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.

The next one is unfortunately not great work either. I’d noticed that the CG Cookie channel had uploaded a very long series of tutorials onto YouTube about modelling a common cargo container and thought it must be truly comprehensive to be so long. Unfortunately it turned out to be an old tutorial that used to be hosted privately and they had chosen to make publicly available only now. The worst part is that despite its length it doesn’t even cover materials at all and is only about modelling.

Still, I found it somewhat useful for seeing the extent that one can do to model things to such a high degree of precision. It does seem mostly useless however as those details will never be seen in most scenes using that model and the end result has way, way too many polygons. Oh well, it was a quick and easy exercise so no harm, no foul.

This next one is a little insane as well. I started out by modelling a pretty detailed street lamp post. Then I thought about adapting the CG Cookie stuff on dynamic paint to make a puddle in the street with the lamp seen in reflection and having it react to raindrops. I couldn’t do exactly what I set out to do. I don’t see how you could make a combination of puddles and wet ground react to falling water realistically without a real fluid simulation. So this is just a single body of fake water but I think the animation turned out okay.

All the extra detail on the lamp post is wasted here as well but I plan to use that model in another scene later.

Finally, here’s my attempt at following along with Andrew Price of Blender Guru’s tutorial on cloth simulation. I added some other stuff to make it a bit more original but it wasn’t difficult. I’m amused that the best way to create the fuzzy surface of the towel is to add put one million hairs on it.