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: