Today’s program features Blender, Blender and more Blender. Bzzzt!

To be honest, throughout my life I’ve made several attempts at 3D. I tried simple software, I tried giants like 3ds Max — and never, never managed to get anywhere. I kept wondering why: usually I learn programs quickly, but 3D just refused to be tamed. Guess it’s just not my thing.

But now the moment has come when my thing or not — I still have to do it (:
So this week I was building the portal arch, the sketch of which I showed in the previous post. Unexpected roadblocks met me at literally every step, and I’m not exaggerating xD

At first I tried creating both the wall and the arch using Wall Factory, but the cursed bricks refused to line up properly. Every row insisted on being a different height even though the numbers were strict, and neighboring bricks sometimes attempted to merge in an ecstatic (crossed out) embrace. It got easier once I decided to make the arch separately and then attach it to the wall, but I still couldn’t fully defeat the merging problem. Oh well, those bits are on the edges and easy to fix.

Then I grabbed a plugin for procedural damage, so I wouldn’t have to manually sculpt cracks and other effects of time, and that's where the chaos began. First, it created a monstrous amount of polygons I later had to reduce. Then the bevel suddenly stopped working on the bricks. And when I finally fixed that, the texture refused to appear on the “damaged” areas. I will spare you the tragic tale of the scary technical explanations I had to survive (from very kind people, to be clear!). The important part is: it’s fixed now. But oh boy, that was rough.

Oh, and after the damaging some bricks ended up with holes in their mesh. I said “uuuuuuh” and simply deleted the defective ones, cloning and rotating neighboring bricks into their place.

Once the wall was dealt with, I moved on to the arch. After a few tutorials it seemed like it would be easier… but nope! Still, thanks to the hard-earned brick experience, I managed to fix things much faster this time.

Then I decided to make slightly different textures for the damaged areas of the wall and arch — a very tedious process, but I conquered it.

The crystal and the light were fine, but suddenly I found myself dealing with backgrounds for the render. After some trial and error it turned out they need to be 4K, otherwise everything becomes aggressively pixelated. But that’s a task for another day.

So, below you can see the current state of the arch :D

The render isn’t final yet of course — I still need a proper background and better lighting — but it’s something already! The next challenge is rose bushes T_T 

If you enjoy following my tiny victories and major Blender tragedies, you can support the project with a small donation or subscription — it helps me keep going and make the game better💖

See you next week!