Pharah's Helmet WIP

So I've always enjoyed Blizzard's artists. They have extreme talent on whatever project they come up with. Overwatch characters are beautifully designed, and all unique. Its no wonder the game has over 30 million players.

At the moment I admire this game from afar, and model parts in my spare time. This is a work in progress on Pharah's helmet. Simple, yet elegant. The details still need a bit of fine tuning, and I need to add the chin guard. I'd love to slice this up to make it printable.

I'm going to be doing my next tutorial on a lot of the basics of blender, but I think I'll use this model to discuss a lot of those basics. A few people have been lamenting the difficulty of blender, and when to use different tools. With 3d software, there's often times lots of unique tools like the knife, or offset edge slide tools, that are more advanced. Sometimes people just like to learn where the hammer, or wrench are before they pick up the surgeons scalpel.

Look forward to that video in the next couple of days. For now, thanks for checking out the post!

Polygon discussion using a B-2 Spirit (timelapse included)

Modeling Tips for: Cars

Hard Surface modeling - Tracer's Gun

Wanted to show some specific, simple techniques for modeling out Tracer's Gun. Modeling becomes very simple when you begin to break down individual components of a given object and just focus on one thing at a time.



Always get your overall shape out of the way before breaking down into further details.



Thanks for watching, and any and all feedback is appreciated!

Tracer's Guns

From Blender to VR

F-35 One Hour Model Timelapse

Diamond - Trillion Cut Timelapse

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. 442 Verts (115k with sub-surf)

So I'm working on a new print. I'm very happy with how low I've managed to keep the vert count. Seems to be so low because of how simply this aircraft has been designed. There are very few sharp details to it. I love this aircraft for that reason. Not because of how simple it is to model, but because I love efficiency. There's something about creating a beautiful shape with as few steps as necessary that just makes me happy. I could probably shave another 20-50 verts off of it, but I think I'll leave it here.

Thanks for looking!

Quick render

Diamond cuts

Latest render of diamond cuts. Left to right; top to bottom: Heart, Marquise, Cushion, Round, Princess, Oval, Radiant, Emerald, Cabochon, Heart shaped cabochon, Octagon(laying flat), Asscher, and Trillion

The shader on the left is the original built by The Digital M. The shader on the right was with some very basic tweeks to it.
The render above has quite a few differences, but also good lighting to highlight the facets of each diamond. 

An important aspect of doing a final render of something like a diamond with this type of shader is to use maximum number of light bounces via full global illumination.

Another important aspect of rendering small objects like diamonds is to make sure the scaling is roughly plausible. There's no such thing as a 500 carat diamond(to the best of my knowledge) so make sure you use about a 300 millimeter "lens" via your camera settings, as well as choosing a single diamond to focus on and using some radial, or f-stop depth of field.

I'll be doing a few more time lapse videos in the near future of some of the cuts since you guys/gals seem to really enjoy those. This gemstone series, though, will be coming to a close in the near future, and I'm glad to be at the point I am with the render quality to them. As always, thanks for checking in!

Diamond - Round Cut timelapse

Blue Falcon

Was playing F-Zero with the kids the other night and decided to model out the Blue Falcon. I'll post a time lapse in the next day or two. Its a pretty simple sculpt.

Squerta Sculpt

Lamborghini Egoista

So I decided this week I wanted to do a car. I hadn't modeled one yet, so I wanted it to be a good one. Lamborghini's have always been an infatuation of mine. It could definitely use some more detailing, logos, and other text but I had to take a break from it. 

I learned a lot about shaping these things, but the biggest take away from modeling this has been to really focus on the bigger picture. Too many times I got wrapped up in doing one particular detail, and really messing up my topology. The time required to fix the topology would have been better spent in examining the best course of action first.

At any rate, its break time from this project. Thanks for checking out the progress!

Paved with gold...

Thought about doing some Easter eggs, but then felt I'd rather do something more relevant. Decided to mess around with gold. One thing led to another. Throw in an emission shader on the text and viola.

Shuttle Type 9

So around 2 years ago when I started modeling, the very first thing I wanted to create was a shuttle from Star Trek. It was one of my favorite TV shows growing up, and I have many fond memories watching it with my father.

Original model of mine

When I was younger I'd watch The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine with him, but when my parents split, Voyager was in full swing. I was about 14 or 15 at the time and I would watch reruns of it every night before bed.

Star Trek has always been a show that pushes the boundaries and really tries it's best to highlight psychological struggles of being far from home, as well as political issues. For that reason, a lot of episodes from TNG, DS9 or Voyager still have relevance today. Any story that has philosophical truths in it is going to stand the tests of time, regardless of its CG(or physical models) components.

So in keeping with my passion for revisiting old movie/video game productions, as well as attempting to show my improvements here's my current render:

Latest model of mine

I still have a ways to go with texturing. I couldn't find myself a good texture that I could make a good displacement map from either. At least not one that was free. But in the end, I'm pretty blown away at the difference some time and effort can make.

Eventual goal is to fully model out the interior as well, and import it into Unity and walk around inside VR

As always, thanks for reading and feedback of any kind is appreciated (constructive critique especially)!

Part 3: Air Force One - Engines (tutorial)

This one I decided to do a full on tutorial for it. listening to it after the fact, the audio leaves something to be desired. I'll attempt to sort that out on my next one.

I'm glad to be moving on from this one. Turns out modeling big aircraft is a little boring since there isn't much to "figure out" about them. They're really straight forward sculpts.

If you guy would like to see more videos about these types of aircraft, let me know. I'm going to be doing a then and now comparison in my next post. I'll show the differences in my modeling over the course of a little over 2 years now.  Look forward to that shortly!

Part 2: Air Force One

It's been a busy weekend! Had the father in town for his 58th birthday. We also took some time to go see the poppies that are in full bloom in the Antelope Valley. It was some much needed family time.

Anyway, this is the second part of modeling out the Boeing VC-25. I didn't do it exactly as I should have, but I discuss in this video how to go about modeling in this manner and how to get the best results with the least amount of effort.

Hope you enjoy, and I'll be finishing up the engines tomorrow most likely!

~"Poppies golden poppies...."~

My beautiful wife

The F-5 Tiger

Decided to take a break from the video editing for the VC-25 and model out an F-5.

We took a trip to the Joe Davies Heritage Airpark, and I got inspired to model this one. It's surprisingly small in comparison to a lot of the other fighters. I also just learned how similar this and the T-38(Air Force trainer jet) are. Maybe I'll make some mods and have myself a T-38 as well.

Its always a learning process figuring out how to make specific extrusions out of the fuselage in order to get the correct output. After finishing the initial sculpt of this aircraft, I probably spent another hour or two just pushing vertices around in order to get the shapes accurate. As always, modeling aircraft takes a bit of finesse. At least there's the benefit of symmetry with most aircraft, however.

Expect some screen capture videos in the next week or so as to specific techniques for this build. Thanks for reading!