Hi everyone, after many years of intending to learn Blender, I finally got started recently. I hope I settle in well here!
Assuming I’m in it for the long term, I will be eternally grateful to David Ward, Johnathan Williamson and Andrew Price, whose tutorial videos were extremely inspiring and gave me the confidence and basis I needed to finally get going with Blender, even if 90% of them are far too advanced for me at this point.
So here is the first mini-project I set for myself - to make a simple wallpaper featuring the Google Android mascot.
I could say EXACTLY the same thing! I’m in the very same situation! You can see some of my renders here, there’s an option in every profile that allows you to see the created threads.
It’s not bad for a first render at all! My first one was MUCH MORE simple and terribly amateur than that, so, you will improve faster! I wish you great luck!
Thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated! I might redo the lighting at some point, but for its purpose as a wallpaper I actually intended it to be somewhat dark. The noisy shadows however were not intended - how do you avoid that?
Okay, newbie question time - what’s the preferred method of doing this? Would I just take a screen grab of the viewport with the wireframe showing, or is there a better way?
There are a few ways of doing this, easiest being change the material to wire (you probably want to re-position the camera too) and re-render with an orthographic camera. Another way (if you want your wireframe to be over your model) is to duplicate the object and then change the material. Like you said, you can always just press z and then take a screenshot though ;). Honestly, the wireframe over the original looks kinda cool while still showing the same info…
For lighting, you might want to check out Ben Simonds tutorial on it. Very in-depth, though his tutorials are less ‘do this here’ and more ‘this is the idea behind it’ (kinda like Jonathan Williamson). You can find it here: http://bensimonds.com/2010/06/03/lighting-tips-from-the-masters/.
I believe this is from a low sampling setting on the light source or in the world settings (not entirely sure though.) Try turning it up a bit. Note this will increase render time.
Ah, finally got it working right - thanks for the help Mephala!
I’m more or less happy with the topology, though that’s probably because I don’t know better. The eyes were the only fiddly part and I’m sure there is a much neater way of forming them than what I did. Apart from that everything was rather straightforward, although the tips of the antennae and the arm hinges have far more loops than were really necessary.
