Polybook – Jake

[Kaj Suominen]

@jakeblended awesome work Jake! and timely post. was battling with smoke sim and dust effect on my shot. i had seen brent nebula, but had forgotten it. so after few tweaks on his node setup, gettin the dust effect i wanted. cheers. 🙂

[Jake Korosi]

@louhikarme Awesome, and yeah that nebula technique is something else.  I can’t wait to see how you worked it into a dust effect for your rescue-ship.  I have an idea of my own for a use of that setup in a non-space scene, but I need to find out how well I can control the shapes of the dust-clouds; the noise texture is fairly random after all.

[Kaj Suominen]

@jakeblended yea, randomness makes it pretty hard to control. though i got some ideas for future, and smoke sim stuff propably was waste of time now since this uses the whole volume and not touch the particles. ahwell. live and learn. 🙂

[Jake Korosi]

@louhikarme I’m not sure smoke sim is a waste of time yet; we already know for sure we can shape those pretty exactingly with forcefields and curves.  I have yet to see whether there’s a way to shape volumes equally as well that use this method.

It seems like every week I become more impressed with what it’s possible to do on a procedural material.  For instance, have you seen this voodoo?  To be honest I can’t see myself ever doing that procedurally rather than just modeling it, which would take all of five seconds; but still.

[Kaj Suominen]

@jakeblended that is cool. didnt see the breakdown, but saw the effect earlier. procedural is something were i will be focusing more. but more so on the tools that i can build games more easier. batch tools to process meshes and blueprint that handle all the heavy lifting. that is were houdini will come in place, they have good game dev toolkit already and you can modify everything to fit for your needs. still going to be using blender for modeling. 🙂

[Jake Korosi]

The last year and a half has been just disastrous.

First, my monitor went bad.  So I replaced it.  Then my computer’s power supply unit started failing, so I replaced that.  A couple months ago, I damaged my drawing tablet, so I’ve just managed to replace that (it arrived Wednesday!).  Now Tuesday night, my video card died.  Well, almost died – it only works using the generic Windows display driver, and the screen is filled with vertical glitchy-color bars.  

On top of that, when trying to figure out what the problem was, I ended up reinstalling Windows – several times, because the installs kept getting interrupted midway by the failing video card whenever the graphics drivers were installed.  By the end of it, NONE of my user files were successfully saved.  It’s not a huge deal since most of my files by far are saved to OneDrive; but a couple of months ago I ran out of OneDrive space, and hadn’t gotten around to getting a 360 sub to give me some more space – meaning my last couple of Blender projects weren’t clouded and are now gone forever.  Those are the spaceship I just made for the July contest, and the Egyptian character I was making for the realistic character course.

The July contest is done, and although I had some future plans for that model, they involved redoing a good portion of it anyway, so I guess that’s not a crushing loss.  But that character was only halfway done.  I was waiting for my new tablet to arrive so I could finish it, and now I have to start from scratch.  It’s hard to explain how demoralizing this whole situation is.

A friend of mine is sending me an old video card, that they think still works.  Hopefully it does – but, it’s old, and will not run Blender 2.8.  It will be….a while, before I save up enough to get a new video card that’s an actual upgrade over the one I had that just died.  So I’m going to be stuck for a while using 2.79, I guess.  I will not be able to do any decently complex projects either, since I think the card I’m being lent has like 512MB of VRAM.  Looking over my options here, it looks like my best bet is going to be diving into the Animation Bootcamp, which I’ve been wanting to do but kept putting off in favor of modeling courses and projects.  The pre-2.80 VonnBots are still available, and I’m quite grateful for that!  But until I get a new card it looks like that’s where I’ll be stuck.  

[smurfmier1985]

@jakeblended oh man, that legitimately sucks! You always have so much bad luck.. 🙁

Luckily the viewport play blast renders aren’t too demanding for your temporary video card, and the animation courses are fun to do. You’ve mentioned for ages you wanted to do them so just see this as an opportunity and I hope you enjoy yourself.

Best of luck, hope you don’t have any more bad luck along the way.. I’m rooting for you!

[Jake Korosi]

@smurfmier1985 Yes!  I’m choosing to look at this as the universe forcing me to sit down and finally stop putting off the animation.  A while back I already started the Bootcamp – I did the rotating-ball and the bouncing-ball exercises and everything; I just kept getting distracted by the modeling and sculpting – it sings to me!  But now I won’t be able to do any seriously complex modeling or high-definition sculpting for at least a couple of months even if I wanted to.  It’s an opportunity, so I will take advantage of it as best I can. 🙂

Those loss of those projects still stings a little, but live and learn.  I’ll be getting that extra OneDrive space, that’s for sure.  

