Portfolio 4 Final

 

Common Art Sprint 6 Final

 

Portfolio 4 Week 2

Common Art Sprint 5

 

Portfolio 4 Week 1

 

Week 1: Block out in Maya, High rez sculpt in ZBrush

Week 2: Retopo and UV unwrap

Week 3: Texture icy material

Portfolio 2 Week 4

 

Portfolio Research

For this piece, I focused on creating a hard surface model with the boxcutter add on in Blender. I wanted to focus on using this tool to create clean shapes and panel lines. To use it, you must first select a mesh in object mode. This tool quickly makes booleans in the shapes that I wanted, which sped up the modeling process. 

The image above shows the mini helper menu for quickly changing the shape. On the left, there are the options for circle, box, and ngon cuts. I used a lot of the box cuts because the model is quite geometric.

I started with the larger parts of the model, and slowly worked my way to the smaller shapes. Boxcutter utilizes the boolean modifier and is non-destructive.

This is a simple example of what the process looked like when dragging with boxcutter active. To get rounded, beveled edges after dragging the desired shape, I pressed 'B' and dragged my mouse inwards/outwards. Using the scroll wheel gives more divisions.

After making the boolean, it is possible to go back and edit the shape. The HardOps toolkit addon ties in very well with BoxCutter. The addon gives me the ability to use "Ever Scroll" by pressing Q, which lets me scroll through existing the booleans and transform them. This is useful to edit the vertices, move them around, as well as adding bevels to certain edges.

For the panel lines, I used the ngon cut, allowing me to draw the cut in a line. After making the cut, I rotated the camera to determine how deep it goes into the mesh. By default, boxcutter snaps to an angle when making the selection. Holding ctrl and moving the mouse lets you move freely.

The panel lines were made in orthographic view and I proceeded to line it up with the reference.

After making any cut, there will be a boolean modifier that automatically gets created. There are several shortcuts to quickly access ways to manipulate the boolean's thickness, offset, etc.

I would say that using this method to create the base mesh was successful. However, in hindsight, I would want to bake the panel lines instead of creating them on the physical mesh. I would want to look more into Zbrush techniques and practice making clean meshes/panel lines that way. There are multiple resources for this, but I just need to step out of my comfort zone and execute them.

Common Art Sprint 4

 

Portfolio 2 Week 3