Blender Barrel Complete

I am happy to announce that I achieved my goal for the day by completing my barrel project in blender. :)

Below you can see the high poly mesh which consists of a whopping 4 million plus polygons! Each part was modeled separately, sculpted, and manipulated into position before being used in the baking process.

The high poly was originally much higher polygon count, but my computer crashed when I tried to perform a Remove Duplicates vertices operation, so I went in and manually removed a ton of the vertices and faces from the inside of the barrel. Below you can see some of the barrel "gutted" on the inside.

The low poly mesh is pretty basic, which is why a lot of the shape from the high poly mesh does not translate too well to the lower poly mesh, but since this was my first attempt at such a process and as a learning experience, I think I didn't do too badly. Right?

The UV layout for the low poly is not too bad, but I know that it could be better. I just need more practice and hopefully I will get some useful advice from the cool people on the art forums I've shown this on.

Well that's all for now. I'll have more cool stuff to show later I'm sure. :)

Blender Barrel Beginnings

Well, my learning of Blender has definitely been going well I think. I wanted to model something and learn more about Blender along the way, so I asked my wife for a subject, and she said "a wooden barrel", and so I got to work. I have spent about 14 hours on this high poly model so far.

Most of that time was spent learning how to create my own sculpting brushes for Blender, learning what the sculpting tools do, and how they can be used, learning how to create my own custom UI components and tools using Python to speed up my workflow, and learning how to make use of the super-powerful modifier stack and multiple scenes.

I learned how to not cripple my system working with millions and millions of polygons in real-time with zero lag, I learned how to effectively make and use a "library" of objects for reuse, I learned that I can swap objects from layer to layer with ease in order to get them out of the way while working on another to reduce the polygon load on my system.

This is my progress so far.

Today I plan to unwrap my low-poly mesh and then bake the normal and ambient occlusion maps of my high-poly mesh to bring them in to GIMP for creating the albedo map and then finally taking all of the maps and my low-poly mesh into Unity for some production testing.

Level Up!

It's been awhile since I posted last, and I'm sorry about that. I've been a bit busy with far too much. From choosing what direction that I want to go in with the studio, to working out details on my project, to finding freelance work, and to the reason for this update...I have finally jumped in the deep end and committed myself to learning blender, and it's going quite well much to my surprise.

Anyone who has known me for a really long time knows that I have always been a hater against blender for numerous reasons, mostly the unconventional UI, and the crazy usage of keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and because it was "limited" in it's capabilities.

I WAS WRONG. SO WRONG. SO DAMNED WRONG I WISH I COULD GO BACK IN TIME TO SLAP MYSELF AND LEARN HOW WRONG I WAS.

Blender is by far the easiest to use 3d package I have ever touched. It is also the most comprehensive and complete package, and the best part about it is that it is 100% fully and totally legally F. R. E. E., that's right, I said FREE! And it's available for all major operating systems, so that means whether you use Windows, Linux, or Mac, you have access to this incredible software.

Now, the UI is indeed unconventional, yes, but this is actually a good thing. I wish more software worked the way that blender does. The manner in which the panels and controls are interacted with is far superior to anything I have ever used before. Take the hour or so that it takes to learn how to use the UI in blender and you will no longer think it to be a hindrance to the use of the software.

The keyboard shortcuts are indeed there, and some are downright crazy. I'm looking at you, you W-Key Specials menu! But it's actually pretty easy to use them once you learn them. It's worth the hour it will take you to learn the shortcuts. Here are a few of them to get you started.

In the 3D view in Object Mode:

Press the A key to select or de-select all objects in the scene.

Press the X key to delete the selected objects.

Press the G key to grab the selected objects allowing you to freely translate (move) them. Use this in addition to the X, Y, and Z keys to restrict translation to a specific axis.

Press the R key to rotate the selected objects freely. You can use the same axis restriction keys to your advantage here as well.

Press the S key to scale the selected objects freely. Same as the grab and rotate tools, use the restriction keys to have sensible scaling on an axis.

Press Shift+A key to bring up the Add menu. From here you can add things to your scene.

Press the Tab key to switch to Edit Mode.

That's all that I have time to list. Learn more by checking out blender for yourself! Below are some things I made with blender (the tree I modeled with Wings3D before learning blender) and have put into Unity for a quick turntable.