BC1-1808 homework, n647

Watched the video and very interesting to start learning blender 2.8, I have a bit of experience in modeling with blender already but using this chance to start exploring and learning how to work with blender 2.8

WEEK 4 - Learning more - Dragon head sculpt
Well was a busy week so only had today to work on the homework, since sculpting is what I have less experience when modeling decided to go and try sculpting a mosnter from scratch, originally I planned to do the whole body but was jsut no going to happend, so limited myself to the head, and tried playing around with 

a few things.The model is mostly sculpting, but used poly modeling for the tetch the tongue and the little membrane.

I also planned on using particles to make like a feathery mane on the back or put some scales with curves and array but was not happy how it looked, still was nice to try may use them in the future.

The quills/feathers done with particles

I do need more time to get used to sculpting, specially from scratch

Stuff like theeths and spikes, are a lot easier to do on poly modeling, and maybe use multirez to sculpt detail on them later on

WEEK3-SCULPTING MELVING EXCERCISE

Tried my hand at thesculpting homework, sadly there was a ton to do this week and had some problems with my hardware but things working now, sadly there was no time to try the extra, but will try have it done before the stream if I find the time.

For Melvin I decided to sculpt the body but I made the fangs and honrs with poly modeling and positioned them, used blender 2.79 for the sculpt and render

WEEK2-SPIRAL STAIRCASE

I went for a victorian spiral staircase, working a lot with modifiers to try get things done with them as much as possible, I started doing the volumes with more basic shapes to get the overall look and proportions and after that I sketch up the details looking at references, and started putting them in.

Ended up cleaning things a bit, and adding some end cap meshes to close things up, so I can adjust the number of steps and blender will do the work, also adjusted the spiral vertical bars to not use so many polygons.

One thing I made use of was vertex groups, this way I could put objects I had separated before inot a single entity, and add a modifier that only affected a part of these, sadly this does not seems to be working very wellwith the solidify modifier at the moment.

Also went a bit overboard playing with lights and animation to get a nice scene for it.
Here is a Turnaround animation for the spiral staircase, I should have used less frams so its a bit heavy: Spiral Staircase Turnaround
Blender file: Spiral Staircase blender File

Final render of the stairs with the sketchs I used for making the patterns based on references I was looking at.

Different views on a little scene I made to test out EEvEE rendering and the different options, and to get a good look at the ful ldetails on the stairs

Observations:

-The lack of being bale to see the effect of modifiers on edit mode made this much harder thna I expected

-For wirefrime view apartently you can turn on hidden wires on the views menu.

-Wonder if the developers may add the option to use a modifier on a collection, that could be very interesting and save time on several items sharing modifiers, but not all of them, maybe just add a "collection modifier" modifier on each object on the colection and you can change its order on particular objects.

-The end and start cap on the array modifier are a bit weird, I had to put the start cap on the end of the section and the end cap on the start, thats not very intuitive.

-Open GL render to get the turnaround on the viewport worked very quickly and with nice results, also no crashes, but since I have subdivision surface do a extra subdivision on rendering, I did a full render of the turnaround and crashes 3 times in the process, lucky I was rendering the image frames so was not a hugel oss, but its still very unstable atm.

-Added a glass material, and the default option is for it to cast shadow and blocks all the light, had to change the option from opaque to alpha blend in options to get he light trough.

WEEK 1-MORNINGSTAR
So I went wiht somehting simple, a morningstar with primitives, the spikes where done quite simple with cones and cilinders, first selected the sphere and used the cursor to selected to create a cone at the center ofthe spere, then grab it in z to take it to the top, selected this and set the transformation to the 3D cursor, that way I could rotate the spikes around the sphere surface easilly.

I planned to do the chain links with a torus by adjusting the segments but sadly the torus is not working in the current release of 2.8, so I used a cube and a bolean to punch a hole trough it with a smaller cube, after that is only a matter of positioning the links.

things I learn

-The outline option on the shading is quite nice, too bad you can not set the line width
-on evee you have to turn on screen space reflection for glossy materials to reflect things, otherwise it shows no reflection
-the viewport render is now under the view menu -> open gl render

I did open gl render of 3 different matcap settings, flat with blue oulines, comic style matcap with white outlines, and the red metalic matcap (I edited them togheter in clipstudio)

Also did a render on evee using a simple metalic material and a second material non metalic for the handle, for the floor I used a plane and on texture just set checkered and adjusted scale