Courne Supremacy

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

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:

I’m back in the bay area today. Nice weather we’re having. I’ve been watching it part of last week — there were supposed to be thunderstorms in San Francisco. Yesterday, I started my journey back home around 3 am. The flight from Philadelphia to Chicago, no problem. In Chicago I learned they downsized the plane for whatever reason but I got onboard. When we reached San Francisco all I could see were peaks of the Golden Gate bridge and the rest of was just a dense white fog. No visibility, but our intrepid pilot decided to try and land anyway. Turbulence all the way and the passengers were upchucking the five dollar “snack packs” that United sold us a couple of hours ago. Just as we were fifty feet off the ground we sudden pulled up and skipped SFO all together. We didn’t learn till later that there was a sudden gust of wind (a freak one-in-a-million chance according to our pilot) that caused us to pull away. In San Jose we did a “gas and go” and a bunch of disgruntled and ill passengers opted to get off the plane ( at their own expense — United wasn’t going to off load their baggage and they were on their own to get to SFO). We landed though and I got home. Then the clouds broke and the sun shone down on the newly washed and cleansed Earth. What a day.

Today…I spent the last day of my vacation being somewhat industrious. Blender’s really piqued my interest in 3D modeling again. So after a day of work, here’s what I have: an almost complete, untextured Nintendo Wiimote. I did it using images I found off the Internets and modeled the entire thing with subdivision surfaces. Throughout my entire marathon modeling session, Blender didn’t once throw a fit or crash. Amazing. trueSpace or Martin Hash would have crashed a hundred times by now.

Reference Image (I used photoshop and cut it up into a front, top, and side view and discarded the ones I didn’t use):

A shitty render of my modeling work (I’ve got to learn how to set up lights and render better):

Enjoy! I need food and lots of TV now. Back to work tomorrow…

So I’ve delved into the world of modeling 3D with Blender. After seven hours of obsessive vertex tweaking this is what I finally came up with:

I gotta say, it’s easy to get into 3D modeling with Blender and it feels great knowing that it’s a full 3D modeling package. Not once did it crash on me while I was modeling either — most stable software I’ve used. There’s one issue: when you load a background image, make sure it’s small. I had a 3 mb TIFF file as a background image to reference my model building off of, and having that in there considerably slowed down Blender. I think if you want a reference background image make sure it’s below 100kb — jpeg compressed. This was made just manipulating polygons and using subdivision surfaces. It’s supposed to be a female face, but honesty can you tell? (Well, the face has a beak like Ashley Tisdale, so maybe it kinda does.) I used to draw a lot of female characters and I would love to become adept at modeling one in 3D.

The work is based off a tutorial which you can find at MontageStudio. I find them to be really great video tutorials. They’re all medium to high quality videos and the guy goes through things step by step. I learned a lot about Blender’s interface just by doing the face tutorial. Definitely a good place to start — er, if you’re a beginner to intermediate modeler.

My goal with blender: a full on 3D humanoid character. You’ll know how it goes because it’ll be posted on here.

I used to be really big into 3D modeling way back in my teens because I thought I might want to do art for a living, and hell, making 3D models for video games, who wouldn’t want to do that? Of course, back then, I was inspired by games like Command and Conquer — they used 3D artwork, but only to make pre-rendered sprites. Now, well, you know what 3D is like nowadays in video games. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making 3D meshes: texturing, rigging for characters, low polygon modeling, etc. The list goes on, but I’ve been surfing the web looking at freeware software for the past couple of days and came across Blender. Blender is a freeware 3D modeling, animation, and rendering package. Yes, there’s also Povray, but Povray never hit me as user friendly or intuitive to use. There are modelers for it but they never seemed all that great or cohesive — hence why I begged my mom (when I was younger) for a copy of Caligari Truespace to do 3D in, then later I picked up Martin Hash Animation Master. Back to Blender. Now you’d think that it being freeware means that the UI is obtuse, the features are buggy, and it’s generally just a pile of horse manure. Well, I’d say, and only from my limited experience with Blender so far, that you’d be wrong (and I was wrong to think that too). Its come a long way. I was quite surprised to see it have a huge set of features — it’s on par with what I found in Maya. There’s already some incredible artwork done in it including animated films –it can do everything from game artwork to full on broadcast quality 3D animation and even video compositing with CG elements.

Blender’s also lightweight clocking in around 11 mbs for the download. It runs fast. The UI will take some getting used too, but since I don’t know other 3D packages that well, it’s a blank slate for me and Blender can imprint its UI grammar and methodologies on my brain. There’s a huge user base it seems and a lot of blogs, tutorial sites, how-to videos, and documentation online. It might be the perfect way to get back into 3D for me. Best of all, I won’t have to fork over the ungodly sums of money Caligari or Alias want me too for their buggy, bloated software.

If you’re interested in checking out Blender you can visit their site: www.blender.org.