Not much to show off here today, unfortunately. I did certainly get my 30 minutes in, probably closer to an hour / hour and a half, but I haven’t finished what I set out to accomplish.
Today was mostly focused on the video course for physics simulation in blender, learning the ins and outs of the built in physics systems and what they can do for particle effects, soft and rigid body collisions, dynamic painting, and the smoke and fire system. All very cool stuff, and something that I’m going to have to play around with with more scrutiny at a later date. Some of it will potentially be useful for the more immediate goal of character and environment modeling, but most of it falls in the “good to know” category for me at the moment, and I’m really only covering the videos because they are still a part of the introductory course, and you never know what will help to really sell a render.
That said, some of it could potentially be very helpful even if I’m trying to stick more strictly to modeling and sculpting. Cloth especially could come in handy, since you can use the cloth physics to get more realistic deformations for fabric models. The fire and smoke physics could come in handy, too. And the particle system has a wide array of applications, including dynamic hair, so that’s a plus. Even for creating static renders, you can run the simulation for a bit, find a point where things are doing what you want, and then incorporate that into your static scene. Very good stuff.
Aside from just watching videos, part of the challenge is actually doing something in Blender every day, preferably involving modeling. So I at least started one of the exercises. This one is a test of the rigid body system, by setting up a series of dominoes and knocking them over. I haven’t finished yet, I was able to model the domino (they provide one, but I am trying to learn to model after all), set up the physics, and get a small group of them to properly collide and fall. Tomorrow I’ll go through and try to set up an interesting pattern with them, and render the collapse. I think I want to try to practice some more advanced techniques for that, but it will require some research. I know there’s a way to have the particle system use objects from your scene as particles, and to spread them out over another mesh, and then make them real. In theory I should be able to use that method to lay out an interesting pattern of dominoes that I can then knock down. Combine that with an animated fly-by camera and some decent lighting, and I should have a pretty sweet little video, I’m just not there quite yet, and sleep is still something that is required.
So for now I’ll just share a quick snapshot of my little domino scene:
