing to spew out and in what directions – well that’s a but over simplified but It didn’t take long following a tutorial or two to get a simple low polly fire effect. After that a quick rotation on the cube I used for the water made it look like the sea was coming in and out too. Have a look at the video loop I made bellow.
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I’m hoping to take this scene further and make the house look a bit more realistic (in a low polly fashion) and add a few more details to the scene, may be a sun that effects the lighting or clouds and variation in the trees or something.
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What do you think of my first try? What would you change or add to it? Can you recommend any tutorials? Let me know in the comments bellow.
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