Self Study 1 -- Getting Started in Blender
The first self study module for this unit was to prepare and familiarize us with blender and many of the concepts of 3D modelling that go with it.
We were initially tasked with creating a simple barrel in blender to get familliar with the basics of blender and 3D modelling. The barrel tutorial video I watched was
which was very clear and easy to understand. After a few hours of trial and error, I finally had a "completed" barrel!
It's my first time seriously using blender for any real purposes so It was a surprise to see the barrel come out looking at least a little barrel-like, though there's a lotta room for improvement in the future! The barrel itself is basically a cylinder that's been slightly scaled with 2 rings of extruded faces, nothing too complex, and the texturing is just some flat colours and simple lines so I didn't find the painting part of it too complex, though I think dealing with UV wrapping, seams, and inconsistencies are gonna be the death of me in future...
For the main task for the week we were tasked with finding something from a tasmanian tourist attraction and doing our best to model that. I chose to model the tasman bridge since while not technically a tourist attraction per-se, it is a well known landmark of hobart and I felt it would be an interesting challenge to put my (currently quite limited) 3D/Blender skills to the test!
The final result came out decently for what I currently know how to do, there's a bunch of small details that I was unable to add, but overall I found this task to be a decent challenge. The arc of the bridge was probably the most challenging part since I used a cube with simple deform applied to it and for some reason no matter what I did blender would not want to play nice and correctly deform the cube, but somehow the deformation got applied correctly so I just made a note to never touch it again, just incase it somehow decided that it was gonna not work again! The pillars are made out of cubes that I sliced up using loop cut and by deleting a few straggler faces and rejoining the edges, it was a pretty dedious process and I'm sure there's tons of ways to do it better which I'll need to look out for and be aware of in future 3D modelling endeavours.
Overall I feel I learnt a ton about blender and the 3D modelling process, though I can see glimpses of the vastness of what I have still yet to learn or be able to do, I definitely feel like 3D modelling isn't for me in general since it just won't "click" with me as much as I feel it should be.