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Minus a few minor details I think I’m ready to start reworking the existing materials. These are from my previous builds so the texture coordinates and scaling of procedural textures are off. 

Interesting note, the bottom image is the original build I was doing which apparently was the episode 3 Anakin’s lightsaber which you wouldn’t think would go through any design changes but i guess there was some creative design on the hilt for the prequels. 

Large Star Wars drop as I’ve been gone for awhile but still productive. 

So the past month I’ve been tinkering with my droid animation:

First animation is looking promising in the test renders which is simply him attempting to fire his jet booster. 

Second animation is going through blaster tests. In this animation he attempts to fire his blaster while hovering with disastrous results. Overall theme in the 2 minute animation is he cannot get his audition down either due to his own mishaps or interruptions by other droids. 

The last two images are from a project I started today both are a result of the current Last Jedi Fan art contest that was announced the other day. 

Simply put the contest states that all content must be from the current movie so I figured why not go with everyone’s favorite. The Porgs. 

The first image is a very early base of a Porg mesh, it is still currently in the skin modifier phase so there really isn’t any true mesh data it’s just a rough skeleton of about ten verticies but once applied it will serve as a good sculpting base.

I did a bit of research as I was definitely stuck on how to do a base of the wings, were they more penguin like or like regular birds. Well thanks to research I know i should model the wings like a regular bird and according to starwars.com I should more precisely look into puffins. 

The second image does not really need any introduction it is Anakin’s lightsaber. The theme of the image is two Porgs attempting to carry the lightsaber up the stairs of Ahch-To. 

Well C0-K1 “Cookie” is getting in front of the green screen for his first animation. Not technically literally, there will be a green screen in said animation but nothing with live action.  

For the moment his rig is adequate for the animation. Basically couldn’t rotate the legs the way I wanted with the IK rig so I had have to rotate each leg as a bone group. It was a very hard decision to go with IK, I could have easily moved the legs with a control box and FK rigging but it would have cost me the up and down movement I so desired with this character. simply put it i’m sacrificing simplicity for personality. 

The 3rd image is simply tests of him raising and lowering himself, if you look closely you will see the legs intersecting with the head/body, limits of IK is I couldn’t quite limit the rotations of the very first joints. While they weren’t meant to rotate along any axis but Z I will be modifying him in the future to incorporate other rotations. It won’t be noticeable in the animation that the joints are supposed to be locked so I’m pressing since I’m a few weeks overdue. Additionally I rescaled the thickness of the bottom portion of his body so the legs can rotate. Really all I need to add later on are hinges to the legs so that if I shot him from below his movements would be believable. 

Well been awhile but making some major progress. 

My last post I mentioned that ill be making a series of tutorials and before I did that I would be making a sort of mascot that can introduce each video. 

Here is C0-K1 or as I call him, “Cookie” an homage to blender cookie that has greatly helped me with blender. 

So a little background on the second image. That image is an alpha background, hence nothing behind him. This weekend  I’m going to start rendering 3 animations with this guy. The test render above is a test of flame for when his rocket booster tool goes haywire so I’m going for a very large flame.

Once I bring him to life I can get underway getting back into the tutorials. 

In the next few months I will be launching a few set of tutorials. One thing I needed in particular was some sort of transition in my tutorials. Being the star wars fan that I am I thought of using a droid to project title images or something for the transitions. So to that end I decided to begin building a droid that isn’t currently in use. 

There are some slight differences but for the most part this droid is based off some concept art for BB-8. Granted theres a great deal of improvising with this character as I have only found one image of it and that was a screenshot i took of a featurette on the force awakens. 

I am hoping it turns out well, so far I am pleased with how he’s turning out; slightly basing the leg joints on the imperial probe droid as it looks as if its purpose was that of a probe rather than filling in for a bb or r2 unit. 

My apologies for the late response, 

Unfortunately I don’t have an immediate answer to your question, I’ll have to search through my posts and see if that part wasn’t posted, I could have sworn that I finished the eye tutorial. 

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen with this model. 

At first I intended to go with a series of wave textures but decided against it in favor of using a stencil texture paint of a random hair texture I found. Now with this there was a small hiccup in the texture, mainly in the UV unwrapping as it seems that there are a few errors near the chin, hence the bubbling there. 

Once the base mesh is retopologized, something I wanted to do today but got caught up in researching the hair, I will begin texturing the hair onto the base mesh. Something I found in the research was that there is a subtle texture matching the hair along the edges where the hair meets the skin, most likely meant to add a transitional layer to help blend the two meshes together.  

Well you know me, start a project one day, alter it another. One of these days something will move past the first stages of a project but I do have a good feeling about this one. Also partially the reason I’ve been inactive lately is that I’ve been thinking about what my overall goal is with Blender and have been constructing a project that could help me achieve it. I can write off the past projects a simple rehearsal. 

With star wars celebration approaching I started to tweak the inquisitor project slightly and am working towards a more scaled down animation project, something in the realm of 10-15 seconds as a start. 

Now I will say I am a fan of the animation style of Star Wars Rebels, hence why the first image is a sculpt of Kanan I am working on. While the initial sculpt is nearly complete I have been testing some blender cycles materials that could possibly mimic the render engine utilized in the series. Haven’t looked into what they use yet. So far I am thinking that the toon shader is a decent start. The second image utilizes the basic diffuse shader. Interestingly enough after looking closely at some images I did notice that there were some interesting lighting choices with the lightsabers, noticeably that they don’t emit light inside the shaft at the base of the blade. With no research as to why I can’t say why that is, all I can do is think of how I can mimic that. So in the first image I used a cylinder that would not render but still influence the light emitting from the blade. 

