Grogu Squint

Sep 18, 2022

Another week with not a lot of time, so I grabbed a free resource and used it to practice shape keys.

"Mandalorian / Baby Yoda [Star Wars] Low Poly" by micaelsampaio is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Whale

Sep 11, 2022

This week neither of us had a lot of time so I kept it simple. Happy with how the whale and lighting turned out.

Avocado Toast

Sep 4, 2022

Scheduling had us both in a bit of a rush this week so we decided to to something simple. I wanted to try expressing an idea that I’ve had about looping animations for a while now, see if it would actually work as I figured it should. Aside from rendering some low-poly food to use as assets, and what I did was set up a procedural background, and then tied that background to the position in space, of an empty object. Then I animated that object through a circular looping animation, meaning that when the animation had finished, it would have smoothly looped completely around in a non-obvious way. Worked out exactly as I’d hoped and produced these trippy animations.

Moon Moth

Aug 28, 2022

The subject this week was a moth with a moon in the background. My wife finished her painting quickly this week and I wanted to mess around with animation, so I came up with this idea. I took a picture of her moth in fact, and then cut that out and used it as a texture for my piece. I then spiced it up by having the animation rotate through hue, saturation, etc.

Beach and a Drink

Aug 21, 2022

The subject was a drink and a beach, a lot like the old Corona commercials. I figured it would be a good opportunity to try out some transparency and then I threw in some procedural texturing to get the sand and wood textures. I tried going with an NPR look but I just couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted it so I went with Cycles.

If I were to do this one again I would try for a Porco Rosso look as I think it would be suited here. If you look close enough, you’ll notice the glass if floating.

Desert Boat

Aug 14, 2022

I’m a big fan of paintings and pictures of a boat with “Point Reyes” on the bow for some reason. I must have seen the picture come up on the Chromecast idle rotation and there are some pretty great pictures and drawings/paintings of it out there. And then I’m also a fan of some photos of the Namibian desert that I’ve seen, likely also on the Chromecast. So I took some liberties with my wife’s subject of a boat at sea this week and decided to model the boat and then projection map the texture to it. Was interesting and I’m okay with the result aside from not having a ton of time to work on the lighting again.

Flamingos

Aug 7, 2022

This week was Flamingos. This was our first weekly challenge, and I have some experience with Blender so I picked rigging and cloth sim as specific things I wanted to work on this week. I bit off way more than I should have and had no time to work on lighting so that’s a bit of a rush job. But I was able to get a decent generic Flamingo model done with an inverse kinematics rigged neck to make it easier to pose. And then I was able to drape a canvas cloth sim over a stack of boxes and over some wagon train style struts. Managed to get the cloth to sew to pinned vertices to create the effect of looking tied down.

Weekly Challenge

Aug 1, 2022

Weekly Challenge #

My wife expressed some interest in learning to paint with acrylics a couple of weeks ago, which sounded great to me! While she was talking about a YouTuber that she’d found that had a series of tutorials, I mentioned that I’d always wanted to get more familiar with Blender and that maybe we could have a cooperative challenge to give us both a bit of structure. We came up with a set of rules that we would each produce art with our respective tools every week, publishing it somewhere online (an opportunity for critique) by Sunday eventing/night.