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Nervous about posting this after seeing the talent on display in this thread but I'm a relative newbie at Blender (I've only ever tinkered around with it) and I've finally finished a project I'm at least a little happy with, a goblin weapon called a Boomsticker:   I'm not doing it for any practical reason, I just like putting things together so it's not gonna be animated or anything. It was a fun learning experience and I know the geometry is pretty rough (Everything under the dynamite is hot garbage), but since I could see the issues I wanted to complete it so I could go back and try a new project with what I've learned. There are a few things I'd like to ask and don't particularly want to sift through sixteen thousand forums and tutorial videos for though: 1) Is using a Subdivision modifier lazy as gently caress or is it God's Own Gift to workflow? I feel guilty about applying it but it gives me the results I want. Going forward should I just be extruding and loop cutting and the like or am I safe from the Blender Police beating me with a big stick? Is it just a case that Subdivision is the quick and easy way to make a low poly model turn into a high one, or is there a wrist slap for using it? 2) While we're on Modifiers, this is pretty much ditto for Mirror. I can see that it makes putting decals on specific sides of a model a bastard because technically there's only half a model, right? Is over-relying on Mirror a bad move in general? 3) Substance Painter: As far as I'm concerned this IS literally God's Own Gift because I want to die when I do UV stuff and I'm pretty sure that's universal for everyone. I looked around and tried out different things: Blender's node system, Quixel Mixer (I couldn't figure this one out), and finally Substance Painter. Substance Painter does The Thing I Want which is being able to make a model look good without suffering from a nervous breakdown, but is there any other program I should consider using before I sell my soul to the altar of Adobe for twenty quid a month? 4) Will the end result of modelling be that I turn into a light-shunning gremlin who hisses when his bedroom door gets opened because I'm halfway there and I need to know if I have to double down Thanks in advance E: Blast my rear end I forgot about shade smooth/flat doing the heavy lifting without needing to wrestle with Subdivision 
Songbearer fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 21:17
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:36 |
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So I've been working on my Blender project for a week or so and I've been having a great time, but I'm finally at the point where I'm wrestling with UV maps and it's a slog. My problem is that I've made my meshes from one primitive and have done a bunch of beveling etc to prettify them, but now I'm kind of thinking I should have made separate meshes and joined/parented them because hoo boy, this model is messy to work with for how relatively simple it is. Is there any downside to using separate objects this way? I discovered the knife intersection tool and facepalmed when I made a better version of a clock face and found I could just slap it onto my old mesh.
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Jan 14, 2021 20:18
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Songbearer posted:So I've been working on my Blender project for a week or so and I've been having a great time, but I'm finally at the point where I'm wrestling with UV maps and it's a slog. My problem is that I've made my meshes from one primitive and have done a bunch of beveling etc to prettify them, but now I'm kind of thinking I should have made separate meshes and joined/parented them because hoo boy, this model is messy to work with for how relatively simple it is. Apparently the way I've been doing it (One interconnected mesh from one primitive) is for people who are already good at this stuff and now I feel like a ding dong
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Jan 15, 2021 01:33
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cubicle gangster posted:I think even people good at it don't use one mesh I'll slap down the cash and give it a scroll, thanks. I'm a few hours into doing a complete remake of my project where I haven't made my gun out of one box and already it's looking insanely better - I was holding out on putting little gribbles on the model because I just couldn't bare looking at the UVs for it anymore but now poo poo actually has a layout.
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Jan 15, 2021 04:42
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echinopsis posted:Are/were you trying to fit the entire model in one UV with one material? Yes to the UV, no to the material. The gun I was making was initially made from one cube, extruded and beveled into something pretty darn detailed given the circumstances - but when it came time to UV it, it was very obvious it wasn't going to work out well. Honestly I don't know what I was expecting considering that all my other tests were actually made out of separate objects and came out fine. Call it a fit of misguided experimentation I guess 
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Jan 15, 2021 09:56
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echinopsis posted:I'm curious to see what you've done though, want to know how it's not going to work. Since I've mastered the art of Saving Nearly Every 5 Seconds™ I'll do a trip report on the final product and post what I did wrong in case anyone tries to follow my footsteps
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Jan 15, 2021 11:57
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I've finished my first full Blender project - animation, texturing, sounds etc. Naturally it's a gun because I'm a teeny tiny little baby, but I hope this one is more fun than MyFirstM16.obj. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-UDkvYIXn8 As I mentioned I made a lot of mistakes and eventually had to scrap everything and start from scratch, something I'll chronicle in this thread when I have time since it might make tiny little Blender Babies like me avoid making the same errors, but for now I'm going to take a small break until my creative juices have returned. I'd love to hear people's impressions - I know there's a lot I've done wrong but I think I've learned enough from this to move on.