[Aaron Rudderham]

@jakeblended Goddamn man, that’s rough. I’m not sure if there’s much I can do but feel free to reach out if I can. Much love, and good luck!

[Jake Korosi]

I appreciate the concern, and the offer Aaron!  But as luck would have it, yesterday not long after posting my whinge here, I was able to make arrangements with another friend to help me out with getting an actual new card sooner rather than later, so crisis averted on that score.  If I had just waited a couple of hours before posting, I might’ve been able to keep my recent misfortune under the radar…

Even so, I plan on sticking with yesterday’s decision to give modeling courses a break and focus for a bit on animation.  I still have a personal modeling project I’ve been planning  for a while, that I will be working on at the same time; but it doesn’t have a deadline, so the animation courses will take time-and-effort precedence, and certainly no more modeling courses until I’m -at least- through the Bootcamp.

[Jake Korosi]

Starting a new project – another car.  Another OLD car.

I’m not sure why I torture myself with these old cars.  They have all these weird curves and shapes that are just a nightmare to model properly.  I think they did it on purpose – back in the 40’s and 50’s they anticipated computers and 3D modeling software and sat around the design table saying “you know what would be so funny?”

I think I’ve recovered enough to give character-building a second try after this car is done.  Losing that original project to a hard drive failure was so demoralizing, but I’m over it now.  It will be a different character though, one with lots and lots of pre-existing reference and very little invention needed; I’ve decided I need to practice the technical skills before I go trying to design things on my own.  

[Jake Korosi]

Well you may have noticed that I had an entire pandemic-year, that would’ve made an awesome excuse to literally do nothing but Blender courses and projects of all shapes and kinds with all the free time I had, and I spent it doing not that.  I participated in the DOG project and I was very happy with my work in that!  But that was really it.  

Meanwhile, in all that time our sages here at the Cookie have been dropping new course after new course – the treasure chest course, some new animation courses, almost an entirely new set of Fundamentals of X courses now!  And I have not been doing any of it!  I mean, I’ve been watching the videos and educating myself about the concepts but that’s it.  

Well that changes now.  Seeing the results of the DOG project and working on the Spice Vendor House has re-invigorated my interest in 3D and now that my main contribution to the latter is finished (I may contribute some interior items later), it’s time to re-commit myself to serious study.

First up – sculpting.  My pen hasn’t touched its tablet since I lost my Realistic Character Course project file when my SSD fried.  Since then the sculpting system in Blender has gotten a serious upgrade, with all kinds of fun tools added.  So my first stop is the new Sculpting Fundamentals course.  I started on the homework yesterday; here’s my sculpt so far:

When this course is done, I’m going to restart – and FINISH – the Realistic Character Course once and for all with a new project.  I’ve been spending the last week or so gathering reference for it and I believe I’m ready to go with it.

[Jake Korosi]

All righty, ol’ Sharkie’s done – the sculpting, at least.

 Shark  by  jakeblended  on Sketchfab

I think I’m going to give him some shaders and an environment, so I can add him to my sadly neglected project gallery here at CGCookie.  I’ll be giving him basically the same treatment as in Kent’s bonus stream, but with one exception – I think I’m actually going to give him a quick retopo (famous last words) and paint his skin by hand.  Nothing fancy at all, but I want a little bit more control over his two-tone coloration.  Procedural shaders are fine for the rest of the scene though.  I’ll probably do all that tomorrow, or as much of it as I can.

[Jake Korosi]

Fini!

Rather than retopologizing, unwrapping, and painting a texture for a very simple two-tone skin, I decided instead to go with vertex colors; the choppiness from the decimated mesh gives me exactly the kind of “ragged edge” I was looking for and I’m pleased with the result.

[Jake Korosi]

I am happy with the Shark.  I used the course as like a natural refresher to get me re-oriented with sculpting, and it did that; I caught on, got comfortable, and even got into a groove very quickly, and with a couple of tiny nitpicks I’m VERY pleased with the result!  I feel absolutely ready to tackle the realistic course again, and I am all set to do just that.  In fact, I was planning to get it started today.

Buuuut then @theluthier had to go and drop this new Eevee industrial environment course and it’s too relevant to my interests to ignore.  This first, THEN the character, I promise!

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