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.