Brad Ferguson
Game Knight (a 3D animated short)
Game Knight (a 3D animated short)
Brad Ferguson
My Very First 3D Animation in the History of ...

Learning 3D animation!

My Very First 3D Animation in the History of the Entire Universe!!!
3D
Brad Ferguson
Almost Naked Animals 3D-ified: Octo

As part of my ongoing adventure in teaching myself 3D, I now proudly present the Banana Cabana’s ultra-safety conscious Desk Clerk (and Howie’s best friend), OCTO!

Almost Naked Animals 3D-ified: Octo
3D
Brad Ferguson
Almost Naked Animals 3D-ified: Bunny

Next up in my journey revisiting the old Almost Naked Animals gang in 3D is the extremely short-fused Banana Cabana Activities Director, Bunny!

Almost Naked Animals 3D-ified: Bunny
3D
Brad Ferguson
The Banana Cabana Reunion--Heeerrreee's ...

Getting the ol’ Almost Naked Animals crew back together, one-by-one!

The Banana Cabana Reunion--Heeerrreee's NARWHAL!!!

tutorial

Quick Light Bulb Tutorial

My original plan was to hop into characters AND Blender 2.8 next, but my friend, Jesse Lickman suggested I first work my way through this simple (But ever so helpful!) 2-part tutorial series by the wonderful Blender Guru.

This is the first tutorial I just followed as is & didn’t make my own creative additions to—so what you see, is what you get in this tutorial.

It introduces modeling the bulb & creating the materials, working with Bezier Curves, the Kelvin Scale, omitting certain object’s shadows from camera view, Render Layers AND an introduction to working with the Blender Compositor (among other things)! So helpful!

…So NOW onto characters & Blender 2.8!!! (…probably?)

BulbFinal.jpg

Junk In Brad's Trunk

I’m long overdue for another 3D project! Although I was itching to get back at it, I had to step away for a month due to work—and it’s amazing (and frightening) how much I’ve forgotten in that time! I’ve fumbled along on my own, starting this new image, but I think it’s back to some basic tutorials for me!

Lesson 1 kids: STICK WITH IT!!!

So this follows my progress from the very beginning of a new scene I’ve created & shows its evolution through the stages.

I’d like to once again thank Polligon.com (and Andrew Price/Blender Guru) for use of their great textures.

Additionally, I’d like to give a shout out & sincere thanks to my great, ol’ friend Paul Stodolny for his time & wonderful advice on immensely reducing my frustratingly obscene render times. I really appreciate the help, Buddy!

Junk In Brad’s Trunk

Junk In Brad’s Trunk

After conducting a brief poll, the results are in which leads us to this FINAL image!!! As I suspected, the sharper version but using the chains of the atmospheric version was the winner. No weighty render times on this sucker, thanks to the wonder of Photoshop. I hope you like it!

Image 6: (The final image?) This bad boy took about 24 hours for my machine to render—that’s WITH Paul’s advice (No wonder my updates are coming so slowly!).

I wanted to play with adding a sense of atmosphere by trying out some volumetric lighting. I added 2 lamps to help make things pop & changed the material on the emeralds & rubies so they wouldn’t lose their saturation…but I unfortunately think they ended up looking like Jello here & lost the definition of their shapes.

I also wanted to give the scene a low-lying mist, so I ran a smoke simulation emanating from the floor…but aside from losing detail, I can’t say I see a defined sense of misty-smoke unfortunately. I do like the lighting on the foreground chain here.

What are your thoughts between images 5 & 6?

Final Image with volumetric lighting and a low-lying smoke for fog (Which aside from losing detals, I’m not really seeing)

Final Image with volumetric lighting and a low-lying smoke for fog (Which aside from losing detals, I’m not really seeing)

Image 5: I’m really having a tough time deciding if this or Image 6 should be what I consider my final image. There are aspects I like from both. This one is crisper and reduced my render time by about 13 hours.

Final Image without volumetric lighting & fog.

Final Image without volumetric lighting & fog.

Image 4 1/2: Have you every heard that ancient saying “Never let your computer render for 38 hours without first making sure your pearls aren’t floating”? Apparently neither had I.

OOPS!!!

OOPS!!!

Image 4: Now playing with putting in and manipulating some textures. Still a work in progress with lots of adjustments to make & details to add!

Textures-1.jpg

Image 3: Slappin’ in some mad, simple materials before I lay down some textures, yo.

RuffMaterials.JPG

Image 2 & 2b: And look what I made all by myself!!!! No help from no one.

Image 1: The first render of a new scene I’m working on. Still much to do/learn! This render took my computer 3.5 hours to spit out. (that’s alotta coins!)

Trunk-1stRender.jpg

"The Sucker"

After completing Blender Guru’s tutorial series on creating an anvil (Click here to view the post) I had to push it a few steps further to make it my own. Lots of experimentation & trial & error to create everything in this image. I call it “The Sucker”. I hope you like it! :)

Creating an Anvil

Thanks (once again) to Blender Guru’s AMAZING tutorial series, I’ve worked my way through modeling this anvil. A lot of complex shapes and interesting ways of looking at things go into such a seemingly simple object. Thanks to this series I’ve now learned more about modeling, Booleans, optimizing topology, normal mapping, 3D sculpting and UV unwrapping!

There was also a lesson on baking normals in the last video of the series to optimize render times, but I found doing so lost some of the dented sculpting details—So I stuck with the original.

As with all of these tutorials, I won’t just leave this anvil here—but will add to them & make my own little entertaining image(s) with them as I learn more. So stay tuned for a gallery update!