Embedded Files
Project deliverables
Project deliverables
Introduction
Introduction
The goal of this project is to create and document a simple 3D scene, I am required to demonstrate an understanding of the basic 3D workflow from my understanding of the basic blender UI and controls, blender materials, editing, camera settings, lighting and finally rendering.
Deliverables include:
Rendered images of the finished scene
3D scene file (embed link to your Google Drive folder in your learning journal)
Documentation of project process
Mid-project and project-completion reflections
Because I had completed the beach scene fairly fast I didn't have much new that I could reflect on making the second reflection feel extremely daunting. I decided that I should learn something new and focus on an unfamiliar area. Something that I really wanted to try is the more organic side of modeling. For this I decided to create a tree. To the left is the reference of a bonsai tree that I ended up using. Because I had never done this style of modeling before I decided to followed parts of this tutorial.
I started with the base cube and turned on Dyntopo, a setting that dynamically adds topology as you sculpt. Along with that setting there was four main tool I had used.
Snake hook tool: A tool that makes use of Dyntopo and just as its name suggests allows quick snake-like and hook-like protrusions. This was an incredibly fast way of creating a rough tree shape.
Grab tool: This made it easy to move things around and adjust the protrusions to be in a better more realistic or interesting position.
Smooth tool: To smooth the object. If I used large brush it was also a convenient way to shrink curtain parts of the tree.
Inflate tool: Increase the size of the mesh.
After creating the main trunk/branches I then started using the crease tool. This was to sharpen up areas and create unique divots and details over the tree.
Next was a branch containing the leaves. This was made separately from the tree. The branch is made up of a cylinder place on its side with a plane containing and image of leaves placed along it. A few loop cuts were added to the leaf plane and I used proportional editing to give the leaves a more 3D appearance.
At this point the tree trunk was made up of 36 000 polygons. Using a modifier called decimate I brought the amount of polygons down to 2ish thousand. Alternatively I could've used the shrink wrap modifier and the face snapping tool to rebuild the tree with an even smaller poly count and cleaner topology. This would also mean I could unwrap the model and apply much nicer looking materials. This would be at the expense of increased modeling time. Since clean topology and a lower polygon count doesn't really matter for this project I opted for the quicker and easier method.
The material set-up is pretty standard. Using the CTRL-Shift-T short cut for node wrangler lets you quickly select and setup all textures with the correct settings without having to do it all yourself. There were only two things that I did that are different from the default set up. Firstly I added a Hue/Saturation Node in between the colour texture node and BSDF node so that I can adjust the colours of the bark. Secondly in order to use the Displacement map within the Cycles renderer I had to go into the material settings > Surface > Displacement and set that to "Displacement and Bump" instead of "Bump only".
This material is to be used on the branch and trunk.
Because there is no UV setup for the tree I used box-project to put the material onto the objects.
I placed, rotated and scaled all of the leaves along the branch. In general the bigger leaves were placed to the back of the branch while smaller leaves placed at the front.
All leaves were joined to the branch and the origin was moved to the base of the branch. This is so I can easily move the branches into position.
Branches were simply scaled, rotated and placed on the tree trunk.
A HDRI was added to the world and the leaf colour was changed to be a purple colour using the same node type that I had also used to change the bark colour. It was also at this point that I decided I wanted an environment to place my tree.
Inspired by the tree tutorial I decided I wanted to try and create similar scene myself. I started with a cylinder as the base. I increase the poly count using Sub-Div modifier then applying it.
Using the displace modifier and a generated cloud texture, bumps were added to the rock object.
I created a vertex group called Grass. Using weight paint mode, and making sure the right vertex group is selected, I painted an area that I would like the grass particle system to sprout from. Using the displacement modifier from the previous step, I added in the grass vertex group and inverted it to smooth an area in order to add grass to later.
Next I want to add the rock and base grass textures.
The material setup is similar to the bark. The key difference being the use of a second lot of textures.
Using "frames" I kept textures grouped together. Individual mix nodes are placed between the same texture of each group. The factor on the mix node lets us merge between the two textures. By creating a new separate texture that is hooked up to the factor we can use the blenders texture paint tab to paint the desired texture onto our object. In this case I have to paint in white to reveal the rocks and black reveals the base grass.
Next I wanted to add some grass particles to my object. I had no idea I would approach this so I found a tutorial by CGMatter. The process was surprisingly simple but there is a number of steps to keep track of.
I started by modeling a single blade of grass. I used 2 array modifiers to create a grid of grass.
I applied the modifiers and separated the grass by loose parts.
The randomise transform tool was used to make the grass look more natural. The proportional editing tool was also used to add a bit more randomisation to it. The separate grass blades were then joined together again.
Next was the creation of a particle system to distribute the grass object. Particle > Hair > Render as an object, select our grass object. Hair strands are now replaced by the grass object. The grass vertex group that was created earlier is added to the Vertex Groups > Density to make it so the grass only spawns on the top of the rock.
The grass material was made up of a noise texture and the colour ramp nodes. Noise just gave randomness to the colour of the grass while the colour ramp gives the grass more than just a single shade. The tutorial also said to replace the Principal BDSF with the Translucent BSDF. There was no noticeable difference between the two so I'm not sure why he said to do that.
