Greetings,
I am a 3D artist, and am employed in mould-making. The software I have been using for a couple of decades now appears to have ceased development, and so I am adding a backup to my toolbox.
Though I am rapidly getting up to speed with Blender’s tools and philosophy, and am discovering plenty that is superior to what I’ve been using up till now. I tested Blender a few years ago, but got nowhere with it, though my impression now is that version 3 is a much more professional and coherent tool. I’m checking off all the tools I need to do my job, and may very well end up moving over to Blender as my prime software.
Anyway, here is a non-work-related image ( I won’t be able to post much of those due to NDAs). It’ll be developed further for my son, who is into Pokemon in a big way.
https://imgur.com/oz6el0L
(*edit I’ve cropped the image so it appears better here, but just to do this test with the most inconvenient arrangement possible, it was filmed on a phone using dreaded ‘vertical video’)
So far, the geometry is simply a textured sphere. I wanted to get familiar with the shaders, and how to build a gradient. The background was was filmed at a low-resolution on my son’s phone, which was also used to capture the images of my mirror ball which I assembled into a HDRI for lighting and reflections.
The footage was tracked in Syntheyes, where I also created a textured card of the chessboard to reflect on the bottom of the ball. And back in Blender, I got to grips with the compositor, doing a little colour/gamma correction and adding a bit of blur to help it blend in.
I’ll update it when I have a proper model built and textured.
Regards,
Derek