I feel pretty embarrassed, in a way, about posting anything here at all. I look at all the other WIPs and finished works and I am like a two year old child that has just picked up a crayon.
But this is my latest, and I hope I am getting a little bit better with every new experiment.
I will say upfront that I have yet to do anything decent with regards to lighting, materials and atmospherics. I have dabbled with each but not to such an extent that I am happy with. My focus at the moment is on modelling and animation, which includes getting my head around armature systems.
This particular experiment was born out of wanting to understand what an “Icosphere” is. I’m not familiar with that term, or at least I wasn’t. I am now wiser on that topic.
One of the wikipedia pages that came up in that search has an unwrapped net of the twenty sided icosahedron which then proceeds to wrap into the polyhedron shape. So I thought I would try to recreate that in Blender. I used BricsCAD first (similar to AutoCAD but affordable… just) in order to suss out my preferred method of unwrapping. I then moved in to Blender to model and animate.
This time I used an armature containing 21 bones.
I also created just the one mesh and then used linked copies of it (Ctrl + D) so that I could crack on with the animation part and then work on the mesh a bit more later.
Another new thing for me was using material “slots” in edit mode and I have used three separate materials in that single mesh. And when I say “materials,” I’m only talking about a simple Principled BSDF texture, nothing more.
I didn’t go for a true unwrap in the end. I played around with splitting the icosahedron in half and then bringing it back together having turned it inside out. It does that twice for the two minute long animation.
So, yeah, simple, but a challenge none the less for me. I estimate that I spent around thirty hours on this starting from the starting concept to finished article.
Oh, I should mention that I encountered a few problems along the way while trying to parent the meshes to the bones but I will do a separate and more detailed post on that in the support forum.
Now for the video:-
