Fuel Drone thing and next Blender School

 The fuel Drone thing is finished!

Thunnini is the Latin word for Tuna.

It's nice to polish off a model in a few hours. Although the sketch had been sitting around for a couple of weeks, the model was finished in about three hours, split into two sessions.

What's next? 

So, I really need something to sell. A really nice space vehicle is the way to go. An orbital Elements Light Rig is the way to go because it's not too big and should have reasonably broad appeal as a generic space object.

The secondary objective is to accumulate space objects that can be sold as a kit-bashing set. This extends my idea last November of selling a set of modular space vehicle parts that could be quickly chopped and changed into a set of space vehicles.

Before that:

Finish the Mesh modelling course.

07 Modelling a Soccer Ball

Subdivision doesn't need to be a modifier.

Subdivision

Smoothness =1 to keep the curvature of a sphere, for example.

Good Topology

A definition:

When the mesh components efficiently define the intended form and can be easily manipulated.

Efficient:
Localise the introduction of more geometry/edge loops

Easy to manipulate:
Less geometry is generally better. Use non-destructive changes for as long as possible. Usually, this switches around when you animate. You apply modifiers and join objects together.


Bad practices

Broken faces: When a face gets twisted without the underlying edge.

Concave quads: Convex for the win.

Long thin faces: Not performant and often results in shader problems.

Dense geometry: Not performant and can be hard to manipulate. 

Manifold/No-manifold: Lose edges/vertices. Overlapping.  

09 Custom Normals and shading

Normals are a critical part of polygon modelling. A normal applies to a face and tells the render engine how to apply light to a surface. Smooth edges are shaded without interruption. Edges that are treated as sharp will show a clear edge.

Blender can apply a Smooth by Angle modifier to treat any edge of a certain angle as sharp.

Setting custom normals in edit mode can be much more performant because the engine doesn't need to calculate smoothing for every frame.

Tools not working as expected, or the shading looks odd?
Check normals are consistent. Flip or Set Outwards.

Weighted Normal

Shifts shading blend towards smaller faces, removing rendering artefacts.
See https://blender-life.blogspot.com/2023/12/blender-school-weighted-normals.html