Progress Report 10/14/2022 (Patreon)

Are you excited for spooky season? I'm excited for spooky season! :D  Here's what I got done this week:

• Published 3D Adventures Part 14 
• Reworked the face normals to work better with a variety of light angles
• Fixed an odd lighting issue by removing specularity from the model
• Used shader nodes to make the nose and mouth outlines fade away when the camera gets close

I decided to make this a lighter week since the last two weeks have been me going ham in Blender with little to no break time. That's not to say I didn't get much done, however!

The main thing of note is, as seen above, I managed to get the nose and mouth outlines to fade away as the camera gets closer. I don't even remotely understand shaders enough to explain how it works; I just found an answer about it online and copied their homework. :P

The reason I want these outlines to fade within a certain range is because the outlines add a lot to the face from a distance, but become distracting up close. It looks a little silly from the front, but from a 45-degree angle it looks great! (I wish I'd made the gif from that angle, instead...) I may handle a full-body outline the same way in a future model, but for now I'm pretty happy with how it is right now. ^_^

Oh! While I was testing the lighting, I technically made my first animation! I made the camera spin around the model and rendered it to see if some flickering shadows were going to be an issue. They weren't, thank goodness! The animation took me a bit to finish despite how simple it was. I didn't know any of the controls for keyframes or anything, plus getting the camera to spin perfectly around the model was a task of its own. But hey, now I know!

In other news, normals are rather tedious little devils to modify. It took two or three days to get them to react well in certain lighting setups (for example: a candle shining on the face from below). After a while I figured "good enough" is good enough; I probably won't be playing with lighting too often, and if I ever do, I know how to prepare the model for it.

That's really the main thing I'm getting out of all of these small changes I'm making -- if I can do it once, then I know I can do it as many times as I need to in the future. That's also part of the reason my 3D Adventures journal series is so important to me. It's something I can look back on if I ever need a refresher on how I did this or that. Heck, I already have a couple of times!

Anyhoo, that's enough monologuing for today. The clock just struck Taco Bell and I don't want to miss my appointment. I'll see you guys again next week!