“Talisman.” I didn’t have as much time today, so this is a bit more thrown-together than earlier pieces. It’s a beveled and tapered path with a UV map (painted in Photoshop) and an unhealthy amount of gloss. Mild postprocessing in Photoshop.
“Heart of a Dying Ship.” Ever since Cycles came out I’ve hardly used the Blender internal renderer, but since Cycles doesn’t yet have volumetrics, here we are. For the background I subdivided a cube several times and gave it a red halo material (making all those red dots). Then I created a honeycomb matrix, extruded it, and gave it a volumetric material with some colored lights scattered around inside. The torus knot also has a volumetric material, and the white energy core in the center is just a sphere with a white emitting light. Finally, in post I dialed up the chromatic aberration and lens distortion, which ended up creating the rainbow effect around the edges.
“Exodus.” Going for the low-poly look. I’m also going to try to make sure the rest of these daily renders have some kind of story to them.
“Dancing Table at the Top of the World.” Just some playing around with the cloth sim. It was somewhat frustrating since Blender kept crashing, and the checkerboard texture had some weird bug that kept messing up the texture unless I unplugged the node and then plugged it back in again. So I didn’t polish it as much as I would have liked — I was lucky to get this render without it crashing. (That said, this is the only time I’ve had Blender act so unstable on me. In general it works great.)
“Candyworm.” A beveled curve hanging out on some checkerboard planes.
“The Creeper.” Playing around with metaballs and orthographic perspective.
“Guardian.” I’m admittedly not very good at sculpting yet. But hopefully over the course of the month I’ll get better.
A sphere on a plane, with an environment map for lighting (using a photo I took a few years ago). On the plane, I’m using some distorted noise to mix together two glossy materials (one rougher and darker than the other).
I’m realizing I really, really like environment lighting. So, uh, there’ll probably be a lot more of that.
The tube-ish things are a torus knot with a displace modifier, and I made the background leaves using the Sapling addon. The ground is just a fractally subdivided plane with a subsurf modifier.
This one is a bit more heavily postprocessed than my first two, mostly because I wasn’t happy at all with the initial render. Lots of Photoshop texturing.
I wrote a Python script to generate the spheres (random sizes, random locations). The main sphere material is a subsurface scattering node mixed with a white diffuse material with Fresnel as the factor, so the white shows at the edges of the spheres. I also did some postprocessing (color correction, slight texturing) in Photoshop.