I feel that I’m now much more confident in 3D modelling and texturing than I was in the beginning of the year. As I had never used Blender before and had only attempted 3D modelling once for my portfolio, it seemed like a very daunting thing. However I think I have learned a lot in only 5 weeks.
When I was working on the snowman assignment I had to restart the model a few times despite it being made of simple shapes and it took me hours just to finish the model. I know that if I were to attempt it again now I would be much faster. I think I did a good job at it for where I was skill-wise but I would definitely have put more effort into the environment if I were to do it again. Also, in hindsight I don’t think the animation was as awful as I thought it was at the time but now I would spend much more time on the animation portion as I am getting more comfortable with animation in Blender and I have realised that it essentially does work like layers do in Clip Studio Paint.
I really struggled with the skateboard assignment in class as it took me the entire day and even then I ended up restarting it. I’ve learned that sometimes it can be better to restart a model than to try and fix all of the mistakes you might have made in it as that can often be more time consuming. After I had completed the skateboard and pullcart however, I felt far more comfortable with the basic edit tools in blender when modelling the tie fighter. I am also glad that I went a bit further and found out how to include a background into my final render using composite nodes, however I do find putting textures onto planes to be a much easier way of achieving this.
By the time the third week came around, I was far more comfortable in my modelling capabilities and for the first time I was able to complete all the modelling for the classwork in class. As I had finished the classwork with time to spare I decided to attempt adding textures to the objects and being slightly more creative with my models rather than just following the video exactly and leaving it like that. Although what I had learned from a video on texturing was not how we would later end up texturing things, I am still glad that I took the time to experiment with it as uv smart unwrapping proved to be very used for me later on to create quick backgrounds/environments to display my models without having to take a large amount of time in uv unwrapping them when it isn’t needed. I also found the process of modelling and animating the zubat to be much faster than previous models as I had a much better grasp of modifiers such as mirror and subdivison surface. I also learned how to use the knife tool which is useful, however it does sometimes mess up topology which can be very tedious to fix.
For the fourth week we learned the old way of texturing things in blender. I doubt I will use this in the future as I found the method of uv unwrapping to be very time consuming but I found it helpful for understanding how the uv map works. I also enjoyed modelling the sword as it was the first time we had complete freedom to model it in whatever way we wanted to. I found it to be a fun way to test the modelling skills and techniques I had learned up until this point. I also enjoyed lighting and staging the model.
I enjoyed learning substance painter in the fifth week as it is much more intuitive than the old way of texturing. I also like how it has layers like a drawing program. I did struggle with modelling my helmet initially as I had a more ambitious design and found the visor on my design hard to model. I instead decided to model a simpler design from Skyrim and found it much easier to model. However I still dislike using the knife tool and find it difficult to fix the topology that it disrupts so some errors in my topology still persisted as I struggled to get rid of some of the triangles in my model.
I am overall very happy with the progress I have made in both modelling and texturing and I feel I have become much more confident in using both blender and substance painter and will continue to experiment with blender in the future.