Week 2, Day 3: Compositing

Once the camera is aligned with the angle of the camera that took the shot, anything can be added to a real-life scene using Blender. In the below image, I've added additional bike racks on the right side of the image.

More complicated setups are needed to make an image with reflective objects look convincing. Also, this scene contains corners. I had to use alpha maps to get rid of the jagged corners of these bricks.

Week 2, Day 2: Alpha and Displacement Maps

Alpha maps allow a flat plane to appear to have detail that would take ages to model by hand. A dragonfly wing, for example, contains hundreds of transparent cells, making it easier to use an image. Using arrays, dragonfly wings can make some beautiful designs:

Displacement maps are another form of detailing, but where alpha maps require very little geometry, displacement maps require millions of vertices to look convincing. The effect is a bumpiness which gives surfaces a more realistic texture.

Posing my character

Here is what I've done with my robot character, combined with what we did with Armatures in class today. I had to do a lot of fine tuning around the joints to get the solidity of his body consistent; in between, the joints must bend very locally. This work would pay off mostly in animation, since the difference in stretching isn't visible in a still image. I didn't really use the weight painting feature, as selecting individual vertices was more precise in this case.

Week 2, Day 1: Armatures

Today was spent learning about hair, armatures and rigging. Here is a man with hair climbing a platform, demonstrating both concepts.

Weekend Progress

I modeled, UV unwrapped, and began texturing a robot over the weekend. The design is based on Gunnerkrigg Court, a webcomic by Tom Sidell.

Day 4: Lathes and Arrays

Today, we explored the properties of glass and used curves to model radial shapes. One curve is repeated around the circular path to create a shape. I chose a wineglass:

The index of refraction is set to 1.5 for this material.

The array modifier can be used for some creative instancing as well, allowing for fractal-like shapes.

Day 3: More mirror modeling and UV textures

For the first half of class, I modeled a plug using reference images. Here are the results.

For the latter half, I unwrapped a banana mesh to match an image of a scanned banana peel in order to texture the banana. Here is the rendered banana.

Day 2: Symmetry and finishing the screwdriver

My screwdrivers now have a rack, and I changed the lighting to use 3-point lighting (it took a longer time to render with so many area lamps).

Next, we did a symmetry exercise. I created a frog train, started over with a computer, then attempted a bee.

First day

Here's my first render in the class... subconsciously inspired by Sintel's dragon, probably.
Below is my version of the screwdriver from following the tutorial: