Courne Supremacy

My latest work-in-progress. A “bunny rabbit” character that I created with my brother named Albino Grimby — hence my Interwebs nickname. His Interwebs nickname is Grimby Slayer. Here’s what Albino actually is:

A small stuffed animal. He might look cute, but we all know the truth. He’s evil to the core although all he ever wants (porportly) is to bite your face off with his non-existent mouth or get some candy and let it absorb into his body as if he were the blob. My brother and I knew of his fowlness and thusly, his full name is “Albino the Brain Sucking Grimby.” He doesn’t actually do that or anything else. Now here he is in 3D with fur and without fur:

The fur one, when you look at it closely, isn’t there yet, but I didn’t spend much time on getting the fur to move correctly. The model itself is a work-in-progress. I still need to add details to his paws (hands) and figure out how I want to texture map him or just use base colors and furry-ize him to death. The fur version of Albino has 100,000 fur particle covering his body. I would need to use forcefields and whatnot to get them to stand in the correct way. Might be do-able. I spent all day yesterday familiarizing myself with Blender’s particle system — mainly for doing hair, but that’s really tough. I tried to add hair to my head model (see previous post for bad renders the head model). I managed to get the hair from looking really, really bad to looking like barbie doll hair or a washed-up punk rocker chick after a night of binge drinking and cocaine. I need to improve my technique or there are tools that Blender needs in the barber shop area. I saw that they’re working on some, and I look forward with great anticipation at what the next release of Blender will harbor for hairstyling.

My goal for Albino Grimby is to make him a fully articulate 3D character. So he’ll be modeled, textured, and rigged. Then I can do some animations with him. Like this one:

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/albinofly.avi

Notice, though, that the Albino in the animation has a big ole mouth. That would actually be Albino’s japanese brother, “Mangabino.” From there, I’d even like to experiment with him in Blender’s game engine or in DirectX. That might be fun to have a fully articulate character. It would also be great to test him with my OBJ code to ensure that it still works and raytrace him via my homebrewed raytracer.

Where is all of this 3D going? I’m definitely not interested in getting a job as a 3D modeler. I’m quite happy as a software engineering. I’m content with this being a hobby. I’m also happy to support Blender and freeware. If freeware is this damn good, then I say, let’s keep going in that direction.

I’d like to see my characters live in 3D most of all. Especially this one, which is the ultimate goal. (BTW, potentially NSFW.)

Tags: 3D Modeling, albino grimby, blender

Some more Blender practice. This time an entire head. “Where are the ears?” I hear you saying. Next time. Next time there will be ears. I’m not 100% happy with the render. I’m playing around with Blender’s subsurface scattering parameters, but I said to myself, “this is the last render of the night and I’m going to post it no matter what.” I modeled the head from a cube and used subdivision surfaces again. For the most part I modeled the head by just splitting and merging polygons until I got something that looked like a very tesselated head. At first the head was very blocky looking and had way too many polygons. Most of the work I put into this was spent finding ways to cut down the number of polygons and to form the various polygon loops that make up the head. If you thing about it, there are circles that radiate outwards from the eyesockets and from around the nose and mouth and even the entire skull. These loops meld into each other and when they do and they’re sculpted smoothly it gives you a pretty pleasing looking 3D mesh.

Oh, here’s another render of the same mesh I but with different lighting and rendering settings:

And just for kicks, here’s an alien face I did yesterday. The goal for this mesh was just to see how fast I could model a face from scratch. I wasn’t trying to make it look beautiful. I wanted it as ugly as I could get it and see what kind of monster would appear.

That’s all I got for you right now. More to come.

Oh, did I hear you say something about DS Homebrew? How’s that going, you ask. Not going right now. Going slowly maybe. I’m torn between letting my Blender kick play itself out, but there are some hefty things I want to model and it seems that now is the time to be learning and moving towards that goal — besides I seem to be moving pretty damn fast at the pace I’m picking up and learning things in Blender. I’m also trying to relegate Blender to the weekends and spend the scant hours I have during the weekdays to write code and study DS stuff.

Tags: 3D Modeling, blender

Another practice session with Blender 3D today. I modeled another face. Not bad for five hours of work. It’s not textured but it uses Blender’s sub-surface scattering as apart of the mesh’s material.

As for rotoscoping reference — I didn’t use any. I just used my best judgement and the help from one of the online videos I found at Montage Studios. This one came out a little bit better and was fun to put together. One day of course, this face will have to be linked to the rest of the body, but we’ll see. That’s still quite hard for me at this stage.

Tags: blender, human face

some more renders of my wiimote in Blender 3D. Enjoy.

Tags: 3D wiimote, blender

Okay, maybe not a final, final render, but I think except for some tweaks here and there, it’s pretty much done. There are some things I can do, which you’d never see, so I think I’ll skip doing them. Maybe it’s lazy, but this being my first Blender 3D project I’m pretty damn content with the way it turned out. It’s probably not the most efficiently modeled 3D object and the texturing is half-assed, but it looks damn good.

For those interested, I used subdivision surfaces and except for the four lights on the bottom of the wiimote, everything else is actually one mesh — the face plate, the entire body of the wiimote, everything. One mesh. It was hard working with the subdivision surfaces at times because it likes everything to be rounded and things on the wiimote’s faceplate have sharper corners. In retrospect maybe I should have found some different way to do the faceplate, making the holes for all the buttons proved to be quite an undertaking and resulted in creating a lot of the edge loops around the wiimote mesh. I wanted to try and capture as much of the geometry of the wiimote as possible. I think I succeeded. I’ll post a montage rendering of the wiimote in various positions. For tonight, you get this:

Tags: 3D wiimote, blender