July 25th 2020 - Squid Mage and Italy Burano

Squid Mage by Satoshi Matsuura

Recreated another monster concept art by Satoshi Matsuura into a 3d model for practice. I feel its a pretty good recreation of the concept art. Implemented a basic body rig for the 3D model as well but didn't do any animations. Maybe I'll do something simple with it in the future.

I felt pretty comfortable tackling this practice project and I can attribute it to my gestural sculpting practice that I was doing. The character was composed of simple shapes that I knew I would be able to easily recreate with sculpting. After sculpting the character I then retopologized it. I put the character in a T-pose to make it easy to retopologize but it was only during the process that I realized that for future projects I should make things like the tentacles straight as well and then pose them afterwards. This is because it was a pain to retopologize the tentacles as a result of the angles.

One new tool I discovered and wish I knew about before is the B-Surface addon that comes built-in with Blender but isn't enabled by default. I only learned about it after completing the retopology but I can see myself using it more extensively for all future retopology projects.

An area of weakness and improvement that I will look into more in the future is to figure out a process for texturing. 

Italy Burano - 3D Recreation Project

For my next project I wanted to try my hand at making something more realistic in 3D and decided to use a a picture by Mathew Chen that he took of Italy. Still a lot of areas to improve upon but it was a good learning project for practicing hard-surface modeling and spent time focused on texturing.

If you want to see more beautiful photography/videography take a look at Mathews portfolio at : https://www.chenproductions.com/

Regular Video - Italy Burano

360 Video - Italy Burano

When I first approached the texturing I figured I could use camera projection to get easily create photo realistic texturing. Sadly the image I was using wasn't high enough resolution and the textures that I made were really pixelated so in the end I had to make each texture myself. 

It was a good experience since I haven't spent a lot of time on texturing and now feel comfortable with the basics. 

I want to experiment more with camera projection in future projects as I feel like it can be a powerful approach to creating 3D assets quickly. 

The water effect was created using the PBR Shader in Unity. Still a complete noob at shading and plan to tackle that in much further depth next month.