It has taken some time getting around to writing this blog post as the next section in the Complete Blender Creator Course I am taking is quite content-heavy, even more so compared to the previous section. As a result, today’s blog post will be the first of a three-part series for Section 6. At this point, I just want to mention that there will be some Blender-related terms I will use which I explained/described earlier in previous sections of the course – so if you have not read some of my previous blog posts, some of what you will read may seem like jargon. Either way, I hope you get a good read out of it! 🙂
In Section 6 (40 lectures, 6hr+40min), A Fluffy Bunny, the objective is to model and render a scene of a rabbit in its natural environment. We first begin with an initial plan and design phase much like what was done in the previous section with the animated lamp. One key consideration in the rabbit’s design is to avoid modelling any part(s) of its body that would not appear in the final render. As a result, I am sad to inform that my rabbit will be indeed, without limbs, as the tall grass would cover its legs in the final scene rendered.
After the planning and designing phase, the concept of layers was introduced. In computer graphics and animation, a layer typically contains a single object or element. Each layer is stacked on top of one another – often in a meaningful order (e.g.- from the foreground objects to the background elements in a scene). Thus, layers are often worked on independently and combined at a later stage. The instructor then proceeded to show how to hide and unhide a layer in Blender. No doubt, layers will be re-visited later in this section when all the different objects and visuals in the scene have been modelled. For now, all attention is turned towards the focal point of the scene: the rabbit, of course.
Modelling the rabbit began as soon as it was learnt that a new object can be added, the Metaball. I like to think of a Metaball in Blender as a sort of soft clay, putty, or dough. Two or more metaballs coming together can meld into one another (or leave a dent in the other if so desired). Using a side reference picture and three metaballs, the outline of the rabbit’s body and head was quickly formed:
Next, two ears were created using a UV sphere and a mirror modifier. The metaballs were then converted into a mesh and joined together, which in turn provided a decent amount of geometry to allow for potentially high-detailed sculpting afterwards:
With sculpting in Blender, a number of brushes can be used to add or subtract geometry in a model. The size and strength of the brush can be quickly adjusted as well. By using the computer mouse and literally moving back and forth across the mesh like a brush, a bit of definition was added to the rabbit:
At this stage, the particle system, found under the properties viewport, was introduced. In Blender, there are two types of particles: hair and emission. In this case, hair was selected and a number of parameters were then shown and adjusted. The first two parameters were the emission/hair number and length; the number indicates how many strands of hair there are and the length indicates how long each strand of hair is. Furthermore, the number of strands of hair that can be adjusted are parental, meaning that each parental strand could have a number of children strands as well. The importance of children strands is that, when interpolated, they can control everything you can possibly think of when it comes to the appearance and distribution of the hair such as uniformity, size, endpoint, roughness, randomness, clumping, etc.. The aforementioned are all numerical parameters that can be adjusted in order to generate on the rabbit any kind of hair imaginable! For my rabbit, I chose 10000 parental strands with each parental strand having 10 interpolated, children strands to begin (Note: I have not adjusted any of the parameters in the children strands at this point):
In addition to assigning a material to a mesh (in this case, I’ve picked a medium-brown for the skin), a material can also be assigned to a particle system. And so, for the hair, I’ve chosen a light brown (fun fact: in many cases, an animal’s fur actually looks much darker than its skin due to the apparent density).
As soon as a particle system is generated on a mesh, Particle Editing is enabled. Like sculpting, a number of different brushes of adjustable size and strength were available to allow for high-detailed editing across the particle system – in this case, the rabbit’s hair: Comb, Smooth, Add, Length, Puff, Cut, and Weight. I won’t go into detail of what each of these brushes do as they are fairly self-explanatory. As such, I proceeded to comb my rabbit:
Now, the rabbit is starting to take form alas?!?! I think I’ll call him Mr. Rabbit from now on… 🙂 Still, his hair looks a bit odd – for example, tufts of hair are coming out in unusual places and the hair seems to be a little too uniform throughout the entire mesh. To tackle the issue of hair being where it shouldn’t be or too much hair growing in certain areas, vertex groups were created for different parts of the rabbit and the instructor then showed something called Weight Painting. In 3D modelling, different parts of a model can be assigned varying weight values. In Blender, weight-painted areas cover from red (100%) to blue (0%) as a colour spectrum. The rest of the colours fall in between these two opposite ends in our colour spectrum; for example, green-painted areas would have a weight value of ~50%, whereas yellow-painted areas would have a weight value of ~75%. In the case of Mr. Rabbit, this weight value is assigned a percentage of the particle system as long as it is linked/applied to the vertex group. For simplicity, I weight-painted in red the following vertex groups: Body, Ears, Whiskers, Head, Chest (not shown):
It should be noted that after weight painting, any changes done in particle editing mode are lost (i.e.- combing). So planning ahead and staying lean, once again, is important! After weight-painting and re-combing, I think Mr. Rabbit looks a lot cleaner, hmm?
*Breathes heavily* Phew, okay, I’m not done yet! I mentioned about the importance of children strands in hair particles a few paragraphs back and how a bit of randomness and variation can be adjusted in our model. Well, at this point, we were then told to adjust some of those parameters for different weight-painted, vertex groups in our mesh. We also added different materials for chest hair and whiskers during weight-painting. After a bit more particle editing as well (mostly combing.. lol), here is the last progress picture I have to share:
If you’ve made it this far in my blog post, just want to say thanks for taking the time to do so! I hope it interests you as much as I had learning all of this. It may not look like it, but in fact, I have spent quite a bit of time up to this point. Organic modelling (can and usually) takes a LOT of time and I finally have a proper taste of it… Anyway, I look forward to finish modelling Mr. Rabbit and moving into creating the world/environment he lives in. Stay tuned and I look forward to writing my next blog post!