The journey is important- but you have to be going somewhere good.

So with the pretentious blog title out of the way let's take a look at, in 3D terms I've done this term.
This should be fun or depressing!

Let's look at one of the first models I made-

'Shippy Ship'

This space ship was simple, low on polys and low on detail, I built half the ship then mirrored it so it's very symmetrical. It looks like a budget tie-fighter.

It was alright for a first real attempt but it was a first attempt and personally I can tell, but still- could be worse!




Next up we have the penguin:

This penguin I was much, much happier with. It had more detail but was still quite simple at its core. The mistake I made with this one was modeling in smoothed mode. This meant that I had to go back and fix some of the problems that caused with the polygon version. 






Now we move on to my project work, this could be interesting!

This was a first 'second' attempt at the space ship. The first few tries where so bad I dare not show them here! This one isn't particularly great either in my personal opinion. Instead though, lets look at it as a learning point, the edge loops are all over the place, they look messy and that's because they where. I was placing them without real care or attention at the time and this caused me definite headaches down the line. 

 We have my second ship- far better, but again not without its own issues. It has, as you'd expect far more detail than my previous models and I spent quite a lot of time trying to make this work. I followed a tutorial by the fantastic Mike Hermes  (https://www.youtube.com/user/MikeHermes65) for the nose but branched off for the rest of the ship to really make it my own. I built the ship out of multiple parts to make my life easier then group them once fully modeled. However the reason that I didn't take this further was there

 where several issues with the geometry as a whole that couldn't be reasonably fixed even after re-topologising the model to simplify it. contrary to the first ship that I worked on this one was more enjoyable than frustrating. I even gave a couple of attempts at texturing it but UV mapping was a nightmare due to the geometry. Lessons learned with this ship though so I'm not unhappy with it. I learned to be very careful about how I compose a model, as down the line if something isn't done right our without the 

for sight for the rest of the project it can cause you significant issues.








Finally- before I dedicate a whole post to the final piece I took a stab at a sword. Pun intended there. 

I'll be honest this wasn't a serious attempt- but I wanted to take a break from the space ship at the time and try something a little bit different. It's not perfect, or even, in my opinion, that great- but a lot of what I've learned this term personally for me has been about foundations to build on. 
I can't honestly say I'm good at 3D modelling yet, but with time, patience and perseverance I know that I can improve.


The mistakes I made are fairly simple in retrospect, I gave up too easily and abandoned ideas almost as fast as I started them. I didn't give my models room to breathe in a creative sense and so I'd get frustrated at a lack of progress. I moved on too quick rather than address the problems a model had.

On the positive side of things this meant that I tried a variety of things to model, I sought out both peer tutorials and professional ones to expand my basic skill set. I pushed outside of doing things I was comfortable with and ended up with I think, a good place to build up from. 

That's all for now, I have decided to change up models for the final project piece, it's simpler but I don't think that diminishes the charm of the project, I just need to finish it.