Week 5 - Apples, bowls and bananas

This week I found the tutorial on how to model apples using the proportional editing tool. I started off with an IcoSphere and began with moving the mesh to get an overall shape of an apple. This didn't really take too long, they didn't need to be perfect. All I did was moved the points around randomly until it resembled an apple. Then I applied a simple red texture to it. I then tried to model another apple but this time using a UVSphere. This one I found a bit more fiddly as there were a lot of points in exactly the same place and I ended up with an extremely jagged apple. I soon realised that I could actually select all the points at the same time. This made it a lot easier and I actually produced a better apple than I did with the IcoSphere. I coloured the UVSpheres green.

The bowl I found extremely simple to make. Just by creating and deleting a cube, I could still add vertices to the cube from scratch, even though the cube wasn't there. I created a line with three points and spun it 360°. This made a plane in the shape of a bowl. I then extruded it down slightly and added a brown woody colour to it.

The next part of the modelling fruit tutorial entailed 'box modelling' a banana using a background image (View>Background Image...). This meant starting by finding a side-on image of a banana, placing it into the background of the window and extruding and subdividing a cube along the length of it. To do this I had to put the cube into wireframe mode (Z) and then subdividing it in edit mode. I then moved the points around the banana and then extruded a new set. When this was done I was left with a very square banana. I smoothed it until it was a bit more rounded. However it still did not look right. I needed to scale the ends so that they tapered to a bananary point. The way I did this was just by scaling the vertices around the circumference of the end (Alt+Right click to select the edge loop). I continued to do this to every point individually until it looked just right. I later realised that I had done it the extra long way as I'm sure I could have used proportional editing to get a better result. I had already done it though, and I didn't really want to remodel the whole banana. I'll just bear it in mind for the next time I model a banana or similar shaped object. With that done, I added a texture to the model (F6>Add new>Texture Type: Image>Load) that I had found on the internet (FilterForge.com).

I had saved the bowl of apples in a separate blender file though, so I had to import the banana into it if I wanted it to be together with them. This was not as simple as I thought it would be. First I had to go to 'Append or Link' in the File menu (or Shift+F1). I then had to find the blender file with the banana and select the object in the file and import that. Eventually I found it named 'Cube' (I guess I should name my objects from now on) and clicked 'Load Library'. I then thought I at last was done and went to save the rendered image. I then discovered that I had a very grey looking banana. The texture I had applied earlier had not been imported into the fruitbowl file. So I retextured it the same way I did before (I guess it was good practice) and saved the final render. Here it is!

Course 3 – Render options & Proportional editing

This weeks tutorial was all about changing the options of the final render and a new technique called proportional editing, hence the title.

The render options didnt really require any modelling, it was simply changing some numbers and pressing some buttons. It showed me how to change the resolution of the final render and I also learned all about oversampling/anti-aliasing and how to make it work efficiently.

The proportional editing part of the tutorial showed exactly how to make a mountain scene from just a simple plane. It started with creating the plane and increasing the number of vertices it had from 4 to about 289. I could then move each of them independently of each other, making my plane very spikey. To make the mountains/hills though, I had to enable proportional editing. This meant when I moved a point, it would affect the points surrounding it. This created the mountain shape. It was still very blocky though. To fix this, I had to smooth it out using SubSurf (Subdivisions Surface). This tool smooths the object for you. An extra special thing it does though is that you can set a different smoothness for editing and rendering. This way you can work on a simple object but when you render it it is smoothed out. This would be very useful on a computer with low cpu power. After messing about with what I had learned this is what I ended up with: The challenge after this tutorial was to create an egg holder using what I had learned. This didn't take too long as I had spent quite a long time on my mountain scene, familiarising myself with it.

Course 2 – Mesh and vertex editing II

Week 2 - Not much to say here. The tutorial explains how to make a pill using just the UVSphere and the steps I felt were pretty self explanatory, I didnt really have any problems as long as I stuck to the instructions.
I did discover one thing though, when I came to saving it. I said in my last blog that to save you can use Ctrl+S as well as Ctrl+W and they both do the same thing. When I tried to save using Ctrl+S however, it thought I wanted to shear the selected face. So, I guess I will be using Ctrl+W to save from now on.
Anyway, here is my finished pill:

The challenge to make the salt shaker though, I found a bit more tricky. I found out that I can't do anything the tutorial hasn't told me to do. I wanted to squash the sphere on the top so it was more oval shaped that round. How you do this though, I have no idea. I tried pressing some buttons that I thought it might have been but ended up completely distorting the whole thing and had to start again. I guess thats one thing about Blender that is different from Maya (which I have also been learning), there's no obvious button to press for everything you might want to do.
So I just did the simple bit, extruded half the sphere, resized it, deleted the half-sphere that I didn't want and then filled the space.
Here is my finished salt shaker:

Blender Course Basics - Course 1

Tutorial: http://mojo.csd.anglia.ac.uk/~marie/docs/BlenderCourse-Basics_EN_v1.0.pdf

I started from scratch with this tutorial. I have had very little experience with 3D modelling software although it has always been something I wanted to learn to do. I have recently been trying to get the hang of Autodesk's Maya but I have literally scratched the surface of what can be done with it. I found it difficult to find a decent tutorial I can work through.
I think I'm one of those people that can learn how to do something just by trying it out and randomly trying things, I have a lot of patience when learning I guess. These 3D programs like Maya and Blender however do not work that way, at least not with me, so I was quite pleased to find a 3D modelling module on my course.

Following the step by step instructions in this PDF, I very quickly learned the absolute basics from the first course and got the models made fairly easily. I wouldn't have minded not getting it right first time, as I would probably have discovered some extra tips but I'm sure I will find them eventually.
I didn't really have too many problems making the house, other than pressing the wrong hotkey every so often. A quick Ctrl+Z undo sorted that out. One thing I did think was odd was that Ctrl+W is the default save shortcut and not Ctrl+S, however Ctrl+S will also save.After the house was done the castle was the next step, and since I had learned everything I needed making the house, this was a piece of cake. It was simply a matter of duplicate, transform and repeat. When it came to the tops of the towers I cleverly reshaped one and then duplicated that to make the others.

When it came to rendering, fortunatly I had discovered from another students blog that pressing F3 will allow you to save a JPEG of the render.

For future reference, this is what was covered on this course:

Moving, rotating and scaling objects

Locking axis

Editing vertices of an object

Duplicating objects

Saving files

Rendering scenes