This section is about my creations in Blender. You will expect a range of 3D models and animations here. The learning process is an ongoing one, as I try to understand and implement the complexities of Blender one step at a time.
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Live diorama of cityscape with passing spaceships.
23/11/2022
With university out of the way and a job now secured, I'm finally getting back into the journey of learning the more technical features of Blender. I've started off light with creating a short and simple animation using some previous assets from my Unity 3D project.
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A low-poly capybara.
18/07/2022
Just a simple low-poly model. Creating more organic models will be something to work on in the long-term, as this is a extremely dissimilar to the more geometric topology that I'm currently used to modelling with.
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Spaceships made in Blender, ready to be transferred to Unity.
23/06/2022
These spaceships were modelled after the sprite designs in my 2D Python space game project. The ongoing 3D Unity project is planned to follow the same game mechanics as the Python version, with additional features. Both projects are available to check out on my Programming page.
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Static view.
11/06/2022
This spaceship model is based off of an old drawing I made a couple years ago. I've become more accustomed to using other surface materials apart fromt the default Principled BSDF to create more metallic renders and ambient emissions.
Full spaceship animation with environment.
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Model animation with armature rigging.
08/06/2022
To add more life to my model animations, I made my first attempt at introducing armatures to my objects. Here I learned about vertex groups and how they were assigned to each bone in an armature. One graphical challenge was trying to animate the model's tail to sway in a natural behaviour. Another unforeseen hurdle was the apparent clipping of faces and meshes occurring in the head and upper neck area, which would collide and flicker when moved according to the paired armature bone. This was partially reduced by imposing a weighted normals modifier and auto-smoothing, however, some of the clipping persisted (although to a much lower effect). A lesson of improvement in terms of animation will also be to include more intermediate keyframes to components for more natural-looking motion behaviours.
Static view.
I was able to create these armatures by using the following tutorial: Rig a Low Poly Character in Blender 2.9x (Imphenzia).
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Sentry turret and cubes.
04/06/2022
These low-poly models are based off the iconic game Portal. I tried the Looptools add-on to easily create the disks on the sides of the cubes, and the 'eye' of the sentry turret.
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360° model view.
31/05/2022
This improvisation was based off of the ship designs from the Star Trek franchise.
Another area I'd like to experiment with is landscaping. Since I currently only know how to build and extrude regular shapes and objects, I'd like to have a go at creating more organic forms.
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Animation full view.
27/05/2022
This project focused mainly on the rotation animations of individual components. In future works, I'd like to experiment on relative motions between different objects, such as orbits and rigged joints.
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Animation front view.
24/05/2022
This model was based on one of the sprites I created for my Python spaceship defence game. I used this project to experiment more with the different modifiers, mechanisms, and features that the base version of Blender has to offer.
Animation rear view.
One challenge in particular was trying to get the balancing of the lighting correct. Among a multitude factors, this involved adjusting the emissions and blooms of the surrounding various environment props, the roughness and reflectiveness of surfaces, and the specular and angle of the global light source. I was able to adjust these elements to a stylistic effect, however, more research needs to be done to fully understand how to manipulate these properties to their intended states.
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Animation back view.
22/05/2022
After a long and tedious season of exams and deadlines, I finally made time to sit down and start learning how to use and animate in Blender. With this project being my first run at Blender, I wanted to create something that was not too technically demanding. The main aspects I wanted to capture in this project were dealing with multiple objects in a scene, simple rendering techniques, mirror, bevel, shading, and array modifiers, planning out keyframes for animation, and export processes. I was able to construct and compile this scene and animation with the help of a few extremely helpful YouTube videos:
Animation front view.
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