Textures Used
Textures Used
Project Reflections
Project Reflections
Mid-Project Reflection
Mid-Project Reflection
Proficiency:
What skills, techniques, knowledge, or technologies are you using to achieve project requirements? Give examples analysing the strengths and limitations of work in your field and reflecting on the skills, knowledge and research relevant to your project.
For the beach scene I made use of all of the expected basics including:
View port controls: Middle mouse to rotate view, scroll and shift scroll to zoom, shift mouse to pan. I had to scale, move and rotate each part of the scene. The tree pieces had to be duplicated. Loop cuts used to quickly add geometry, bevelling to smooth sharp edges for the alien box. A HDRI and sun light was added to the world. I double checked the object scale was applied throughout the whole process just incase I had accidentally adjust the scale in object mode. For the rendering settings I turned on Ambient Occlusion(A way to fake shadows for indirect lighting. Usually pretty subtle) and bloom. Finally before rendering I double checked the camera was set to 1920 x 1080.
Process: How are you planning your processes to achieve outcomes within the project timeframe? How are you managing your priorities and tasks and responding to changes or challenges? Give specific examples of your research and how it informs your project.
I'm already proficient with the basics of blender and a few other 3D programs. I had completed the beach scene during the first day of class. For me the process was to have the tutorial running in the background while following the steps.
Person: What communication skills does this project require, and how are you responding to feedback and giving feedback to others?
This is a solo project so I didn't need have a huge need to interact with my peers. Instead I think I would like to reflect on how well I have communicated my thoughts throughout the journal. I feel like I didn't capture a significant amount of the process and ended up redoing having to redo the beach scene. This time I screen recorded the process at home. In the future I will take steps to more thoroughly capture the process. I will do this by taking screen shots after each stage even if I don't think I will need the screen shots. It's better to have too many then not enough after all.
End of Project Reflection
End of Project Reflection
Proficiency: What skills, techniques, knowledge, or technologies are you using to achieve project requirements? Give examples analysing the strengths and limitations of work in your field and reflecting on the skills, knowledge and research relevant to your project.
Most of my experience is with standard polygon modeling pipeline. For the second scene I wanted to touch on things that I'm not super comfortable with. In this case I learned more about simple material combination techniques through nodes and layer masks, node organisation in the form of frames, a refresher on some of the sculpting tools, learned how to use a displacement textures in eevee as well as cycles, how to setup and use vertex groups and finally applying objects to a hair particle system.
Process: How are you planning your processes to achieve outcomes within the project timeframe? How are you managing your priorities and tasks and responding to changes or challenges? Give specific examples of your research and how it informs your project.
The requirements for this project were quiet lenient so I think I was already in the ballpark for passing without this second section. That said the overall process was quiet simple. I had an object I wanted to create and I expanded the scope of the project as I went. YouTube was used whenever I needed to find new information.
For example I wanted to create a tree and I didn't really know where to start with organic objects so I went to YouTube and searched for "tree blender". I ended up watching Grant Abbits video. It was simple and to the point. It also covered a range of different tools. (Abbitt, 2022).
The grass is from a tutorial by CGMatter. This was a considerably more difficult tutorial and covered many more tools. Due to the speed of the video I think a more intermediate understanding of blender was needed in order to be able to learn much from this. (CGMatter, 2020)
Person: What communication skills does this project require, and how are you responding to feedback and giving feedback to others?
I think I did a better job communicating through screenshots and descriptions of each step then the first half of this project.
References:
Abbitt, G. (2022). Easy Realist Low Poly Trees - Blender 3 [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdTabPJuqdc&ab_channel=GrantAbbitt
CGMatter. (2020). Create Grass Fast Blender Tutorial [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf8s1Ckycdo&ab_channel=CGMatter
Appraisal: Overall, how successful was your project? What worked or didn’t work, and why? How did it match with your expectations? Give specific examples, screenshots or links.
There are a few things that I would like to have improved on if I could redo this. For example I don't really like the variation or density of the leaves on my tree. I think I should've spent more time creating a few more branches and and more leaves to each branch.
There is also an extremely visible seem around the top of the rock. I'm not sure if I can blend textures over a seam within blender so I would have to recreate the UV's if I wanted to fix that.
Because I used the box project technique to texture the tree I couldn't really control the direction of the grain alone the tree. To counteract that I enlarged the texture which hid the grain and created a more blurry less detailed tree. I think it looks fine for this purpose but if I had more time I would've liked to have gone back and have done it properly.
Challenges: What obstacles did you overcome and how? What lessons did you learn?
I found that the grass objects rotation wouldn't follow the curve of the rock object. I think that it is because the particle system was using the global rotation instead of the rock object plain orientation. For now the fix was to limit the grass vertices group to the top of the rock object where the uniform grass direction make sense. I would need to do a bit more research and experiments with the particle system to see about getting objects to rotate around the target object properly.
Future Goals: How will you improve your skills for future projects? What will you do differently in your next project? What will you repeat?
For future project I would like to push myself from the start. Originally I was just going to leave this project after completing the tutorial. But in the last lesson I started to play around with blenders glass shaders and I was having a lot of fun with it. Noticing the work that one of my team mates for project 02 had put in for this project also inspired me to actually push myself. But this also meant that I only had a couple of days to add in anything extra before the due date. All in all, for the next project I hope to really see what it is that I can do if I give myself the luxury of perusing new and different techniques.
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