May 19th 2020 - Animation and Sculpting practice

Continuing to work on animation basics and I've made a short clip of the classic ball bouncing.



Also just discovered Beeple and inspired by how he has been doing daily renders for over a decade now. His daily work is amazing with some of it feeling like concept art where I would love to see more of. I looked up a few interviews on YouTube and listened to his explanation for why he does his daily's and realized that it allows him to experiment and discover his style and how to create unique effects.

I won't be doing daily renders like Beeple but I do want to incorporate more experimentation into my practice. Here's one of my physics and particle effects experimentation.

Another one inspired from the controversy around the deadliness of Covid-19.


Sculpting is still an area I'm working to improve. I'm doing gestural sculpting to get better at creating shapes and continuing to study human head anatomy to try and create better and more realistic head sculpts.

May 12th 2020 - Moving on to animation practice

Just finished two advanced tutorials on CG cookie focused on vehicle sculpting and creature sculpting. Learned a lot from the process in terms of how to achieve finer details. One area that I know I still need a lot of work in is how to properly retopologize models based on sculpting. I'm definitely not an expert in anyway but I do feel a lot more confident and comfortable creating 3d assets that I might want or need now.

After I finished with them I also decided to put them together in a short 360 video as well. I'll be focusing on improving animation next.

May 2nd 2020

Getting more comfortable and familiar with modeling in Blender and using the modifiers now. Still a lot to learn if I want to sculpt realistic objects but I'm confident creating simple shapes and forms now.

Also played around with my airplane model with a short animation using a audio clip from Dunkirk. While working on it I realized how sound can be really useful for storytelling when it comes to building anticipation.

Character Modeling

Character modeling is something I want to progressively get better at for sure though so I'm making a time investment in learning the human anatomy and practicing it frequently. Trying to accelerate my learning so I'm doing focused practice and study on the human head. Trying to create a human head without reference and then reviewing my work to identify where I'm making mistakes and to avoid making them again on the next attempt to get better more quickly.

April 26th 2020 - Hard surface modeling

Been chugging away on the blender 3d modeling tutorials on CG cookie and started trying out hard surface modeling. I decided that with the corona virus issue going on and just staying home most of the time that a good project would be to recreate my new home and create a virtual tour of the space.

I want to create the virtual home tour project in Unity while creating all the assets in Blender. This has been my main focus and it's given me a reason to better learn how to use Unity. I have a better understanding of the different interfaces and how to change the settings dealing with environment lighting, material and textures. The light explorer function in unity is something new and is really useful for more easily adjusting lighting.

Video capture - 360 video
I've also discovered that the old tool that I used to use, Unity Recorder, has been decommissioned and no longer available. Looking for a new solution I downloaded the demo version of Video Capture in the asset store and liked how well it worked and purchased the Pro version which is on sale. Took quite a bit of time learning how to use it but so far I'm finding it to be much better than Unity Recorder with some interesting features that I think will enable me to make better 360 videos.

Getting better at character modeling is still a focus and I'm trying to practice doing faces. Should be sculpting more faces but I feel I've gotten better at doing eyes and eyelids. 

I still need to practice human mouths and noses a lot as I'm not sure what I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing in sculpting yet.

The current tutorial focus is hard surface modeling which I only started after creating the vast majority of assets for my Virtual Home tour. The approach and skills I'm learning from the tutorial are already showing me better ways to approach modeling which is a nice surprise.

All in all, I feel like I've been making pretty good progress on getting more skilled.

April 19th 2020 - Completed the Chibi Character Sculpting Tutoirial

The CG Cookie tutorial on how to sculpt a chibi character was very comprehensive and I felt I learned a lot from the exercise. The addition of using multi-resolution and cloth simulation for the scarf were new aspects of sculpting that I hadn't tried before at all.

My sculpting skills still need to be refined quite a bit as well so after I finished the character I started practicing redoing the head.

April 15th - Chibi Character sculpting Progress update

Had an issue with my previous blender project file and had to restart from scratch. Was having an issue where when I tried to sculpt other parts of the character Blender would basically slow to a crawl and crash.  A bit frustrating to have to do that but at the same time doing it all over again was good practice and I was able to learn from my initial mistakes.

Lots of areas to improve upon for sculpting and I'd like to be able to do it faster in the future.

Current Progress

April 7th 2020 - Snorelax retopology

Just completed the Snorelax Retopology which is the first one I've ever done. Learned a lot about why you should focus and plan out the details for the retopology first. Also that you should use much bigger blocks and to make the process faster and easier for when you need to add detail.

I started the sculpt in the sitting position but that made it harder because I couldn't just use a shrink wrap modifer on the legs. I'll try doing it from a t-post moving forward to speed up the process of retopology in the future.

I'll try out coloring the snorelax and finishing it off to see how well that works out.