Correct 3D Modeling Philosophy

Before you dive into the world of 3D modeling, there is a website that you need to visit before all else. You can find it here.

This website belongs to Bay Raitt who is co-attributed to the creation of Golum in New Line Cinema's The Lords of the Ring trilogy.

After reading the entire article, here are the things you need to remember:

1. Make a mess - As you visit forums you will get advices like: your 3D model must follow proper topology, you must model in quads or triangles or ngons, you must use poles or not use poles.

This is wrong. Atleast in the initial stage. Don't follow these advises or else you will get yourself stumped.

When you are just starting your model, only silhouettes and contours matter.

It's not important if you are not producing perfect quads or tris. You're primary goal is to shape your mesh to the object or character you have in mind.

But while you are making a mess, do aim to use as few edges or vertices as possible. Because as you will eventually find ,it is hard to manage lots of edges and points and move them around in 3D space.

2. Cleanup - You should clean up. But remember this only comes after you are finish shaping your mesh.

During the clean up stage you can concentrate on turning your model to all quads or triangles.

On this stage you can also apply proper topology.

These two principles is no different from 2D drawing. In 2D drawing, professional artists first scribble sometimes producing an incomprehensible drawing.

Then they slowly refine their drawing choosing only the strong lines. Then they delete all the unimportant lines.

If you follow these steps you will save yourself from getting frustrated when you are modeling.

Best Blender Movies

Do you ever dream about making your own 3D film?

But in order for you to do that, you must first have a 3D software.

If you are going to buy an all-around commercial 3D software like Maya or 3ds Max, expect to shed $16000 to $4000 USD. Or you could use Blender which is opensource and completely free and still produce professional quality 3D animation.

Here are some of the best 3D films made with Blender:

1. Big Buck Bunny - by Blender Foundation
2. Lighthouse - by Promotion Studios
3. Elephants Dream- by Blender Foundation
4. Alchemy - by Jason Pierce
5. Orion Tear - by Rogerio Perdiz
6. Da New Guys - by IceBoxGames
7. Freddy's World
8. Memory
9. Mite! by IceBox
10. The Cup by Psl-Man
So If you ever dream about becoming the next Pixar or Dreamworks, what are you waiting for?

Get crackin!

Blender Bone Rigging Tutorial

Here is a simple Blender 3D rigging tutorial. If you find the display too small, just hover your mouse over the video and find the full screen option.

Enjoy.


Big Buck Bunny - Rigging Tut from Ben Dansie on Vimeo

Where to Learn Blender 3D

For a 3D software that pack a lot of features, the Blender installer is just around 9 MB. However the documentation is not included with this installer.

But no need to worry. I will give you a list where you can be introduced to this wonderful software.

Where to Learn Blender:

1. http://www.blender.org/education-help/ You will find the official documentation and several tutorials here.

2. You can also watch some of my favorite channels on Youtube.

a. http://www.youtube.com/bitsofblender
b. http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=agent47crows&view=videos

3. You can also buy several books available at http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/. Whatever you buy here will help support further development of Blender. Or you can also buy from Amazon or your local bookstore.

Well that's it for now. I will continue to update this list as I find new information.

Low Polygon Game Character

I found this very low polygon character demo. I post it here for my reference because I've always been interested at how far textures can make a very simple model look interesting.

Everything About CG

I figured that I better keep all my computer graphics related post here.