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Jan 28, 2021 21:25
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500 posted:But then again, I know of one artist who is rocketing ahead, but told me just the other day they weren't happy with their progress. So maybe it's the sort of feeling that's always kind of there, at least to some degree, no matter how good you are. The moment you're satisfied with your art is the moment you are no longer an artist Art is fuelled primarily by self doubt and secondarily by jealousy and you should never allow either fuel source to run out
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Feb 1, 2021 18:43
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EoinCannon posted:I don't know how serious you are but jealousy can be corrosive and terrible for your mental health Hyperbole but there's an element of truth to it where if I see my friends putting out some primo stuff it'll usually be enough to pull me out of a slump if I'm in one or drive me to study my techniques even harder if I'm working on things. I suppose a better term would be competitiveness? I'm not trying to outdo people though because I love their work, I just feel like I should be keeping pace. Self deprecation I have in spades though  I've accepted it as part of my workflow by this point:1) Get a great idea far beyond the scope of my abilities 2) Do the rough sketches/blockout and feel like I can pull it off 3) Slowly descend into madness as things turn out to be more difficult than I initially imagined 4) "gently caress it, let's wrap this up and move onto the next thing" 5) (Weeks or months later) Hey I actually did That Thing better than I thought I would This year I've made an unofficial new years resolution to stick with a project until I'm happy with it to the extent of my abilities at the time so my approach should be a little less toxic from now on. The video above is the first time for a while I've immediately felt good about what I released (while noting what I could improve on). Songbearer fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 18:16
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That is so loving cool I've been collecting various cool vehicle renders for inspiration so if anyone has any cool artists to reccomend I'd love to see them, preferably ones that have some cartoonish/stylish element to them rather than just renders of actual cars
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Feb 9, 2021 00:30
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Sharing my WIP that I've been working on for the better part of Feburary, probably two weeks in. My second Blender project following the Unwritten Rules Of Blender that say if your first ever project is a gun it is mandatory your second project is a car. This one is a weird combination of 20's - 50's automotive design and I've learned just how little I know about cars during the process. The idea is that it's a car driven by a team of undead hunters, so the engine is powered by boiling holy water and released as consecrated mist from the exhaust. Panels flip open to deploy flamethrowers, stake launchers and other fun gadgets such as a flippable headlight cover with a crucifix inset into it for the light to shine through. I've animated a convertible roof which was really drat rewarding to implement, it was a big "Yahoo!" moment when I got it to work.    I'm considering this about 40% done with the modelling. I'm relatively happy with the shape of the exterior but it needs to be spruced up with some art deco stuff, anti-undead iconography and such. I still need to sew the exterior together and put wires/pipes etc on through the engine and gizmos, but to be honest I'm really daunted by those steps so I'm putting them off til the end. I've been following this guide that was reccomended: cubicle gangster posted:I think even people good at it don't use one mesh and although I'm not even a fraction of a hundredth as good as this guy and I had no prior idea what I was gonna make, it's been real helpful. If anyone can think of anything I should be focusing on or changing at this stage in my model I'd love the feedback.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:39
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I've been plugging away for the last three months or so on my second major Blender project, the Ghastly Martin undead hunting vehicle. Most of my progress posts have been in the YOSPOS thread which I've been using as a journal and critique source which has been a massive help to keep my momentum and spirits up with the project  Again it's not gonna be anywhere near as good as professional 3D work but I'm proud with what I've made so far. Here's the animation reel for the vehicle with its deployable features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTN2eioR-sY There's a lot of little details that escape the purview of this animation and I haven't put together a soundscape for it yet, but I'm going to shift my work to making scenery and an area for it to drive around and hunt some sort of creature so it can show off its stuff in a full scenario. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on what I have so far, I know there's a ton of rough edges that could do with polishing but after spending so long on it I'm happy to have something to show.
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Apr 26, 2021 17:42
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Yeah, camera movements are something I really don't have much of a grasp on. I've moved onto the next stage which is making scenery and objects for it to drive around, and a target to hunt down, so I decided to leave learning camera work for that stage. The animation is mostly for me to make sure the different car parts animated correctly without shattering the vehicle into a trillion pieces, and I think I got most of what I wanted out of that. Once all the scenery is rigged up I'll probably do a new version of the flyover with a pretty backdrop to add to the mood 
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Apr 27, 2021 21:56
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So I've been working on a Blender animation near daily for the better part of this year and I've almost reached the end of the animation blocking phase, ready for polishing in the new year. With 3.0 I can finally start rendering in Cycles which is great, but it takes a long, long time on my 1080rtx and doesn't hit the quality I'd like. This isn't too much of a problem currently because I'm not going to be doing much more than test renders, but it will later. Obviously getting a graphics card with grunt for a reasonable price(!) in this era is out of the question, so I was wondering: Does anyone know of any reputable Blender render farms that deliver good results and aren't too arcane to handle? I've tried using SheepIt but the network stuff is so spotty that I can barely get any results. Paying a monthly fee every once in a while to get some good quality renders done at a reasonable speed would be tickety boo with me - the alternative is selling my organs on the black market for a 3080ti and I'm not quite ready to go that far.
