Weekend efforts

Boolean-modified cube mirrored and repeated.

The weekend offered some time for Blender training. I watched a number of episodes of my Hard Surface Modelling course, which is great. I realise now that I need to repeat watching followed by lots of hands-on practice.

I made a start with the Boolean approach to modelling. It's so powerful but just tends to leave me with a horrible mess. The training videos, while they didn't give me an instant fix, they have left with a much better understanding of what pitfalls to avoid.

 However, Saturday's efforts to reboot the Fire Shark model got nowhere. Here is how it tends to go: I make a start, I make promising progress. After an hour I'm already struggling with bad topology, constrained by shading artifacts and or just feeling like I've not improved on the existing attempt, which is passable, mostly.

Simple Stools. 

More Boolean play.

For the rest of the weekend, I tended to do more quick exercises.

Tested if I remembered how to make simple stones. I overdid the smoothing for boulders but liked the quick results.

A vast landscape mesh, coming in at about 300MB. Really, too big as you can't get all the polygons into view.

Last thing on Sunday, I built a huge landscape mesh, using World Creator 1, which I bought in a Steam sales a few years ago, but never really made use of it.

Blender started to chug, but then when I realised how big this model is, I was quietly impressed by the cycles render engine performance. Thanks to Hardware CUDA support and some denoise filter work.