Thanks!
Now I see even clearer why I struggled:
The vertical loops are just making a mess out of things…
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I had begun to see those in the render. If you wanted them for extra bend they could be useful. But I set out assuming the quarters were flat. Made half and mirrored.
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For realistic/high poly mesh they would be useful. For low poly not so much… Sometimes I tend to loose the “low poly” focus out of my mind…
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My instinct is not low poly lol. A shield I might be more likely to make would be more like the one restored in this video. Few tens of thousand verts at least. 
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Day 29: More Shields
Time: 2h
Practice makes better - similar amount of time as yesterday, but made 4 shields.
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Day 30: Chests.
Time: 1h
Again, nothing fancy. Short time low poly modeling, though I need to learn a bit of texture painting to make it better and even lower poly (modeling individual planks might be a waste of time and triangles for low poly…)
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Day 31: Space Shuttle.
Time: 2h
I just noticed that’s month is over! Phew.
And I noticed that I set the dates wrong in the first post 
I’ll make a post mortem here soon, when I gather my thoughts about it. Maybe I’ll even make a clip highlighting my progress through the month. But I have to figure a way to showcase whole month in just a few minutes…
Which scene (render / day’s work) one did you like the most?
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I just looked over your whole challenge month and it’s super awesome and inspiring!!! <3
I don’t know what my favorite day / render is… To be honest I just really love how you slowly built up more and more props, that you then used to build bigger scenes (like the weaponsmith’s shed or the graveyard). One can really imagine your low-poly universe (like in a game or so) -> and I’d love to stroll through it and discover all the details in it!
I enjoy your low-poly style and quality of models, but would definitely learn more about hand-painted textures in a further step -> less polys and more stylization possible. (Maybe a bit more realistic cracks?) Oh, and your lighting is nice too, though I know this challenge wasn’t about it 
Btw. your last render of the challenge - the space rocket - is fantastic too!
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Great thread. Really enjoyed scrolling this
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Thank you for taking a time to scroll through it and for your kind words!
It’s tempting to try to put them in a game engine and make a small game out of it 
The good news about this “style” is that texture I used for coloring is 4kb and it’s shared across all objects. So it can be easily imported in game engine. For hand painted stuff I would probably be able to fit only a few objects on a texture (and would probably used PBR workflow, so multiple textures). It’s always a question of trade off: more tris vs more textures.
But overall this is a great suggestion and I will definitely give it a try!
Thank you again for your kind words!
Thank you!
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Ah, that totally makes sense! Didn’t think of that 
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The kitchen and graveyard are my favorites. More specifically for the graveyard, I’d have to say either the skeleton or candle is my favorite asset for it.
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I LOVED YOUR CHALLENGE!!! I will take that challenge for myself as well later on! Thank you so much @bOBaN for giving us that SUPER idea!!! That is Very Inspiring! 
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Thanks! Such heartwarming words mean a lot!
Soon I’ll make a ‘post-mortem’ (what was good/what could be done better/etc.) of the process of doing the challenge and will post it here. Hopefully, it will be helpful for you when you will start your own challenge.
Long time coming, but here is a ‘post mortem’ of this month. Hopefully someone will find it useful if they try to take similar challenge in the future.
General observations:
- Low poly is fun! I didn’t appreciate it as much before I started it. And about a year ago I didn’t even like low poly style…
- What Andrew Price said about “inspiration for new projects” is true for me - the more I worked, the more ideas for new stuff I generated.
- Hard to balance with other goals (like making the Orc), esp. with limited time on Blender.
- Low poly is really good for practicing modeling skills. Most of the time I didn’t got distracted by some small details or things that add realism… or even rendering.
- Low poly is not as forgiving as high poly. All the flaws are easy to see, you cannot “hide” problems with some nice textures. Which is really great for learning.
- I really like the ‘texturing’ workflow with a small gradient texture. It is fast and if you keep to well made gradient it’s consistent. It’s also a bit limiting in what you can do.
- I’m really surprised on how much models one can do in one month with limited time.
- It was good idea to have a few days of ‘warm up’.
- Monthly challenge is hard. First week was easy to keep up, but with each following week it was harder and harder.
- Making the challenge public is important in my opinion. I would probably skip a few days when was extra tired otherwise.
- I don’t have any real evidence for this, but I feel that taking on the challenge really did improve my modelling skills.
- I had made a ‘template’ file - with basic setup ready (materials, windows layout, etc.) - this speed up daily work a lot.
- I learnt a lot about good topology with low poly modelling. I frequently added subdivision modifier just to check if some issues were showing up.
Things to improve:
- It was hard to keep constraints that I set up for myself (like the amount of time spent per day). Next time this is something I’ll definitely need to improve.
- Balancing with other goals: it’s best to just focus on one thing. It’s a big commitment, but overall my experienced suffered a bit due to my mind constantly saying things like: “but what about character course?”
- Better define scope of practice. Sometimes I made small models, sometimes I made a whole scene, sometimes I worked for multiple days to build a scene. Next time I think that maybe making a theme would be better (e.g., build towards one big scene at the end). It might be beneficial to plan out the work ahead of time. E.g., like in Sculpt January - have a theme defined for each day before starting.
- I started to make a low poly library for future reuse (separate blend file). It’s not up to date and will take a bit to finish it. Improvement idea: put things in the library at the end of each day instead of doing it in bulk. Hopefully with 2.92 asset library feature it will be easier to manage models.
In summary, I really liked the idea of this challenge. Now I need a break from such an intense work, but I want to repeat it in the future, but maybe with different skillet to learn. Some ideas that come to mind are: sculpting, texture painting, high poly modeling, thematic month (e.g., low poly car modeling - one car a day), etc.
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I made a video summary of the month!
(it was a pain to make this video… took a month )
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Really good. Added skeleton movements etc. The feature film version is going to take a while!
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I’m not really satisfied with the animation, but I had to stop at some point ;-). It was really tedious to work with 30+ files, juggling different render engines (I even used workbench for the first time for some scenes!), making sure that file paths are correct and render settings are consistent, etc.
The part that I like and I took extra effort to do was the graveyard scene. Could probably make a short movie out of it if time wasn’t an issue…
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Ah, a new link as I’ve deleted the old YT channel
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