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Dec 13, 2021 22:22
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Personally as much as it aggrieved me to be facilitating Adobe's reign of terror I just can't imagine texturing stuff without using Substance Painter. My previous attempts with editing textures using GIMP and stuff were diabolical, but even when I began 3d modelling towards the end of 2020 I decided that I would try and find a better way of doing things or else I would've given up. Quixel was really confusing to me but goddamn if Substance didn't do exactly what I wanted it to despite having no idea how to use it. Since I had very limited knowledge of UVs from years back I relied on Blender's smart UV stuff to unwrap my things for me, which made everything horribly messy and editing it in traditional image editors would have been a bastard. Where Substance excels is that even with clumsy technical skills like mine it can pretty intelligently figure out what you're attempting to do. Thing is, I experienced exactly the sort of thing you're discussing - it feels like you have to take three extra steps to accomplish something that would be trivial in external image editing programs. It's a learning curve, but once you find your way around it I can't imagine doing it the long way would be any way preferable except as a demonstration of technical ability. I hate to give an Adobe product props like this but I think I would have given up on 3d modelling if I had to faff around with textures forever since I only really care about the artistic side of things rather than the technical, and even then I'm not the best artist in the world. But I want a car to look like a car, paint it as such, put dents and scratches and rust on it, add procedural dirt and little ornaments and Substance just... lets me do it. You can even make tiled textures using it which is a huge help when it comes to landscapes and stuff. All I can recommend is spending more time in there, gritting your teeth and learning what the walkarounds are for problems you're running into because ultimately it just makes the whole process a hell of a lot less painful. I'm in no way an experienced 3d artist though so maybe I'm a muggins for being so into it, but the results just speaks for themselves. The biggest things that helped me get results out of Substance Painter was getting my brain around masks and mask generators. Bake your mesh maps in the Edit menu so the generators can figure out your object's geometry, Make a fill layer, make it the right colour, metallic & roughness and what have you, add a black mask by right clicking the layer, then the wand. Add a generator, choose Mask Editor, ramp up the texture opacity and brightness in Curvature and add one of the procedural textures into the texture slot and play around with it. You can add obscene levels of detail really quickly like this by including height maps and so on in the fill layer and using the masks to add the geometry for you. Songbearer fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 16:31
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So I've been working (my first proper!) animation project for just over a year now and I'm making some really solid progress, I think. I have the rough animation all done and now I'm going back through the scene from the start to bring personality and vitality to the character motions, add scene lighting and so on. So far so good, but I'm hitting a major presentational roadblock: I am really, really bad at camera motion and framing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAx2Axzo8UE This is something I've failed at time and time again in my experience with anything that has camera controls, like GTA5's replay function. I just cannot for the life of me figure out timings and camera movement - either I make things move too much giving it a nauseating swimming effect, or I try to jam too much in a shot in too short a timeframe, or I just fall back to using static shots and things are boring and lifeless. Are there any good resources for figuring out how to frame this sort of stuff? Should I be aiming for longer shots or quick cuts? I feel so lost and nothing really sticks well and I find myself redoing a shot only for it to feel worse than before. I can identify issues with the animation itself - some movements are too fast, some too slow, some need to be refocused or whatever - but I can fix these fairly confidently. Camera motion? Not really. Songbearer fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Apr 30, 2022 |
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Apr 30, 2022 10:22
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Thanks folks, I think I've been overthinking things when really KISS is what I should be aiming for. I have a tendency to do the most complicated things first and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make them work when really it should just be a basic thing. I'm not a film buff of any description which makes it very odd that I enjoy animating so much, I just don't have the attention span for films v v that said I'll start really looking at the things I'm watching and see how they do things.
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May 1, 2022 13:23
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Been a while since I posted in this thread but since my last one from a billion years ago, I completed my first Blender project which took me about three years of learning everything from scratch. I had some experience with the program beforehand but this is the first time I seriously sat down and tried to learn as much as I could. I can't sing the praises of the software highly enough, it's so much fun to use and seeing things that I scribbled in a notepad come to life is just great. I can see all the rough edges, of course. My main character's rig is stiff especially in the face, my artstyle for characters lacks appeal in general (I learned a lot about the way I draw things), there's lot of texturing issues, the render is noisy because the scene wasn't optimised too great - but these are all lessons to learn from and, gently caress, I'm just happy to have completed something, anything. My life is just one long series of started and abandoned projects and here's one I can feel proud of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilpIO21wm94 It was only supposed to be a scene with a vehicle in it, I didn't plan for it to get so wacky
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Apr 26, 2024 19:33
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:36 |
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I'm sorry are you really allowed to post gore in this thread
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May 1, 2024 17:55
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