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.

April 6th 2020 - Snorelax sculpt & Chibi character sculpt

Restarted working on a chibi character sculpting lesson which should take several days to finish completely. Looking forward to completing it as I feel that my last attempt wasn't going so well.

Also felt that I should try my own personal sculpting to see how well I can apply the lessons I've been learning so far. Decided that the project should be something simple and not too time consuming and chose Snorelax. The sculpting was pretty fun and didn't feel too challenging. Working on doing a retopology of the snorelax and feel that I'm learning a lot from the whole process. Using a mixture of mirror modifier, snap to surface and hiding parts of the sculpt to make retopolgy work. This will be my first retopology.

Melvin Monster sculpt v2

Applying the sculpting lessons again on the Melvin course from CG Cookie. I use liberal use of the pinch tool combined with crease and draw sharp to make straighter and cleaner lines in the model.

Turned out significantly better than the first time I tried it in my opinion.

3D Stylized Shark Blender Sculpt

3D Stylized Shark Blender Sculpt 

Started working on my blender courses on CG Cookie again and just went through tutorial on creating a stylized shark. Was a pretty fun tutorial and good refresher on how to use the sculpting tools in Blender 2.82.

I want to retopologize it as my next project and then rig it next.