Things I Make: July 2011

Strange Creature

If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you? - First Doctor

For this one, I wanted a amphibian or amphibious looking creature. The bitmap texture is actually gray-scale, color is added by a RGB texture node. The reeds uses a hair particle system while the ground is a sculpted multirez. The water may look like it uses a wave modifier, but Blender 2.49bs wave modifier doesn't allow for circular waves. I got around this by using a wood texture set to displace, then mapping it to an empty. The water also uses ray mirror and ray transparency.

Fire and Ice

The theme for this challenge was opposites, so i decided on a piece of burning ice. The flames used a standard particle system with the individual particles set to a halo texture. The texture itself was keyed to an ipo, allowing the flame particles to change color as they rose. Most of the water was modeled, except for the droplet hitting the surface.

Some thing didn't work out as well as I had hoped. The texture of the ice didn't show up very well though the coating of water, and the flame looks a bit unconvincing.

Kitchen

This was perhaps my most ambitious entry to the Weekend Challenge yet. Created using multiple objects, a ray mirror for the floor and pans, a particle system, soft body and alpha transparency for the curtain, and ambient occlusion to aid the lighting. I don't usually render at this resolution, but I wanted to show as much of the detail as possible.

The Fountain

This was created through use of Bézier curves and spin functions. The grass owes a lot to a tutorial I found at Blender Guru. The material textures for the stone were mapped an empty, I've found that empty mapping works very well when using multiple "instances" of an object, as I did for some of the parts of the fountain. The water was created through Blenders internal fluid simulator.