20 Time Blog 06

This week I continued to refine the textures of the buildings on the street.  The buildings have lots of vertices, which means that it takes longer to apply new materials to them, but I think I'm almost done with working on the first rectangular building:

Obviously the fans and the building base will need their own individual materials, so that's what I'll be working on next week.

20 Time Update 05

Today I continued to texture the street set.  It wasn't quite as easy as I had hoped - the textures tend to stretch when I use them on the large, rectangular buildings; it's going to need some adjustments and fine-tuning before I even try to move on the other structures.  For now, here's a render of my progress:

Next week I hope to finish the rectangular buildings (or at least fix the texture-stretching problem).

20 Time Update 04

Due to a lack of an available internet connection yesterday, yesterday's 20 Time update is being posted today.

I continued to build the Tahnok character this week, as seen in this render:

Much to my relief, none of the other pieces needed to be fixed.  However, the model lacks feet and hand weapons (the feet need to have a structure added that will allow them to move and the weapons haven't been modeled yet).  I also learned that the Subsurf mesh modifier can be rather destructive at times, so I need to remember to enable it in the viewport when I use it.

Having nothing else to do on Tahnok at the moment, I then moved on to adding materials and textures to an existing set for an upcoming production (please note that I did not model it).  I haven't done much with it just yet, but here's a render of my progress:

Next time, I hope to have some updates from my fellow team members; I haven't decided if I'm going to start a new character model or if I'm going to stick to working on the set.

20 Time Update 03

Today I built part of a new model: the Tahnok character (it won't be needed for a while, although it will make a minor appearance as a background character at some point).  Although I was unable to finish it in class, here's a render of what I have so far:

Although I had originally expected to finish it today, I was delayed by the fact that the main headpiece wasn't scaled to fit with the rest of the pieces, so I spent valuable time on fixing that instead.  On the bright side, I learned about selectively applying certain modifiers to an object mesh, which in turn will help me solve another problem that I was having with a different model.  Next time, I plan to finish this character model and hopefully get some updates to work with from the rest of my team.

20 Time Update 02

Having encountered a significant roadblock while working on the Roodaka character (as it turns out, there are still quite a few pieces of the character that need to be modeled), I decided to switch to another model.  The first was a quick color/texture update of a mask prop that's going to be used in my team's upcoming animated short:

After I finished that, I added more pieces to a background character model; it isn't finished yet because its helmet piece still needs to be modeled.  However, this character is different because it isn't based off of an existing LEGO set - it was never given an exact form, so I constructed one of my own: 

In the meantime, the rest of my team is busy animating our first real short.  I can't give exact details on it while it's still in production, but I'll post the video here on my blog once we've finished it.

20 Time Update 01

This week, I started a new 3D model of the Roodaka character; I used a PDF of the instructions for the actual toy to assemble the corresponding digital pieces.  I ran into some trouble when I found that some of the pieces I had weren't up to the quality of the others, but I worked around that by simply not using those pieces for now (which I'll send to another person so that they can be brought up to the current standard).  I plan to continue working on this model next week.

A current render of the model's unfinished foot:

My 20 Time Project

For my 20 Time project, I'm utilizing an existing project (or rather, part of a larger project that some friends and I are working on).  My job is to produce 3D models of characters from the Bionicle line of LEGO sets (with a set of digital "pieces" modeled by other people) using the Blender program.  As for how this applies to my 20 Time, each day I will begin a new character model or improve upon an existing one (either by adding pieces, colors, or textures).