renderingendorphins

Today I spent over an hour playing around toying around and putting together a flying saucer, something I wanted to do for fun for a while for whatever reason.  I only got so far before I hit a couple walls that I’ve hit before, mainly with lighting and object transparency for actual light and scene pass-through.

Conveniently, the tutorial I did today answered this.  I did a Arabic-looking lamp tutorial, and the creator had some nice insights on this stuff.

A cool trick was an alternative way of duplication.  By holding ALT + D, then inputting the rotation details, whatever which way one panel was edited in the future would have the same effect on the given parts Alt-Ded’ counterparts.

For the glass panels, I chose ‘Emission’ as the surface type when creating the glass panels’ material.  This gave it its initial glowiness. 

One of the persistent issues I was puzzled with before was that I couldn’t get any of my actual lights to glow properly.  I learned to fix this by enabling bloom when enabling Bloom when Evee is being used.

The majority of the light settings were configured between the Object Data Properties tab on the light object itself, as well as 4 subsections found in the Scene tab.

Not too too bad.  I still couldn’t figure out how to make the rendered background totally dark, but don’t want to spend any more time on this today.

Looked at a tutorial quickly on how to create an egg, in the hopes of learning an easy way to create the shape for my midcentury egg chair.  That payed off.  The creator demonstrates the approach of properly adjusting the middlemost vertex in conjunction with Proportional Editing (’connected’).  Just a couple of minutes could have saved me over 2 hours yesterday.  (yes, wasting time in this fashion is now a mortal sin for me.)

I ended up hyper-focusing for and wasting 3 hours strenuously trying to cut the proper hole out of a midcentury egg-chair I’ve been trying to create from scratch.  Sometimes it gets easy to become lost trying so many little alternative approaches to what is ultimately not working.  I have to remind myself that from time to time, grinding is not the answer, and I’ve got to consider another approach to the problem.  Only when I did this did I have the willpower to learn the function and power of the Boolean Modifier. 

I did a tutorial by 

The Subdivision Surface Modifier, possibly the most commonly brought-up modifier in Blender tutorials, made it easy to turn an already beveled sphere into something like this tutor4u about modeling a medieval battle hammer kinda object.

Using the Sphere Transmormation, I could turn the flat, square end of the hammer into something resembling a circle. (Click ‘mesh’ + ‘transform’ + ‘spere’)

The X-ray vision view mode made it possible to both see and select vertices and edge on the opossosite side of the mesh, something I’d previously wasted time switching all the way to wireframe mode in order to achieve. (Alt + Z)

Insetting close to the tips where rivets tend to show up helped smooth out the geometry, and make the object seem more realistic.  I did 2 insets close to the edge to create a desirable effect. (’I’)

Yesterday I did the first part of a wonderful tutorial by Grant Abbitt.  He has a 3-part series for creating an old-school medieval looking well.  3 useful tools stood out to me in the video, one of them being the Simple Deform Modifier.  Using the Bend version of the Simple Deform at 360° , I was able to bend a few bricks I drew all the way around and meet with themselves on the other side, creating a perfect spherical shape.  From there it was easy to finish the rest of the stone well structure with some duplications, rotations, and scaling.

Next I learned a skill that feels like it will be a very essential tool many times going forward.  Proportional Editing allowed me to affect a greater general area with my moving/scaling, with the scope of affect being determined by a sphere of influence that is resized with the mouse wheel.  It made it exponentially quicker to remove general uniformity to objects in an area, as it saves you from having to edit each little section one by one.