Is there no way to just upload your wips without commiting to a “post?” It’s been years since I was here. Anyway…I modeled my first independently derived objects and I’m feeling a little spunky about it. I downloaded a fairly barebones but workable model of a Freightliner Cascadia semi-truck a couple months back, and I’ve been trying to figure out something to do with it since.
Being an actual trucker, the model bothers me because of the ‘fantasy elements’ I’ll call them, and in order to make use of the model for my little social media account videos, I had to start pulling off pieces that really don’t make sense. So, I dissolved some verts and edges and faces, and discovered that the place where you would normally find the utility lights which light up the trailer when you are coupling at night were entirely missing. The holes where there but were covered up by the faux fuel tanks, so I thought I’d spend the last few days learning how to do my own modeling, and it wasn’t easy.
My very first edge bridge, combining two shapes into one thing. I can’t tell you how monumental this moment was, and afterwards…almost all the other shaping came fast and easy.
It tooks me at least two hours of totally failing, even though I was following along with five or seven tutorials…but each one hinted at something, but didn’t address my specific problem. But it turned out I hadn’t adjusted the rotation point correctly…that it was still in the initial object when it should have been the orbital for the circle I eventually wanted, or whatever. Anyway…I fingered it out.
You can see how my loose grasp on topology created an unwanted artifacting…but I got over it pretty quick because my use case isn’t to print a 3D object or make a bold new game. This is for my social media dopey videos that are somewhat work-related and, honestly…this was good enough. Actually it was so startling, I nearly wept.
My brain had to wrap itself around a lot of new information, but I feel like I achieved some tiny measure of joy today, so I thought I’d upload it.
Coming up with the lens geometry wasn’t perfect, but again…I’m no engineer. Plus, it wasn’t the shape that bothered me. It was the total lack of understanding how to get light to pass through an otherwise solid object. How to make a real plastic lens. This took another few hours, but eventually, after watching like ten videos…someone said something that made it all click together.
Honestly, the combination of settings related values and then the Nodes-based approach to certain things wound up producing this…a semi-opaque surface in which you can see the underlying geometry of the bulb housing and the screw housing, and the back of the metal bowl shape…but then if you stick an emitter in there, and play with the values…lo and behold, you get…
In any case, it is certainly amazing how things quickly drop into place when you take in a lot of information and you think it just spilled out of your ears…but you really are just waiting for a key problem to resolve itself in a particular way, and then everything just congeals into an understanding, and then you can just start making stuff. It’s super fun, and I can’t wait to make these dumb videos about truckers warring with bollards. It’s kinda my thing.
I added an area light just to show the asphalt texture, but it only looks this way right now because I don’t have the environment built up yet. That all happens later. For now, just look at how beautiful my light are, lol.
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