A small practice piece to get back to art. Ends up looking kinda like a hardware store ad if I'm honest.
Modeling
I don't really have anything to say about these besides that it was just some good practice for playing with some subd modeling and shapes. I do like the way this part looks, especially with the rust.
Material
Using the procedural noise textures to make rust is pretty much the perfect use case for this, so that made making this material quite a bit easier. This rust material has a pretty good range of customizations exposed, so you can get a lot of variety from just this one asset.
Since starting writing this post (been a week and some days) I've spent more time creating cool procedural nodegroups to drag and drop into my projects whenever needed. I'll elaborate more on some of the stuff I've been exploring and developing in a later post. Creating your own tools and having easy access to them is a really cool feeling. It's exciting to me, this is why I think Blender is amazing for the fact that it is free software (as in freedom but also money).
Links
Here's some of the recent and noteworthy tutorials and discoveries I've made from this round of Blender experimentation. These are YouTube links, so just be aware of that.
Sam Bowman's Procedural Nodes series, primarily these links, got me inspired mostly.
- Part 6, how to get interesting layers and varieties of noise
- Part 24, covering symmetrical voronoi patterns
- Part 25, shape tiling setup
SDF Modeler is a cool program, although quite primitive in terms of control and options at the moment. I'd still recommend anyone check it out, even people with no 3D art experience. The nature of this modeling method allows anyone to pick it up and start throwing shapes together with no worry of topology or anything else. It's great for prototyping designs or making a base shape to be sculpted on as well. It's also completely free, so why not spend some time messing around with it? I'll elaborate on SDF Modeler in a future post involving the HEV suit charger from Half Life 1.
