The trouble with working with 3D graphics is that, in spite of all the advances in 3D rendering techniques, the calculations of light in a scene are mathematical approximations of how light works in the real world.
I was thinking about this when I was playing around with a standard lighting set up for a project that I’m working on in Blender. One example is how, in the real world, you rarely get truly black shadows beneath objects.
I quite often see 3D work that would look that little bit more realistic if this simple fact had been taken into account and steps taken to fix it.
In my standard scene setup (top-right) I have a sphere primitive placed on my studio object (just a smoothly curved floor to wall object). It’s lit by a lamp and a spotlight. The underside of the sphere is unnaturally dark.
By adding an area light beneath it at a low energy setting (bottom-right), the darkness can easily be corrected to make the scene look and feel more realistic.
After a solid evening of modelling, writing about modelling and getting distracted by Charlie the cockatiel I’ve got to the stage of adding the toilet seat to the toilet for my bathroom.
The back of the toilet isn’t as perfect as I’d like – I need to reshape it to make the pipe come out of the bottom of the toilet rather than a mysterious tube that just grows from the back.
Having said that, I’m still really pleased with the progress so far.
I’ll continue to update the Toilet WIP page as I work on the model.
I’ve finally started to feel the return of my creative mojo so I thought I’d return to a shelved 3D project – the real bathroom.
The bathroom walls and form are already in place with rudimentary materials so I thought I’d start to focus on the individual objects in the bathroom, starting with the good old porcelain throne. :)
I will be showing WIP steps on the toilet project page. Wow, I never thought I’d ever have a “toilet project” :)
I came across a very cool time-lapse video showing the construction of a house fly in Blender3D. I have to admit – I was very impressed.
It made me realise that I’ve gotten behind on some of my 3D modelling projects… I should kick it up a notch instead of wasting my time playing World of Warcraft. :)
I knocked this together for this afternoon’s class.
The students wanted to learn about using the keyboard for input and how to do collision detection so I thought a nice simple game would be the best way for them to learn these technique.
Yes, I know the graphics are poop but the game is just to demonstrate a couple of principles. Maybe if I can ever be bothered I’ll make it look prettier. :)
To play the game, you’ll need to click on the game so it can receive your keyboard input. :)
I was thinking about this when I was playing around with a standard lighting set up for a project that I’m working on in Blender. One example is how, in the real world, you rarely get truly black shadows beneath objects.
