This is obviously the promised follow-up to my previous post on my project of learning the Thai language this year. Hopefully it’ll be more interesting as I’ll be trying to focus on the language itself. The usual disclaimers apply. I’m still very much a beginner so there is still a lot for me to learn. Plus as the Thaipod101 website does explain but is rarely appreciated outside of Thailand, what most foreigners learn is the Bangkok version of the language, or the national standard. Thailand is a pretty big country so there are multiple regional dialects so some words in common usage seem to be very different in different parts of Thailand.
So I dropped working on Blender stuff a few months back and instead I have been learning the Thai language online. I don’t have any special reasons for doing so. It’s just that I’ve gotten into the habit of learning new things online all the time and I thought it’s time I tried a language next. It is one of the things people keep saying they intend to do and rarely get around to and I haven’t learned a new language since I learned French during my university years. Learning a new language is supposedly one of the best ways to keep your brain sharp and active as you age.
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.
