Dark Wing Duck was done for a Blender competition on facebook organised by Joe Lee Manns. Took my stab at it since Dark Wing Duck was a childhood character I grew up with and also I've been wondering much about Blender. Modeling with the modifiers reminded me of 3DSMax which I do wish that Maya can have one day.
Since it was my first
attempt at using Blender. I was googling everything. EVERYTHING. period. From navigation in the scene to rendering SSS and fur. I was a baby, not knowing anything. I wasn't able to do anything without googling for help and thanks to Blender's great online community and tutorials I was able pick it up really fast. The ones I used mainly were
Blenderguru,
Cgcookie and Youtube. Thoroughly impressed by Blender's rendering speed as well, it took seconds when occlusion was included.
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| Model sheet supplied. |
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| Modeled, rigged, pose test and simply lit with Blender. |
For the contest, I was still trying to render hair and making it look
good till the very last minute. YES, I am amazed
by Blender's hair system also it is actually a particle system. and YES,
it allows the hair strands to be very easily manipulated. However, I wasn't
able to render the fur to look good. for some reason, it was getting
blown out in some spots. Furthermore, rendering on an archaic system that runs on XP 32 bit was suicidal. I had to break the model and rendered them part by part and at times Blender just crashed after it finished rendering. F*** me. It was a thorough nightmare.
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| above is model before hair was added and bottom is with hair added. |
Time was running out and I had to just hand in a " decent" render. Deep inside I was devastated, I wasn't able to add fur, and even do proper textures for it. I had a vision for it which didn't pull through. Sigh.
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| Final submitted image for contest. |
After the deadline, I went back and started troubleshooting the file, going to older files for some materials setups, started reading more forums and tutorials. I did learn much in this process but honestly hope to still better it in the future. "The best is yet to be".
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| Final Rendered Image... for now. |
