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Postmortem: Daily Blender

Done! Today was my last Daily Blender render (since I’m not doing Sundays). Whew. Here they all are:

Other than feeling guilty about spamming people on Twitter and Facebook about it each day, it’s been fun. I’ve pushed myself and done far more Blender than I had in the whole year before this month (just six pieces), and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve started using the rigid body sim, the cloth sim, the hair sim, the cell fracture addon, and environment maps. I’ve done a little more sculpting (can’t say that I’m any good at it yet, though). And, from looking at this overview image, I’ve learned once again that my artistic style is all over the map.

Things I still need to work on:

  • Modeling. I found myself avoiding it as much as possible this month. I can do basic stuff, but not much beyond that. (What would probably be best, I think, is a “Daily Modeling” challenge. But not just yet, and I’ll probably keep it private this time.)
  • Lighting. Environment maps helped a lot, but I still feel like it’s purely accidental when I end up with good lighting in my pieces.
  • UV mapping. I’m still scared of it.
  • I only used Freestyle on one piece. I wish I’d used it more.
  • OSL. I’ve done a little with it but not much.
  • External renderers (LuxRender, Yafaray, Mitsuba, Appleseed).

This daily challenge thing has once again proven productive. (The other time I did it was NaShoStoMo back in April 2011, which netted me twenty stories.) But now it’s time to rest.


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Daily Blender 25

“The Lost Little Golem Sleeping in the Supermarket.” An autobiographical piece. (Uh, good thing this is the last one, huh.)


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Daily Blender 24

“Escape.”


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Daily Blender 23

“Ship in a Bottle.” Apparently I really like using spheres. And crazy materials.


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Daily Blender 22

“Spelunking.” Some low-poly sculpting and a fair amount of postprocessing.


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Daily Blender 21

“Flight of the Awkward Golem Birds.” Some intentionally bad sculpting. I like how the material came out looking kind of like copper foil.


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Daily Blender 20

“The Line Betwixt Light and Dark.” Playing around with the cast modifier.


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Daily Blender 19

“The Geometric Stoneman of Mynydd Mawr.” And now for something rather different. I modeled the character in TopMod, then rendered it using Blender’s Freestyle integration. Did the texturing in Photoshop.


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Daily Blender 18

“Abandoned.” The rigid body sim is my new favorite thing. The wood texture I used here, however, is not. But I didn’t have time to make a better one.


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Daily Blender 17

“Artifact from an Older World.” Playing around with the cell fracture addon and rigid body physics.


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