Well here’s a small preview of my first character in a long long while. 

In short I got tired very quickly of working out teasers so to help with ridding my post of that I have added a simple placeholder lightsaber, so there shouldn’t be any more guessing/confusion of the character. 

So here’s the character:

The character is an Inquisitor from Star Wars, the style will be my best effort to mimic a Rebels styled character.

As for the inquisitor himself, using a bit of freedom of interpretation from the description I will be making the Sixth Brother; an inquisitor that has not been shown but was described in the Star Wars Book Ahsoka. Per the description of the character I will need to add some normal mapped scars on the face later on. 

Though the character is described as unidentifiable it doesn’t necessarily mean the character looks very alien so I decided to make him a bit more of a generic humanoid. 

As for the clothing I figured it could be a variation of the outfit worn by Imperial Combat Drivers just with a slightly different helmet. 

Blender Animation Project:

Not on schedule..very slightly but regardless, retopology is going far better than initially expected. All that’s left is the hands on the character. I may release an image or two of the character model near completion but mostly I am hoping of a sort of teaser animation within the next three weeks which will include the project announcement. However I must say that nothing major related to this character will be released prior to the animation. 

The style of the character I am attempting to mirror is a very simplistic yet practical 3d animation style; fortunately the style I am trying to mirror does not require subsurface scattering. 

The Y wing project is on hold, for the moment at least as I am starting work on my largest project that I have been planning out since November of last year. The goal is to complete it by the first week of May. 

I’ll be making a few announcements in the coming weeks regarding the project. 

With the project I am also considering expansion of sorts, more on that later. 

Now what’s involved in this project:

4 Blender modeled characters (One can be recycled as multiple characters.), a few street settings, which can also used recycled models with separate or random materials. 2 Vehicle models. And that’s pretty much it. 

As for what these objects will be used for, well theres a pretty big hint in the image.  Only thing that may hinder the project is getting the style correct. 

Blender Eeveelution Project Glaceon “Frostbite”

So my shiny glaceon project:

Y Wing Heavy Concept Project. 

Well a good portion of the day was spent figuring out the gun turret for the Y wing. I figured since the concept is that it is custom made and not  factory built I am working on Tie fighter cockpit windows for the viewports and smaller versions of the AG-2G turrets on the top and bottom. That was a last minute decision but it looks like it will work out better than my original idea which was sort of a mechanical arm holding the turrets, though it will still be on a track that rotates around the viewport. 

QT-KT BTL Y-WING Heavy Bomber Project:

With QT-KT rigged and ready to go I’ve started work on the Y wing to go with her. These are the initial builds. At the moment I am starting to swap out the very low detail markers with the actual meshes. 

So far I have ceased work on the engines simply because I don’t want to put too much detail into it prior to the rest of the ship, that could cause them to look out of place later on.  

So the heavy bomber (1st image Left) is simply a modified Y wing with the most notable differences being the extra engines and top and bottom viewports in the rear. These are to accommodate two rear turrets which are inconveniently manned by a single gunner. subtle differences include a longer slightly wider fuselage and additional torpedo slots. 

In all I am designing it to be a 3 person bomber with the additional aid of an astromech. I added QT-KT to the blend file to help aid in creating the slot for her. 

Little update from earlier this week. 

Well two updates from the two projects earlier this week. 

Glaceon project:

Retopology is going pretty well, a few rough patches that needed fixing. Long story short I created a few non terminating loops which required a complete teardown of a few sections of the mesh. 

QT-KT project. 

Well here’s a little update on QT-KT and a random project that’s been progressing rather quickly. 

QT-KT:

Well for the most part QT-KT is complete. I say for the most part because all I am doing now is rigging random bells and whistles for the mesh. So for example when I add a tool, say an astromech fusion welder, I will rig the hatch to accommodate it. To finish out the project I think I will restart my Y-wing project, more to come on that end. 

Eeveelution Glaceon “Frostbite” 

The bottom two images are of a project that was originally slated as a holiday project but it’s still winter so it is relevant. 

Of late there has been a majority of eevelution render’s but blender model wise I have very few varieties. Lately the only ones that have updated meshes are Umbreon and Vaporeon. While Umbreon is pretty recent as of this year and is currently on it’s 5th generation mesh, vaporeon (who has had 3 remodels since I started blender) has not been updated since 2014. This model is Glaceon which will actually only be the 2nd model I have made of this eeveelution. Looks to be going well, currently in the retopology stage, almost at rigging. 

I call the project frostbite as it will be a shiny glaceon which I have aptly named frostbite. 

Happy New Year. 

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve posted and honestly it’s been too long. 

So here’s a rundown of what I’ve been doing:

QT-KT has been dormant for awhile because I have been having trouble getting the rig right. After consulting with the community on blenderartists and seeing their ideas I decided to go back and try again. Essentially we all focused way too much on the front leg, essentially concluding that the center leg’s dropping motion should drive the rig. 

The idea came to me last night and was rather simplistic. 

I started the IK chain with the shoulder bones and used them as the driving factor for the rig. Using a series of transform constraints those bones control the tilt of the body and the lowering of that center leg. I am also prepping the center leg to track an empty located at the ground. As that foot should move freely it should always be facing down due to gravity. 

Now that it is 80% rigged I have noticed after an hour of measuring, the skirt is slightly off on the measurements causing the battery packs to come into contact and pass through the skirt, I am hoping it does not ruin the masks too much but I will have to redo that portion before I call it complete.