Week 8 | Back to Blender!

 

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Back To Blender

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Starting off project two with a pretty busy week! I really wanted to get things in motion so I decided to do a lot of work modeling wise this week. I'm trying to account for printing time/printing mishaps/etc

The first thing I did this week was decide on a design for my keychain. I thought a really cute (and hopefully unique) concept could be a little raccoon and some trash themed charms. So I drew out some concept sketches, decided on the one I liked, and did a turn around to help me with modeling.

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I played a lot with proportions, different styles (I looked at Animal Crossing and Calico Critters for inspiration) but eventually settled on a sort of mix of the two. I tried to keep the designs really simple both for my sanity, and ease of printing. The random egg is a pin I want to make if I have time lol.

Here's a rough turn around of this sad looking fella.

Now in Blender I used the sculpting tools for awhile and This Tutorial which was very helpful. But the results I got weren't really matching the style I had in mind for the keychain - which was really round, smooth shapes and a simple design.

He just looked kind of funny. And I think that's just because I'm bad at actual sculpting.

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But there is another way to make little guys, which primarily uses subdivision tools and geometry which I find I understand way more. So I used This Tutorial to help me create my silly little guy. You use proportional editing, edges, and faces to move the shapes where you need them to be.

To add details, you select faces of your model and duplicate them into surfaces. You can then use the 'solidify' modifier to give the surfaces volume.

I used this modifier for pretty much any raised details that wouldn't be painted off! I may go back and redo the eyes, to try and get a more circular shape, but I like how it is so far. He looks so sad :')

BUT we're not modeling yet! Since the charms are small and simplistic, I spent some of my weekend making them too. I'm not done, but I'll include what I have.

For the soda can, I used a reference picture and just loop cut and shaped a cylinder to it, and used extrusion for the top and bottom details. For the apple, I got a cube and subdivided it. I used proportional editing to get that natural, lumpy shape. Then, I wanted the apple to either be an apple core or have bites taken out of it. So I used the Boolean modifier to indent some shapes. Here's a graveyard of failed ones:

 

They weren't bad, and could probably be perfected more. But I decided to go for the bitten look just for simplicities sake. For the bite marks, I used the Boolean modifier again with some spheres.

 

Next. The Banana.

You can see in my concept sketches that I wanted to do a banana peel...that may change. It was pretty easy to make the banana shape, but the peel part not so much. I'm also having worries about it being too complicated and weird to print so, we'll see. I think I have patience enough for one more attempt at it, but I spent a LONG time using things like split edges, proportional editing, and solidify to make something decent. Plus, having two fruits probably wouldn't make much sense anyways if I want that garbage look. 

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But that's what I have for this week! Pretty good progress. Now that Blender isn't as intimidating and I know my way around, I know modeling isn't going to take as much time as it did in project 1. 

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