I have put the finishing touches on my chrome Box-stick man,
originally I was going to start off with a box and “Box Model” a simple
character, by pulling (Manipulating) vertices and polygons to make the muscular
shape of the character in the way I wanted, then I briefly tried to use a more
memory taxing way of making a character in Sculptris, which I have had a lot of
experience with.
I then went back to making a simple character but for the
sake of time only made a simple man, I am still unsure if I should refer to it
as a box man or a stickman.
Throughout this project I learned how to navigate Blender on
a Mac 1-button mouse, as well as learning hotkeys on Mac and Windows alike,
this helped me a lot in my other Blender projects in terms of workflow. I also
learned the how to fully customize the UI, at one point my screen looked like this because I couldn’t figure out how
to collapse some aspects of the UI. An optimistic person might see this
screenshot and think “Wow! He must be organized and productive” due to my
having so many useful UI options open simultaneously, however this was not the
case and eventually I reached a point where I would attempt to close a feature
but instead open multiple, this has however been taken care of and as usual I
feel foolish for not knowing how to do something that is somewhat basic.
I also learned something completely new in a 3d software,
Rigging, I had always known that to make an animation in a 3d software, the
animator had to assign bones to certain parts of the mesh, but I had never
tried doing it myself for fear that it would get too complicated, however in
this assignment, because I made a simple bipedal stickperson; I was able to add
simple “Armature” to the model. Armature seems to me like simpler bones, with
less defined joints and ball and socket features which make other models more
detailed in their movement, however it is much easier to work with than bones
in Blender I am told.
It seems like my original plan for what I wanted to do
within blender has now become quite skewed from reality, I ended up trying to
unwrap the model of my stickman, so I could add eyes and a basic texture to it,
but I ended up failing horribly. This wasn’t all bad however because I was able
to take a shot at adding armature to the model, the feature for which I kept
seeing in the corner of my screen when I worked on it.
In the end I have made an amorphous man model, with a chrome
finish that has rudimentary movement, I could then use this model to make a
short animation or refine it further to give it more character. But more
realistically I will try my hand at box modeling some sort of rudimentary
quadruped with a real texture.
This project has let me learn the basic skills I need to
start really getting into a complex software.
