F's Sketchbook

There is soooo much stuff getting created with this wonderful software called Blender that never get’s to see the sunlight.
Time to change that.

Let’s start with something I created one evening a few days ago:

Not finished and not gonna get finished soon…
Tie Fighters are missing, the texture on the back of the millenium falcon is not good yet. Smoke on the ground as well as lens flares are still missing too.
I found the Millenium Falcon on this website:
http://www.scifi3d.com/list.asp?intGenreID=10&intCatID=10

Rendered four layers and put them together in After Effects: Sky, Falcon, “Speedstripes” and Dunes.

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Having a go at “Motion Design”.


One of my first sculpts made one year ago.
1 hour Dragon Doodle.



I love the dragon doodle! When I did my sculpting challenge back in June, I was surprised just how much you could get done in just 30 minutes, once you got the hang of it, particularly focusing on the larger details first. In fact, several wound up being “nearly” good enough to be complete in that time frame, though one of my best did take closer to 45 minutes to an hour, and is my favorite from that month. (Coincidentally, it’s also a dragon.)

One thing about your dragon here, from the front, he almost looks fierce and menacing, but from the back, he almost seems like a “cartoon” dragon. Not sure how much of that is the angle, how much is the small arms and legs with the larger body and how much is just my imagination. Still, I like him. Cute fella (as long as he doesn’t mind me calling him cute :wink: )

Hehe, the thing is: the dragon does not have legs! I just couldn’t get them right :slight_smile:
But don’t tell him that! He is not very selfconscious. He likes being called cute though.
I would very much like to see your dragon, where can I see him?

More Testing and Stuff:


Found a relatively easy and fast “procedural” way to cover high polygon models of pines with snow inside of Blender.
Maybe I’m gonna do a tutorial about it.




Stopped working on this as I couldn’t find good close ups of the part on the right side in the picture, thats near the disk.


Edit: Made some changes in post.

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I love the Gramophone, the shaders are beautiful!

I really like the works here @TheAlmightyF, congrats!
I’d be interested to know how you did the snow on the pine tree, which modifier did you use exactly?

Also I really like the bump map on the gold shader of the gramophon, where did you find it?

Thanks!
The snow was created with a subdivided plane, a shrinkwrapmodifier, a particle system and one mball.
Basically I positioned the plane above the tree and used it to scatter vertices on the topsides of the tree through the shrinkwrap modifier and scatter mballs through those vertices.
Although the method is super fast it is not recomendable for every object (e.g. really wide objects or fields) due to the nature of mballs in blender and there are many things to consider.

The bump map is a metall texture from a free texture map making it’s round on the internet. I tweaked it heavily in photoshop and inside of blender. On top of it I put two noise textures which also drive the roughness of the gloss of the metall.

The Dragon looks cute, too bad you never decided to flesh him out a bit more with organic shading and texturing.

The gramophone also looks quite nice, perhaps turning it a little could’ve worked better?

Thanks for the info on that - it looks like a very useful method. I’m not at my computer right now, is this a correct interpretation of your method:

  • Place subdivided plane above the tree (or other object)
  • Add shrinkwrap modifier to the plane, and set the tree as the target
  • Add particle system to plane and set it to hair mode
  • Use mballs for the particles
  • Render mballs particles and set plane to invisible

Are there any tricks that are good to know regarding the mballs? I’ve never used them before.

Cheers!

Matt

You are nearly right Matt!
Tow things are different though:
*2.5. Apply modifiers and delete unchanged vertices above the object. This is where the “procedural” gets it’s quote signs.
*3. Add particle system type “Emitter” to plane and set emission to “Verts”

This works great for simple models.
But meta balls are really slow and heavy on the system in Blender. The more you need of them the slower and more tedious the method is…
I covered the pine with something like 10000 mballs. Setting the particles to 10000 froze Blender for 1 min on my pc.

Thank you very much for the tip @TheAlmightyF, I never thought you could use metaballs as particles! I wonder how you have all the metaballs particles on the top of the branches (it seems to me) and not pointing in every direction… When you shrinkwrap the plane on the tree, do you place it above the tree before so the vertices will be “projected” on the top of the branches?

Very old testrenderscene of mine:


The steps for the snow summarized again:

  • Place subdivided plane above the pine (or other object)
  • Add shrinkwrap modifier to the plane, and set the tree as the target
  • Apply modifiers and delete unchanged vertices above the object. This is where the “procedural” gets it’s quote signs.
  • Add particle system type “Emitter” to plane and set emission to “Verts”
  • Create mball, put origin of mball to bottom of the mball (with the help of an empty or something), set mball for the particles
  • unperformant: Render mballs particles and set plane to invisible
    performant: convert particles to mesh.

That’s very useful, cheers!

Thanks! I found it to be quite slow too, but I’m sure I can find a use for it at some point :slight_smile:

Another 1 hour sculpt doodle:


Done in a very short amount of time. “Animated” in Blender (not much done really).

Took a picture out of the brochure of a local furniture shop and tried to recreate it.
Which side is the fake one?