3D "The Sequel"

 

 



This project was particularly troublesome and very time-consuming. I wound up starting and restarting over 4 different times. The trickiest part to overcome was the hot-keys crucial to success with Blender. I started basically by creating a cylinder and then modifying it slowly to add more faces and divisions in the correct areas. The creation of the tubes of the heart all came about the same way. Through the layout of a path and then attaching a circle to that line and extending it using the line as a path. From there I merged the objects and had a rudimentary outline of the my heart piece. However, there were still many issues, among them: resizing the heart (particularly the back), the merging of the tubes to the body of the heart, the creation of indentations and creases along the body, as well as final coloration and texturing.

Resizing was aided immensely by the sculpture mode offered by Blender and the grab tool which I used to grab large portions of the surface and thus modify large portions of the shape. The build-up of many other areas, as well as indentation was also done through the sculpting mode. However, it wasn't until strange glitching pixel parts appeared that I had realized there was a problem. Through later intense research I had solved it however by "enabling dynamic" sculpting which adds faces as the original face is stretched or modified in any other way. Seams between the tubes and body also posed a great issue to overcome. Through extremely tedious and laborious work however most of the seams are hardly noticeable. Indentations and creases throughout the piece were added by the crease tool in the sculpting brush library. This actually also helped massively with the merging of the tubes to the body as well. On the backside of the heart in particular I decided to crease the line of the back tube instead of adding another tube to the body. I think it worked quite effectively and I love the way it looks especially in comparison to the original. However, compared to the last issue of texturing and coloring these other hiccups seem very small.

Coloring was a considerable issue due to the frame rate I had steadily been decreasing through the final product of (in sculpting mode) 2,936,468 vertices. Eventually I solved the issue by finding every color selection bar and turning it to the maroon color of my heart since I could not locate which one actually affected the surface appearance of the piece. Texturing was another issue and one that led to two restarts of the four total. I realized early on that I would need to finish my piece before adding any color or texture so I did, but when the time came to add a new texture I could not and it resulted in two computer crashes (even with a bunch of RAM.) I went through numerous loopholes to attempt to attach an image of my heart surface even without adjusting the "normal" so as to add texture. UV unwrap was impossible due to the unsymmetrical nature of my piece as well as the copious amounts of vertices, every other option as well displayed only the copy of the heart with no texture or image for me to paste or fit to that heart. I went through numerous textures and formatting issues wondering what it could have been but ultimately the texturing did not happen. I had also even downloaded a bump-map free program trial for a texture to apply. In it the initial input image gave me numerous results for texture application including specularity, displacement, normal map, occlusion, and diffusion. Should it have worked with the end result 3D model would have been amazing, I had tried it on a plane within Blender as well just to see and it worked fabulously, but given all attempts the following pictures for node mapping could not be applied (occlusion image not included):

 

 

However, through the many hours spent on this project and the numerous work-arounds I had considerable fun and am eager to learn more about the Blender program partially due to the many tutorials I watched to learn specific skills and witnessing many of the incredible things possible through it. I believe ultimately, despite the absence of a texture other than a light diffusion, that the 3D model replica of Passion was successful and very accurate in its resemblance to the original.