I haven’t thought about Bitey Castle shorts in a while (I unearthed the link in an archive) but they’re still there and still fun to watch. The main character is Bitey of Brackenwood and the shorts tell of his encounters with other creatures in his world.
Enough said, here’s the link to the site–go watch them for yourselves!
That’s right, I finished the rough modeling of the lantern today, so I’m taking a break from meshes and starting on the textures. There’s plenty of modeling left to do, however, and removing collision detection from all the unnecessary faces, but that’s for later…
My initial count is 13 textures, from cement to stone to tongue and groove panels. You can expect some new renders by next weekend as I can knock the textures out quickly and many of the larger meshes’ textures can be tiled, so there won’t be too much unwrapping.
I’ve pulled a new set of renders from the La Corbiere project. The only major new stuff is from the interior, but I did spend the better part of today getting the interior windows to match the exterior windows.
I’ve been toying with the idea of making a flythrough video of the project, so I’ve had to learn how to animate the camera. The rough tests don’t look too bad, but it’ll take some time to get enough frames to make a decent sized video (even with credits).
I’ve been working with Blender 2.43 since March, 2007 but have finally upgraded to 2.46 so I could get access to ffmpeg. There have been some important changes, especially with the UV mapping process; it’s been a year since I’ve done any serious texturing, so it’ll be like starting from scratch…
Anyhow, I figure I’m far enough along with the meshes that it’s time to start planning and working on the textures; this’ll be good for those evenings when I’m just too brain dead from work to even consider doing any modeling. In fact, I’ll probably do most of the work on my laptop while watching my favorite work movie, Trick!
Woohoo! I finally got the interior roughed in–the upper floor is in place as are the stairs and most of the two stringers. There are even interior and exterior doors!
There’s still plenty of detailing to do, and figuring out how the two meshes will interact–they won’t be seen together, but there will be some identical bits in the vestibule area. Still, I think I’m over that two month long block; and I’d better be, as I hope to have the project finished by the end of the year. That’s right, now I have an official deadline.
It’s been two months since I made any major changes to the La Corbiere project, and now I’ve got the interior started!
This has been the most difficult part of the project to design because I don’t have many reference photos. While I had to guess about a few small areas in the La Tourette project, I’ve pretty much guessed about the entire lighthouse interior–does the interior diameter change, how many stairs are there, and how do the stairs fit into the interior space.
It’s been a busy day–I got the lower buildings completely roughed in and placed and found a better way to make the rocky terrain. I still don’t know what the lower buildings are for, but they’ve been fun to model.
I’ve finally had to give up trying to build the terrain from a subdivided plane; instead, I’ve built the individual rocky hills from extruded cylinders. This way I have the basic shapes and I can subdivide each hill to get the right amount of detail
Pro Traveller has a page listing some fascinating abandoned hotels. My favorite so far is the Bokor Palace Hotel. It’s a shame to see that massive building sitting abandoned in what looks to be a vast, empty space–it would be nice to see some photos of the hotel when it was occupied. The Wikipedia post mentions that the site is in line for re-development, with the hotel being restored rather than razed for a new building.
Well, I finally got proportional editing figured out–for some reason it wasn’t working before but did today–so I got some work done on the rocky terrain. I started with a subdivided plane and started moving verts manually. This isn’t the quickest way of modeling terrain, but I need a specific terrain, so a heightmap wouldn’t do.
I only have a view from the main island, so I’m having to use only the overhead view to model the perpendicular view. Also, I’ve been moving the verts vertically, but they’ll need some horizontal adjusting so I’ve got enough verts for the closeup rocks.
With the terrain in place, I’ll be working on the lighthouse proper next.
Started working on the rocky island underneath the lighthouse. This type is modeling is completely foreign to me, and I’m finding myself looking for tutorials on how to do it–after more than a year, I feel like a beginner again.
So, instead of looking at my renderings, here’s a 3d animation of Picasso’s Guernica created by Lena Gieseke over at the University of Georgia. It’s a beautiful piece and I so like the idea of exploring these 2d artworks.