Theonian
Will post graphics from time to time.
Today I want to show you a really stupid and cumbersome way I found to generate some halo/lens flare-effects!
I found this piece of free software, HaloSim3, which is a raytracing engine for making mathematically accurate halos, according to an academic paper from 1994. The software itself isn’t exactly new either, so you can run it on Windows 95 if you want to(!)
That in itself is pretty cool, as halos and other light refraction effects are notoriously hard to render nicely, and it takes massive amount of time to render such things. With this software you can, in theory, render a correct halo very swiftly, and then composit it with the rest of your scene later.
Click “keep reading” to see how to do it!
Completely forgot how to make particle systems in UE4, so I tried making some basic stuff again to refresh my memory
Sketchfab embeds don’t seem to work on tumblr anymore, but here’s a samurai helmet I made:
At almost 7k triangles, it’s not the most lowpoly game asset ever, but here’s a few things I did to optimize the topology while maintaining as much detail as possible:
Since it won’t bend or deform in any way, I could use a lot of triangles. By using triangles around the brim of the helmet, I managed to round out the shape of the silhouette, without actually rounding out the shape of the entire thing.
Similarily, I used a lot of geometry to make sure the edges looked layered and “3D”. That way, it looks like the plates are divided into separate parts, even though they aren’t really.
However, I got some shading errors in Sketchfab around this area, because I hadn’t made the normals on the edges sharp. Sudden extreme angles, especially with many converging triangles, tend to cause shading errors unless you fix the normals before baking.
Hope some of this was useful to some of you - I know I would’ve liked to know these things when I started out with 3D.
Made an attempt at making some generic motion graphics in Eevee (Blender 2.8)
Seems you can make some interesting animations with the new Grease Pencil modifiers too. Might be able to make something that actually looks good if I just work on it a bit more.
Tested out rendering magic space cloud stuff in Eevee (Blender 2.8) - It’s so fast and simple! Rendered in under 3 min :D
Followed this nice tutorial:
Tumblr still refuses to let me embed Sketchfab links, but here’s a piece of jewelry I was commissioned to make:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/winged-pendant-jewelry-87847215089b49c58457dc33caf16389
Reminds me a bit of Sailor Moon, with the big round gem
Lowpoly smaurai monster thing
The sketchfab link wouldn’t work as an embed, but here it is:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/retro-samurai-monster-7823669e72b840e292a95658fe8088f7
To avoid getting to spammy, I’ll just link all the new sets I made in this one post. There are 16 images in each set, so if any of the previews look interesting to you, just click the link to see the rest on Sketchfab!
https://sketchfab.com/models/76478bfb3090479da911d530e6604a82
https://sketchfab.com/models/8208dedf84a040ddb10f755a9340379a
https://sketchfab.com/models/e2b3264f17d7471a80dffdcedb223890
https://sketchfab.com/models/05d304807eaf42c5a65ca1323eadcf08
https://sketchfab.com/models/877c084d8327484ebded2a6e0b7e77db
