One thing I disliked about my city building scene the last time around was that after spending so much time on the building itself, I was too lazy to make the plant models myself that I used to decorate the balcony with. So I wanted to make a separate balcony scene and focus on making my own models of plants and flowers. This turned out to be a massive undertaking, much more than I had expected. I had to research plant species, find lots of reference photos, and limit myself to textures that were available to me.
Continuing with the theme of bigger, more complex scenes, the above is I think one of my best work so far, an attempt to model a building on a city street. It’s not really that difficult to model, just that it’s a lot of work to get all of the detail. I used the Archipack add-on for the doors and windows and downloaded the plants from Blendswap. The background is of course a HDRI map but everything else is my own work.
I’ve been steadily working on more Blender scenes, growing my skills. The above is something I’ve wanted to make for a while now, a corridor with a vaulted ceiling. It took a very long time to model that and I had to consult a ton of resources and look at a lot of reference images. The final result isn’t a good render because at the end of it all I was too fed up to spend a lot of time on the textures so it’s far too crisp and clean. Learning to model architecture of this complexity was a very instructive experience however and I’ve found that you really need a solid plan for the whole thing. You can’t just jump in and start modelling.
More stuff, a mixture of following along on Internet tutorials in addition to trying stuff out on my own. In particular, since a lot of my stuff so far have been very lacking in surface detail I’ve been trying to learn to do that. First is by faking it with normal maps and then by actually trying to model the detail. I haven’t been entirely successful but it’s been fun learning. The amount of work that goes into modelling decorative elements and I found it amusing that I had to look up reference materials for antique furniture and construction for the designs.
So as the title indicates, I’ve been playing with fire effects in Blender recently. It seems that making cool animations with them is especially popular but I’ve found that rendering fire of any significant size makes my render times explode so I’ve had to curtail my ambitions massively. At the same time, it felt like a good opportunity to experiment with darker scenes and maybe some atmospheric lighting as well. Like so:
I’ve been playing around with Blender so much it’s been cutting away at my videogaming time. It seems to me that modelling is still the task that takes up the most time even if Andrew Price of Blender Guru is correct that materials and textures is what makes renders look realistic. Meanwhile I’ve been having a hard time getting colors and such to look right. Especially after you throw in stuff like volume absorption, subsurface color, the color of the lighting, the background etc., the final result that you get seems really iffy.
As I’ve been playing with water effects and caustics, render times are also becoming a significant issue. Even bumping up sampling numbers to truly ludicrous values doesn’t entirely eliminate fireflies. I was so delighted to learn about the denoising tool in Blender. Anyway here’s some of the stuff I’ve been working on though they are still very flawed and it’s been slow going.
I’ve still been practising using Blender ever since I finished that course earlier this year both through making stuff on my own and picking up lessons on YouTube. My own stuff is generally still pretty crappy, being mostly useless except as a learning exercise. I’ve had to scale down my ambitions quite a bit as making familiar, real world objects seem to more practical. Still, I’m pretty happy with the pace of my progress and it’s been lots of fun.
