September 7th 2019 - First Character Sculpt

Finishing up the introduction to sculpting course in CG Cookie for Blender. This is my first ever time using this tool and I can see it being pretty useful for creating characters. However, I'm pretty bad at it at the moment and will need quite a bit of practice to get better.

My first Sculpted Character in Blender - Melvin

Here is how he is supposed to look like:

Melvin from CG Cookie

September 5th - Just married & Update

My wedding is over and my wife has now moved in with me. Life is starting to settle down and trying to establish a new routine. 

I've looked over the courses in CG Cookie and it's definitely going to help in learning how to make better characters in Blender. Just the recent course I did focused on creating a character head and learning what makes for good topology and general modeling theory was already super useful.

With character creation as the focus, I've selected a bunch of different courses that I think will be good for me to complete. I made a quick estimate at the number of hours needed to go through all of them and if I can keep a steady pace I might be done by mid October. I'm hoping by the time I've gone through all of these courses I'll have a fairly decent knowledge foundation on character modeling. Here is a list of the courses I'd like to complete. 

• Fundamentals of Digital Sculpting in Blender - 3 hours
• Introduction to Retopology - 3 hours
• Introduction to Hard Surface Modeling - 6 hours
• Creating a Jellyfish - 2 hours
• Sculpting the Wrangler Game Character - 6 hours
• Introduction to Character Modeling - 12 hours
• Modeling Realistic Characters(?) - 1 month
• This would be great to complete but would take a pretty significant investment in time. I might revisit this in the future after I've finished learning a foundation in the other skills I think are necessary.

This is just learning about modeling and doesn't touch upon rigging and animation... Still so much to learn as I haven't even started focusing on what I'd like to learn in Unity yet. Regardless, each step should improve my VR Storytelling skills so hopefully in a year or two I can look back at how far I've come. 

I'll be attending Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) for VR and AR again this year towards the end of September. It'll be my second year attending and I'm looking forward to learning more about how the industry is doing and seeing what others have created.

August 5th 2019 - CG Cookie Initial Impressions

Biggest change this week was switching to the newest Blender 2.8. I really like the new look and UI of Blender, especially the templates that set up a recommended window layout for modeling, UV mapping and etc. Still in the process of getting used to the new Blender as they've moved things around as well as removed certain features and introduced new ones.

CG Cookie - Blender Mesh Modeling Bootcamp Review

I really like the way CG cookie has set up learning flows that go from basics to advanced. Gone through a few hours worth of courses now and so far the quality of the training has been great. Specifically I like how they go over the modeling theory and how to approach creating more complex objects. It was exactly what I was looking for. For example, one of my first blender projects I posted about was the 3d model of a Ninja. When I was working on that course and went through the steps of creating the 3d ninja there wasn't a lot of explaining behind why it was modeled the way it was. However, CG Cookie explains the importance of the creating loops and what good mesh topology is and how it helps in modeling.

Since story telling in VR is something that I'm interested in, creating better characters is a particular focus of mine. Which is why I'm really enjoying the section of the course where it's focused on creating a cartoon character.

I skimmed the initial basic introductory to Blender but if I have time in the future I'll probably go back to it. Just the brief time I spent skimming that section taught me some useful tricks and tools that I wasn't using before but should.

So far my time spent in CG Cookie courses has been worth it and will help me in all my subsequent projects.

July 29th - Cooking 2019 Skit Complete

A bit of a rushed project at the end and could have spent a lot more time polishing everything. Still, I feel that uploading and sharing it out is better than just having it languish as an un-finished draft forever. Although I'm sure I'll look back at this and cringe in the future... 

Here are my thoughts after finishing this learning project:

• Gotten more comfortable with the Blender/Unity and make was able to progress in the project much faster.
• Blender
• Learned UV warping / Bone location constraints /
• Exporting animations
• Figured out the issue with exporting animations from blender into Unity. Wasted a lot of time wondering why even though I stashed the animations they weren't appearing in Unity. Turns out I need to select and highlight all of the animation key frames for them before I export from Blender. Makes sense since I select the option where it only exports what's selected. This might make it so I can really start working from one singular master blender file for future projects instead of the way I'm splitting them up right now.
• Rigging
• I added in clothes to the models and now understand why you would want to delete the non-visible underlying objects and mesh's. Removes weird clipping issues and artifacts. I had wasted a ton of time rigging the models and trying to get all of the objects to deform together.
• Unity
• Learned the basics to Trail Renderer and got some more experience with VFX particle generator creating fire. I do want to spend more time learning how to use both to create effects in the future. 
• Unity Physics - I had manually animated the falling speed of the objects but next time I might just try and use Unity Physics engine to do it. That way the falling speed is more natural. 
• Turning off the environment lights seems to work alright as a replacement for fading in and out of scenes. Still needs a bit of work to make it darker but is a usable solution for now. Lighting overall is something that I can probably improve a lot on
• Timeline - Much better organized than my last project and was able to separate the animation out based on scene
• Falling animation can probably use the rigid body physics of Unity so I don't need to animate it. 
• Audio - I can probably improve the audio a lot by just using one single track. That way I can adjust the volume and quality of all sounds. It'll be an additional final step that I can add to projects.

What's next?

I need to learn more about how to do better modeling. Better modeling will help both rigging and animation so I think improving my modeling skills will result in a larger overall improvement. 

As a result I've signed up on CG Cookies so that I can take their 3D Blender courses. Specifically, I'm interested in their course about good topology for modeling. 

However, after taking a look at all the courses that are available, I might spend the time to go through all of them. If I do, try to take all of the courses then then this may very well end up being the focus of both August and September.

July 22nd - Cooking skit update

Been an extra busy week but I should be able to finish this cooking skit project by the end of the week. Here is the current progress of the project:

I've UV mapped and colored all of the cooking objects on the table as well as animated them being thrown into the air and being chopped up.

I realizes that I should consider very carefully what objects I want to include in a scene and take out anything that doesn't add to my goal. The ingredients are important to this skit but if they weren't they would have taken up a lot of time.