Straying from the Path

It’s been about a month since my last post: hello! April has proven to be quite a busy month, but don’t you worry, I still made some time for Blender practice.

Lately, I’ve been straying a bit from the tutorials I have laid out & waiting for me and decided to go a bit rogue. Through my many years using Photoshop (just over a decade now? Wow.) I’ve come to learn something about myself: I learn well when thrown into the deep end. So, with that knowledge, I dove into making some things on my own without a tutorial in sight.

Having now taken the previous sword mesh tutorial I wanted to take a stab (get it?) at a simple blade with some extra stylistic choices. Using some of the skills I had now developed to create both the sword and the modular dungeon, such as mirror modifiers and shader slots, this little love dagger was born.

Honestly, I am quite proud of this little dagger. This project helped to reinforce what I had learned already while allowing me the freedom to play around with shading different faces and using emission for the glowing heart. Plus, making weapons is fun! Moving forward in this realm I want to challenge myself to make different types of blades; kunai, cutlasses, broadswords, rapiers, the list goes on. I’d be especially interested in working with a curved blade to throw another challenge at myself.

Moving on to other self-guided challenges: to continue sharpening and honing my Blender skills, I’ve gone ahead and modeled a couple of everyday objects from scratch without watching any tutorials (okay, maybe one Boolean tutorial). The first of the everyday objects was one of the many pens that reside on my desk. To be more specific: a Tombow felt-tip pen. I am a big fan of Tombow’s products, and their structure is rather approachable for a beginner-Blender-user’s modeling abilities.

Now, the labels (Tombow pens have wrapping information on the pen body indicating where the pen was made, the barcode, and some brand-specific icons) I did not create. At this point, I had a vague idea of how that would be achieved, but that wouldn’t become quite as clear until the next model was created - more on that later. My focus with this model was to work with extrusions, assigning different material slots to the same model, and linking objects. Additionally, I was able to utilize the edge-slide feature to enhance the curve of the felt tip of the pen.

While the modeling of the pen itself was very satisfying, the most fun aspect of creating this pen was assigning textures. Blender’s shading/texturing system is much more robust than I know how to use at this stage, but just playing with the different properties to achieve distinct textures has been a very fun experiment. With just the basic properties to adjust, I was able to create four textures: the soft yet subtly reflective pen body, the shiny plastic that resides at the tip and base of the pen, the metal that encases the felt tip, and the felt tip itself. The initial model can be very satisfying to see completed, but the addition of textures helps bring it into a new and more realistic space, which feels incredibly fulfilling when you know you’ve created that object from scratch with only a bit of reference.

To take that feeling of satisfaction to a different level, I tried to marry something that I not only thought I would be able to achieve technically but something that also gets me jazzed to poke around or gander at in real life: cans. In my life, and especially during/after my time in school for graphic design, I’ve always loved to take my time looking over can design in stores. Over time I have found that brands and designers are branching out and experimenting more with can design for beer, wine, soda, etc. A specific designer that comes to mind in this area is Nick Bers, a graphic designer whose work I know from Matchless Brewing Co.’s beer can designs. His designs are bright and illustrative, and they just happen to adorn very tasty beers.

As a longtime illustrator, I find his designs compelling in that many brands like to go the more modern and polished route for graphics. This is not to say that Bers’ illustrations are unpolished, rather I have found the illustrative style far more interesting and informative than many modern designs out there. And, since the structure of a can is rather simple, I figured why not design some of my own?

Starting with the structure of the can: this part was rather easy. In the dinosaur section of the Blender course I am currently taking (stay tuned to see that in the future), modeling the dinosaur requires using side and front-facing images as a reference for sculpting the body to correlating proportions. Following this method, I brought in an image of a can and began modeling in accordance with those dimensions.

Modeling the can, as you may have guessed, is much simpler than the silhouette of a T-Rex, and so the creation of this can was rather quick using the extrusion, scaling, and inset tools. Since I had never punched a hole in a model before and rather had only modeled using a mirror modifier and then joined the two mirrors, this was my moment to learn a bit more about booleans. Using the boolean logic that Blender possesses, I was able to punch out a hole in the top as if the can had been already opened which proved to be a little more work than I had anticipated as I am so used to Adobe Illustrator’s ability to minus front or back. That being said, the function was still rather easy to work with, and I was able to render an opening into the can’s hollow mesh.

As I write this content and go over the renders shared here, I’ve noticed a few things that I need a bit more practice with.

1. I need more practice creating meshes. This thought may be obvious, but I can see issues with my geometry that I know will get better as I continue to use Blender. Given that I am a beginner, I’ll give myself a bit of grace for that.

2. I need more practice with lighting. While I know these skills will become stronger and lighting choices will become more obvious, I do find myself struggling to light my meshes in a way that clearly communicates the structure and colors. Despite my many years in the past doing professional photography, I haven’t had as many dedicated studio sessions as I have opportunities to shoot on-site with clients or at events in which the lighting won’t mimic what can be achieved with studio lights. I know these skills will come with practice and time, though, and I’m looking forward to honing those abilities.

Baby’s First Dungeon