Today’s practice was really just going to be the mushroom, I swear.
A week or so ago, I was watching someone on youtube during a sculpting timelapse of a strange mushroom character that they were working on. They weren’t really explaining anything, it wasn’t really a tutorial, just showing their process as they made this creature, but during the course of it they got to the frills in the underside of the mushroom cap, and did some kind of magic trickery to separate out a large selection of edges to let them make the frills. I had no idea how they had pulled that off until I watched a video walkthrough on how to model a microphone.
At first thought you may assume that a microphone would be super easy, it’s just a basic sphere on a stick, right? But then you remember that a lot of mics, especially the classic stage mics, have a curved wire mesh around that ball, and that’s something that’s complicated to reproduce accurately, unless you have a good technique. And wouldn’t you know it, the technique that they used involved taking a selection of points, and unselecting every other one, using the checkerboard deselect option, an option that I had not realized was there, and which is almost certainly what the other guy used to create his mushroom cap frills.
So fast forward to today, and I’m doing a bit of light sketching for my sketchbook (see, I told you that would still be happening) and I draw a rock that looks vaguely mushroom shaped. So then I draw a mushroom. And another. It just seemed like a mushroom kind of day. And then I remembered that I know how to do the frills now, and at that point modeling a mushroom was really the only viable option for tonight’s practice.
But the mushroom itself is pretty simple, maybe overly simple, so I decided that I also wanted to put some nice textures on it, and do some simple rigging so I could have a few of them in different positions and poses. And then I needed some ground to put it on, so I had to model some dirt, and put together a particle system that could properly duplicate and distribute some grass that I made.
I think the end result looks pretty nice, maybe the most professional render I’ve produced yet. Certainly one of the slowest, at least for a single frame. Still, I kind of wish I had had more time to put into it, even if it is a really simple scene. It would have been nice to have some rocks around, maybe a rotten log. Better definition on the ground, too, since that didn’t really come across well in the final render. It’s heartening, though, knowing that I’m getting to a point where I at least pretty much know what to do, or how to pull off what I need. And the more I do this the faster I’ll be able to produce nice results, so maybe it won’t be too long before I can start to add in those extra details without it taking forever.