Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Merry Christmas!

A little festive holiday themed Blender practice. Happy Holidays everyone!

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Character Sketch

Dr. Darkness
Megalomaniacal villain of sunlight and all things bright. This deranged scientist uses his patent pending portable pressurized dispenser (PPD) to spray sunscreen on everything in reach.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Character breakdown


     The Man With No Name (aka Manco, Blondie, and Joe) is a typical representation of an anti-hero. His appeal centers around his enigmatic and moral ambiguous character. He ultimately looks to benefit himself, and he will do anything to make that happen. He will cheat, lie, steal, exploit, and murder to achieve his goals. Although, he has a strong sense of heavy-handed justice, and will go out of his way to stop evil men from hurting those he considers to be innocents. Additionally, his deep-running moral code prevents him from harming innocents, and he will usually reserve his "shoot first, search the dead bodies for the information he needs later" mentality to those he considers his enemies.
   He is typical of an Old West cinema protagonist in that he is portrayed as a kind of bounty hunter or mercenary. He has no given home, moving from town to town, looking to make a buck. He doesn't trust anybody and rarely makes friends. When he does, it is only out of convenience and he will usually try to double cross them before they do it to him. 
  More often than not, he elects to remain silent, especially when pressed for details of his identity or motives. When forced to talk he usually lets his gun do the talking. 
  The Man With No Name is highly skilled in the use of revolvers, and will almost exclusively use his Colt Peacemaker for any job requiring some serious wet work.
  Some of this characters weaknesses stem in his rough and tumble attitude to get him regarded as a criminal by normal folk, and he will often have to throw in with some real criminals in order to benefit from a situation, which ends up in either the MWNN being betrayed by the criminals, or the criminals
 deaths. MWNN also has a tendency for exhibiting single mindedness. He will pursue a main antagonist with grim determination, and he allows nothing to stand in his way as he delivers his own brand of justice. 
   MWNN's digs are typically the same. His clothes show his long days spent in a saddle on the dusty road. A  flat brimmed cowboy hat, poncho, sheepskin vest are his trademark. He is roughly shaven, always carrying several day's growth of facial hair. He is rarely, if ever, without a cigarillo in his mouth, which he will constantly chew and shift back and forth between the corners of his mouth. When he speaks, he speaks over his cigarillo through clenched teeth.He will almost always do something with his left hand, leaving his right hand freeto grab his gun quickly is necessary.
  MWNN is such an appealing character because he is neither good nor evil. He is a rugged loner, skilled in combat, strong, confident, clever, and intelligent. He really cares for no one but himself, the few times he shows real compassion or empathy with another character are fleeting moments for him, pauses in his latest vendetta or treasure seeking exploit. 

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The final final (final final) render

I was able to pull a successful render. Some new additions, got the world texture working, and added a hi-res skymap to the background to get some realistic looking reflections on the water.

Orrery Final

Blender crashed everytime I tried to save a render, and rendering was taking about three hours to complete, so a screenshot is all I was able to pull.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Orrery Progress 3



The Blender fluid simulator never really gave me an accurate result so I elected to just use displace modifiers and texture settings to create the ocean. The tentacles have also been re-done with a better rig.


Finished modeling the light bulb for the stars.

Lightbulb turned on:

 Lightbulb off:

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Orrery Progress Part2

The tentacles are  now completed and rigged with about 25 bones to allow for smoother and more developed range of deformation.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Image composite


I made a bedside clock for the image composite based on the '80s animated movie Heavy Metal.



I still haven't figured out some of the nuances of setting the shadows on the invisible ground plane, but it turned out pretty well.
EDIT: After fiddling with different settings...I arrived at a final composition that works best for the surface presented in the background image.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Mantis Mirror Exercise

I ended up doing my own reference drawing for the mantis an kind of went on my own once I got the gist of most of the tut, so mine turned out a bit different from the one shown in the tutorial.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Friday, October 8, 2010

Acorns.

I elected to use a UV sphere instead of an icosphere in order to ease unwrapping and texturing of the acorn body. There were still some seams present, but all in all it turned relatively well.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Working with arrays


Number 2: Making the drops look more glass-like.

Savador Dalien

I attempted some character modeling over the weekend. I ran out of time to finish it, so I made the alien a mannequin instead. The bad lighting is also because of my being short on time, and Blender crashing almost every time I tried to render the image. The Salvador Dali mustache came at the suggestion of a friend of mine.

EDIT: After some work with the lighting and surfacing, Salvador Dalien looks much better.