Blenderings of the Day

I finally got some time to get blending. Wanted to check out blender 2.76's lighting improvements, especially the light portals. Made some quick scenes and spent the evening working with lights.
Ended up making new desktop backgrounds for myself-

Going to put this on my lock screen.

It's not great, but works well as a wallpaper.

A mediocre attempt at creating a pile of  ripped envelopes.

 I must say, the improvements far exceeded my expectations. I could've never imagined rendering scenes like these so very quickly before.

Stats for blenderheads:
The desktop bg was rendered at 400 samples on Cycles.  [20 minutes]
The lock screen image was rendered at 20-30 samples. (Lesser perhaps.) [1 minute]
The ripped envelopes were rendered at 400 samples. [20 minutes]
All the models were created by recursively subdividing a random mesh with exaggerated fractal parameters. (Yeah, not too sophisticated. But hey, I wanted to play with some lighting. Just didn't feel like modelling much.)
And of course, all the scenes use an emitter plane for lighting and a couple of light portals to get beautiful renders.

I finally coded something in Unity5, Yay!

W,A,S,D to move.
LShift to run.
Space to shoot.



You need Firefox to run this, if you can't see my game below it's probably because -
1. You're not using Firefox.
2. You're using something that's not Firefox and it does not support the Unity Web Player.
3. You don't have the Unity Web Player (think of it as Adobe Flash for Unity games).

You can troubleshoot by -
1. Ranting in the comments section.
2. Downloading Unity Web Player (latest version available) here.
3. Using Firefox.

And if you are still not able to play the world's most awesome incomplete prototype, then I recommend this. 

3D Character Creation - My first successful attempt.

After redoing my character several times from scratch, I decided to get a basemesh from makehuman and work from there.

Here's the basemesh-

The cel-shading is just to save you from the awkwardness of staring at a naked man's basemesh.

 I've worked on this model for about 20 hours (intermittently, of course, this isn't the Ludum Dare).

After a lot of tweaking and trying to match reference pictures of myself standing in that quasi-akimbo pose
I managed to refine the overall shape of the model.
Truth be told, I was quite impressed by the anatomical correctness of the silhouettes. (Achieved with beginner's luck and makehuman's near perfect basemesh.)
The silhouettes-

                                   

Then I exported a pair of jeans model from makehuman and edited it in blender separately because I wanted to customise it, the stock thing is not very nice.  Why? Because you get this -

(<<<This is a random Google image, not my character.)


Definitely not nice.
But making the jeans fit was fairly easy. It took me less than 15 minutes. Another 15 minutes for UV mapping it.





Now, the two things I'm really happy about- the hair and the shirt. I modelled and UV mapped them myself from scratch. The haircut is nothing but a messy mesh that was sculpted at higher sub-divisions. And the shirt was made similarly, but with symmetry and smoothness in mind.
After the character was complete I ruthlessly decimated it from 70k tris to 20k tris and then retopologized.
Retopology took most of the time but I'm really happy with the poly-count now. It is well-optimized for being used in a game.
The rig was already there with the basemesh. A simple 32 armature rig with decent weights. But I did some weight painting anyway.

Then came the part I dread the most - coming up with a name. At first I settled for 3Ddude but then I changed it to Sky.

So lo and behold, I present you my very first decent character - Sky!!!!!!!!!!... a few million more exclamations...!!!

Sky says hi! He's modelled, UV mapped, textured, and rigged! (Not yet animated.)
 I decided not to give him pupils but I'm not sure if brown is the right colour for his hair. What do you think?

By the way, you probably failed to notice that he's 3rd Echelon.

Park

A lot better than abstract art...

Abstract Voxel Art

 I have put my feelings into a mathematically generated three-dimensional object. Does it make any sense to you?















It wasn't supposed to anyway... That's why it's abstract.

She gets on my nerves.

She snuck up on me while I was looking at my cluttered desk with unfocused eyes searching for inspiration in the depths of my sleepy mind at 12 o'clock in the night.

I'd been stupid. Very stupid. 

Dropped my guard. Stopped jigging in my chair which must've kept her at bay for hours.

And she was clever - went right for my weak spot.

She slowly came closer towards my hand. The very tips of our forelimbs touched and I felt something on the surface of my fingernail. Perhaps I thought I imagined it, or maybe I was too engrossed in search for inspiration. Whatever the reason may be, I ignored this sensation. 

My mistake.

I was going to pay for this in blood.

The stupid search for inspiration in my sleepy mind went on and all the while she bided her time. 

She probably gawked at my dozing form with her hungry eyes, no I mean it, literally hungry eyes.

She could hardly resist my tempting body, its warmth, and my breath was too sweet. 

Ten silent minutes later, craving had nearly driven her to insanity, she could no longer control her primeval desires. She gave in to the urge.. 

Her mistake. Could've costed her a lot if she wasn't so damn lucky. 

She was not going to pay for this with her life.

She touched me. I had a mild tingling sensation on the surface of my skin. It was mysteriously pleasant. Then the feeling grew more intense.

I snapped into DEFCON 1.

It took me a splitsecond to realize her presence and intentions. My reflexes triggered an impressively aggressive and quick response. I shook my hand and she hurriedly backed off. I wanted to slap her hard with both hands and brutally murder her. 

The mad, angry, insane part of my head said, "See her bleed!!"

The calmer, tired, almost sane part of my head argued, "But that would mean noise, waking the whole house at midnight (including mama), then you would bleed..."

Saner minds prevailed.

I went to bed. She was already there. I fell asleep, there was no escape. She probably siphoned my ichor with mad pleasure until she bloated. 

Next day I woke up with an annoying itch. I took one-hundred and sixty-nine rupees from my younger brother's piggy bank (surreptitiously, of course) and went to the grocer's. I bought a pressurized can of a chemical agent used to keep the likes of her away. I was going to hit her with Godrej Hit.

And just in case you're a slow one : Only female mosquitoes suck blood. They sense the presence of humans by detecting the carbon dioxide we exhale and are always attracted to human skin. You're very vulnerable to them while dozing off at your desk with the window open. The defense readiness condition(DEFCON) is an alert state used by the United States Armed Forces. Godrej Hit is a mosquito repellent( very effective, haven't had problems with her ever since I bought it.)

Resuscitation - The first post.

This blog is another attempt to cultivate a habit of  regular writing. After a string of failures I'm here once again with a slightly more solid resolve and experience in procrastination-aversion.

That's it. End of post.

(Don't wanna quit after the first post by letting out all the steam at once.)