New Skill Acquired: Blender!

I’m going to keep this one short and sweet! After doing some awesome tutorials courtesy of The Blender Guru , I’ve finally given 3D modeling a real shot! The tutorials were an awesome overview of the tool, and provided a great first step in.

The proof is in the pudding! … well, icing.

Andrew Price, who runs the YT channel, approached it from the “80/20” perspective: 80% of the time, you’ll only need 20% of the tools in a given software. So, true to form, in a few short hours of listening to his instructions I have made my first render - this little doughnut!

Afterwards, I thought a great next step (and litmus test of whether I actually learned anything) would be to try and create something “from scratch” (at least, in the 3D domain without tutorials.)

A few hours later, I’m pretty proud of the results for the third-ish object I’ve ever made in this software.

Overwatch’s “Pachimari” character, this version affectionately named “Piggymari”

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One last bit - in the process of looking up which “Pachimari” to do. (I knew that simple smooth textures were going to be way easier than say, the mummy one), I stumbled upon a new vocabulary word / concept: Yuru-Chara.

Long story short, that’s the Japanese term for the cute little brand mascots which are made to be approachable and relaxing. I rather like the idea, we could all use a little more cute!

Designing a Virtual Environment in Spoke and Blender-Render-Fender-Benders

For my “Social VR” course at NYU, this week we were required to design a simple environment using Mozilla’s web-based 3D scene builder. Overall, it think it’s a pretty handy tool for how much accessibility it affords, and the integration with various asset sources makes it fairly simple to pick up!

When thinking of an environment to get started on, as a big fan of Tabletop RPG’s the now-trite beginning of many a years of play has usually begun with some variation on “So all of your characters meet in this Tavern…”, and I thought, why not start this ‘Adventure’ in one! To avoid burying the lede, here’s a snippet of what I was able to dream up:

You can practically hear the farmer who’s having a Giant Rat problem already…

The fun part of this, however, isn’t in the finished product but rather in what would be my first foray into learning Blender, and grabbing assets from SketchFab that weren’t quite right. Firstly, I need to properly credit the artist François Espagnet for his wonderfully stylish assets.

However, when I first went to import those nice windowed-wall sections, there seemed to be a glaring error in the context of my cozy nighttime scene:

Something doesn’t exactly scream “nighttime” here

So I figured “This is a great time to learn about how to change materials in a 3d modelling software. Or maybe it’s textures. I don’t quite know the name yet.” and opened up the asset to try and figure out what I was doing.

After some great “How to make glass materials in Blender” tutorials (so it was materials), my object looked great in the Render Preview screen, wait, viewport, I exported it and dragged it into Spoke, only to find my beautifully transparent windows now part of a colorless gray slab. And after a few hours, I was able to figure it out, with beautiful transparency. Mission Accomplished.

A little Dark, but voila! It works!

As for the Technical How, let’s talk details for those interested.

So in order make exporting / rendering / uploading one smooth process, one of the increasingly-adapted formats is that of the GL Transmission Format (glTF) and it’s binary partner, (GLB). Developed by The Khronos Group, the encode all of the relevant object info in a neat little .JSON package, capable of storing textures, geometry, animation and more, which is incredible.

That being said, the Blender-Render(er) isn’t entirely perfect and hasn’t caught up entirely to the featureset that Blender itself provides. While most of the aforementioned tutorials recommended using a Principled BSDF shader node and tweaking the Transmission all the way up and tweaking other stuff to taste, the current Blender Exporter breaks with certain parameters, one being 'Specularity’. After considerable time, ~40 export attempts, and some forum digging, I found the way to get some sloppy transparency working. Instructions as follows:

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1) Set Render Engine to "Eevee"

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2) Set Blend Mode to "Alpha Blend"

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3) Use Alpha Slider to Adjust Transparency

It’s not quite as beautiful as a great '‘glass’ material, but it gets the job done and let’s light through! There you have it. I’m looking forward to learning how to do it all properly, but for now I’m glad I got it done