For this week’s assignment we were given the change to have free reign on creating and UV mapping our own swords. As I’m not entirely confident in my abilities with blender yet I wanted to go with a pre-existing design, and hopefully feel brave enough to take on 3D modelling my own design at some stage.
The sword I wanted to recreate was the Sword of Light from Dragon Quest XI. The sword itself has interesting features, and with help from online sources and my own collective knowledge from doing previous set workshop tasks, I can create a close replica.
For this week’s assignment we were tasked with the opportunity to animate and model a Zubat 3D model from Pokémon.
To begin a flat PNG was inserted as a point of reference and transformed to lay flat on the axis, rotating to form a T-POSE. Ensure image was set to non selectable due to not wanting to move the reference image and deform the model.
Created a sphere, placed it above axis line and duplicated/rotated it. Named the layers/objects to ensure I knew which sphere I was altering at the time.
The second object we were assigned as practise was a child’s pull cart. The skateboard was a good introduction to the editing tool and followed a similar set of rules. Generating a cube, I then transformed to a rectangle to form the basic shape of the cart. Selecting the top face I created a secondary face in the middle, leaving an outer rim to form the edge of the cart and extruding downward to generate a dip to form the inner cart. Throughout the process I switched to x-ray mode to allow me to adjust and make necessary changes to depth and object forms. I then bevelled the edges to ensure there were no sharp corners to resemble the cart reference.
I would lie if I said that my first couple of encounters with the skateboard had been a success. I have never used blender before and as the shape of the board was more complicated to the simple design of the snowman I was stuck when it came to the boards basic shape.
There was an issue using a PNG as a backdrop. PNG Background wasn’t set to “scale”, so I had to go back and scale the image for the scene and rendered the image, but it seemingly wasn’t appearing. I found that the images weren’t used as planes and merely references, so when rendered this doesn’t conflict with a rendered project if the reference layer wasn’t hidden. For this purpose I wanted to do the opposite, so I activated the import-export: import images as planes took the necessary steps to re-render my animation. (Also when applying the texture nodes for the snow, lost some buttons!)
This also posed an issue of the plane being too dark. I turned the specular down and added an emission node and linked them. This allowed me to acquire the effect that I wanted.
Another issue with using the image; it wasn’t high resolution, but I adored the look of the northern lights, with my light point set up I wanted to still use the image in some way.
I simply added nodes in succession to create a fuzzy/blurred effect. This worked well and I finalized my snowman animation. I’m happy with the result of the snowman animation, and although there are minor tweaks I would like to make (texturing the arms, better surround background, rounding off edges) I’m glad I got to play around with the light settings to match the environment and formulate a realistic snow texture and I gained better understanding of the animation and modelling tools blender had to offer.
Hello! To note, unfortunately my original blog I was posting to got deleted due to linking the wrong blog. I’ve been documenting my progress through word document step-by-steps and intend to upload and update onto here, hence why the dates and times posted wont link up to the work.
