I have bitten more then I could chew during this one. Results are not tragic, but it took a long time… Need to select the next days with smaller scope…
It was good anatomy lesson as well. I took some liberties in representing actual skeleton to keep it (semi) low poly, like f.e., I didn’t model all the ribs. I wasn’t able to model the skull… so I sculpted it at first and then retopologized to low poly version.
Inspired by the skeleton I want to make a graveyard dark fantasy scene. It’s too big of a project to do in one go, so I will keep on adding stuff through next days until I have all the pieces to assemble something nice looking.
Btw. I got obsessed with topology and edge flow after working on the skeleton. It takes much more time now as I’m learning proper ways to do it. Hopefully it will be faster with practice. The upside of this is that I can take those models, subdivide them and add details and will have also realistic version of them.
I might have ‘cheated’. The gravestone is photogrammetry. I had already done the photos and let the computer turn them into a textured mesh. Last night in that hour, I baked it colour and normal, to a simple model, otherwise they are hundreds of thousands of verts. There was a little tidying up, uv stretching as it had some edge shape missing. Then I have a metre square patch of grass modeled I just appended, link copied like carpet squares for a fast grass fill. The gravestone will be one part in my Lychgate, mid distance filler, later. See my old thread on that.
Just actually shows the advantage of having, as you are, a personal ‘asset library’. Chance lined up what I already had with your theme.
It takes a long time to get to the full scene. Lots of pieces created so far and probably will take around 2-3 more days to finish it… All pieces so far:
Possibly first 2 points tomorrow. Statue will most probably take a day on it’s own. And similar time I expect to spent on a crypt. Building a final scene out of it will take some time as well.
Working towards “bigger goal” in daily cadence is fun, but it is also quite challenging to keep on track without producing nice renders…
Don’t think you need to worry too much about the rendering if you’re going for the Imphenzia “look”.
Pretty sure you know this already, but just in case you are doing screen-grabs of your Viewport, it helps to know that you can use the Workbench render engine (Which IS the Viewport shading renderer):
You’ll have to enable all the cavity and outline settings in that tab again to get a similar look to the viewport but works great for things like making test animations for camera-sweeps or scenes where the viewport may struggle to keep up.
I actually didn’t know that about workbench! I’m truly a Blender noob - I have much more too learn and I am grateful for any tips (I have maybe 3 months of total experience spread across a year). Thanks for the info! Might come in handy, esp. as you said for animations.
I know that I don’t need to worry about rendering. That was the initial idea of this challenge - to focus only on improving low poly modeling. But I like to make nice pictures And Cycles + proper lighting and camera setup look way better than viewport/workbench stuff to my eyes. And somehow it’s hard to resist the urge and keep focusing on modeling only
Not perfect, as I had less time today (loads of overtime recently at work ). They were fun to make… And in some regards easier than I’ve thought they would be, in some cases harder (e.g., I’m not satisfied with hands).
And yeah, I definitely make more stuff than I need for the final scene. I just planned to have one statue there
I’ve messed up something yesterday and didn’t notice that. The last chapel had millions of verts. I might heave copied something or applied bevel with too much cuts while creating bricks… and then array’ed them multiple times in the wall…
It’s still not done yet. Doors, damage, stairs, details will take a bit of time to make. for productive day tomorrow.