Again, huge shout-out to @sanectuary for fitting this in a really cool newspaper theme and giving me a good laugh with the writing. It didn't need to go this hard, but my god did he outdo himself.
Cheeky ping to @Nattyloo06, you are famous now! Probably for the wrong reasons, but hey, you are famous now!
Raw renders!
So! In the last week, I really wanted to make something artsy for my friend. They gave me really nice art as a gift and I thought "oh shoot, I.. don't know what to give back". Ideally I'd like to be able to draw something back, but here's the thing: I am TALENTLESS at drawing.
So I went with the second best thing: learning how to.. do 3d modeling and rendering. The only option that's free and available to me is.. that's right! Blender! I called off my work for a week (I saved them up!) and began learning. I sat down, watched tutorials from the fabled "donut man" and minecraft blender how-to. A stupid amount of youtube tutorials later, I got a few animations done for my friend along with some nice renders!
If anyone is interested in doing the same, I am going to list roughly what I've done to create this. And I hope it serves to say as well that you can definitely pick up blender and make something nice out of it!
Without further ado.. let's get to covering!
The scene
We need a functional background to work with, so I hopped into Minecraft and got to work building a background
It looks like something out of a sitcom. But hey, it'll work! Not like our camera will see the other side
Stuff that into blender and.. bam!
Characters and poses
Now we need to import our characters and make sure they.. well, are posed correctly. For this scene, I need one character to lie on the ground and the other to be bent down slightly to take their dripstone. To do this, I can adjust the bones in my character's bodies and move them around until it looks somewhat natural!
Here's an example of one can raise a character's leg. The highlighted blue thing is.. apparently something something inverse kinematics, but
A lot actually went into this scene, the main adjustments are
- I don't want the lied down character to be flat down, so I made sure to raise one of her legs to be bent a little
- I need to make the laid down character turn her head, so she's not just staring into space
- The lied down character needs to raise her hand up, since we want to give it the feeling that the other character is "pulling" the item from them
- To make it seem like some force is being made, the other character is made to "crouch" down by pulling their hips down, and bent forward by rotating the rib bone and hip bone
- The other character has their head tilted slightly to the side as well to give the illusion of them looking at the lied down character
- Their legs has to be shifted, so it's not like they are glued together. To do this, I move the left and right leg slightly front and back
Camera, actions, and...
Lights! We need to make sure this has a cool lighting, so in the two images you saw, those are two kind of lights.
There is the "sun light" which roughly illuminates the whole area, and the "point light" which works like a lamp. The first image that's fully orange is with a "sun light" to give a dated-ish feel to the image, and the second image uses a point-light to make it feel more realistic
Closing thoughts
That's about it! Again, amazing shout-outs to @sanectuary for the AMAZING newspaper rendition and writing, and @Nattyloo06 for the inspiration and roleplay to get me to do this.
And to you as well @urufu! You left me a really nice comment in one of my posts to do reporting, and it gave me the idea to make a silly lil render and ask sanec to make a newspaper version of it.
I hope if you made it this far, you learned something new or even better, feel like giving blender a go! If any reporter factions are reading this.. please pick sanec up, he's great