This week we started off our lesson by modelling both a skateboard and a wagon to experiment with different modelling techniques and, in my case, different methods of rendering as I decided I’d use cycles instead of Eevee for a select few renders just to see how things would go. The skateboard and the wagon appeared easy upon first glance but ended up being a lot more difficult than I first anticipated, especially the skateboard as modelling the metal brackets underneath the board took me at least 3 tries before I finished with something I felt looked good. I followed Mike’s tutorials and came out with two great looking meshes, however I decided to spice up the base colour materials a little bit by involving textures. As mentioned before, I rendered both of these using cycles and I feel for a first time use of the engine, they came out really well! Something about the skateboard render feels a little too soft to me so I might have to re-evaluate my settings and or lighting next time I use cycles but it works for what it is.
The homework for this week was to model a Tie Interceptor which, at first glance, seemed like a bit of a step up in complexity from the snowman but, after glancing over some of the tutorial videos in class, I quickly realised that wasn’t the case and that we’d just be learning some new techniques whilst incorporating what we learnt from the snowman, skateboard and wagon. I didn’t have many issues with modelling the ship itself but moreso with finding the right textures to use online as most weren’t quite fitting with the references I was using. I ended up settling on a concrete texture for the base of the ship, a metal texture for the metal trim around the glass, mosaic tiles for the black tiles on the wings and a grunge texture applied as a roughness map for the glass itself. For the background, I decided I’d use a new space HDRI instead of the one I used for the snowman animation, opting for something with more galaxies and nebulas in the background to make the lighting a little more diverse. Animating the ship was probably where I had the most fun as it was as simple as locking the ship to a Bezier Circle, applying a “follow path” constraint to the base of the ship (the parent) and then animating the offset value so the ship flies along the curve. Obviously I had to do some manual animation to make it look like the ship was turning and swaying but it took me less than 5 minutes to do. Albeit I’ve used Blender before in my last course and in my free time, I feel I’m learning an awful lot more about a program I thought I was well acquainted with, which obviously is a good thing! Also, just for fun, I decided to render one of the frames from the animation and, using Blender’s compositor, edited it a little using glare and some contrast.
