Self Study 1

Blender Barrel Tutorial

It has been over 5 years since I've last used Blender so SirPinkBeard's barrel tutorial (linked at the bottom of the post) was a good reintroduction. 

Following the tutorial, modelling the barrel was easy to do but once I got to UV unwrapping and texturing, I realised I needed to learn and practice Blender a lot more.  I had already thought of how complex and tedious UV unwrapping could get if the model got complex and was proven right later on with my windmill model. In the end able to create something I was happy with and looked like it would fit well in a stylized environment.

Tourist Attraction Model

The tourist attraction I decided to remake was the Penny Royal Windmill in Launceston, located just next to Penny Royal Adventures, a theme park made up of old convict buildings and history all the way back from 1825.  It seemed good to do initially as the geometry wasn't too complex and the paint/texture seemed easy enough to replicate. 

Credit to Mattinbgn Creative Commons 3.0 Unported. Access Here

However, once I started modelling the main cylinder, I realised how hard it was to create something dimensionally accurate without having measurements or a picture of a person standing next to it. Also all of the photos of it were taken from ground level from either the front or the rear which made it hard to determine if it was circular or slightly oval shaped.

Main Parts

I decided to focus on getting the door, a window and lower walkway done so I could get a better idea of the proportions. I created the windows and door models separately and then created objects in the shape of them. I then used a Boolean difference modifier to cut holes in the model so that the window and door would fit in. Boolean difference basically deletes anything of the main model that overlaps with the cutting model, making it easy to make holes in the model. This seemed smart at first but later on when I wanted to texture the model, I had to unwrap the UV map for the windmill, I realised this was a bad approach which I will describe later. 

The fence for the walkway was interesting to create as it was easy to create one piece and use the array modifier to duplicate them. I didn't however know how to curve the array of fences so it took some time to Google it and find out that I needed to use a curve and more specifically, a circle curve. Once I figured this out, it was easy to add the curve modifier to the fence and use the circle curve to make it wrap around.

Sails

I then got onto making the sails which was an easy process to do. Majority of the sail was done with 2 rectangle objects with the array modifier to create the square hatching along with a few copies to create the bottom part of the sail and the single box at the start of the sail. 

At this point I had spent around 6 hours working on this and I didn't want to spend much longer on it as it was going to become too complex and time consuming trying to get every detail. I added in a few more windows, entrance stairs and some pieces at the top of the mill. I didn't add more complex parts like the stairs on the walk way or some things at the top as it was going to take at least an hour or two to do.

UV Unwrapping

UV unwrapping was the worst part as I found out that all of the Boolean difference operations had created additional vertices (points that are joined by edges) and edges (lines between vertices that will form the face/solid part) so close to each other that I couldn't tell if there were 1 or more in one spot. This made it hard to select all of the edges to mark as seams to make it easy to texture and had to manually move each part to figure out where a stray edge was connecting to. The finished UV map for the just the cylinder pictured above took an hour to find all the stray vertices and edges and separate it all. When it came to texturing, I just stuck to single colours as I didn't feel like it was worth spending too much time on this model as there were also issues unwrapping other objects which made it hard to do any detailed texturing work. 

Finished Windmill

Overall, I think it turned out well given that I hadn't used blender in ages and while I did cut corners when it came to accurately replicating the windmill, I think the overall essence of the windmill was captured and I reckon it would fit fine in a stylized game. I also now know what is possible to make in blender with my current skillset which will be helpful in the future for when I need to estimate the time required to create a certain model. 

I also realised at the end that I should have created the main cylindrical part with more vertices as it was very easy to see each face, making it look low poly. Normal maps (out of scope of this self study) would have also been a good thing to use as it would have helped give it depth for the creases between each stone/brick, make it really look like it was made out of individual bricks than looking like one flat piece.

Links

SirPinkBeard - Blender 2.8 How to Create a Wooden Barrel: