Paper crane

This month is going to be intense.

The "did I forget to eat again?" kind of intense.

Lighting is meant to match this image

Let me explain. I started the Lighting & Shading class this week, which should've been slightly more relaxing than the hard-core classes of the past. Lulled into thinking that I'd got this, I naturally decided to do the exercises in Eevee. And I say exercises because there are at least two planned for each week. Eevee is getting better every day, but it is also riddled with all kinds of bugs and features, which means that trying to light anything in it is akin to running a nuclear power plant. The errors are sudden and unexpected, and things occasionally blow up in your face.

But I tamed the beast—not once, but thrice! (Yeah, I know that "three times" is preferable nowadays, but I wanted to indulge myself.) I made three projects: lighting a room, shading a toy truck, and my own weekly project which you can see above. I won't have enough space to talk in detail about all of them, so I'll try to be especially brief.

The set-a-room-on-fire light-a-room exercise was the easiest of the three. I only ran into problems when I tried to make the light realistic. 

Assets: "Warm Bedroom" by oldtimer

There is something odd going on when I use lamps. I don't have enough evidence for it, but it looks like the light is penetrating the geometry. I thought applying Solidify to the room would solve the issue, but there was no change. So, I ended up with a weirdly lit corner of the room that I tried to patch up by playing with the shadow sizes. Not ideal, but still an improvement over my previous go at the exercise.

The second project I jumped into was shading a toy truck. You might have noticed that I'm a bit of a masochist, so I didn't content myself with setting up new procedural materials on the truck, oh no. I just had to go and try to make it look realistic by painting roughness and grunge maps. With brush alphas that I created in Krita. Into new UVs, because the existing ones were horribly stretched. (Note to self: I now know why I'm hesitant to use other people's models. The truck looks super nice, but the geometry is... eh. UV-unwrapping-unfriendly to say the least.) And then I reworked the table material and existing compositor effects and... you get the idea.

Assets: CG Cookie, Shading a Toy Truck exercise

Now, if you think that Blender 2.8 has come up with a new and better way of painting textures... you are partially right. There are some improvements, especially in the "add new painting slot" area, but for the most part it is still as clumsy and unintuitive to use as before. There is also a new shiny button "Save all images" which only works if you sacrifice a goat first and jump around the room three times on one leg. Counter-clockwise. Because if you do it the other way round, the texture gods will send your beautifully painted textures into oblivion. "Why the hell is this texture black? I DID save it!" That, and some less polite interjections might have been thrown against my monitor this week.

But that was nothing against my regular weekly project (I still want to make these, and, in my mind, the other two exercises didn't count as sufficiently "mine".) I thought I'd get a head start on the "lighting match" exercises and try it in week 1 already. And thanks to a comment on one of my projects, I got this brilliant idea. What if I folded an origami crane... digitally! How cool would that be? Very cool, I thought, and I expected to have a lot of fun. But unless the definition of fun changed drastically when I was not looking, I haven't been this wrong for ages. 

I started well. I drafted a decent plan based on rotating the geometry with the cursor as a pivot. To make things more realistic (and easier to see) I even coloured one side of the paper. Here is what I got:

Not too shabby, eh? But I also realised that it was not going to work for the next steps, so I threw it away and started fresh. This time I made the crane the old-fashioned way—with paper and hands. Then I unfolded it and meticulously numbered every triangle. There are 8 main ones, divided into three smaller ones, so I scribbled down 1a, 1b, 1c, and so on. Then I re-folded it and turned back to Blender. In there, I cut a plane into the same triangle shapes, like this:

Math had to be involved, but everything turned out well and I could separate the triangles and name them to match my handy diagram. At which point the assembly stage began. Putting things together wouldn't be too bad if I didn't have to remember that each (solidified) triangle represented a single layer of paper. Together with mirroring, it quickly escalated into a mind-bending exercise. But the best was yet to come.

With some effort I moved the triangles into their assigned positions. Then I joined everything into a single mesh, applied the Solidify modifier, and started sewing the geometry back together. And now, to keep the rest of my greatly decayed mental health together, I'm going to pretend that everything went well, I did NOT make a complete mess of it, and I most certainly did NOT nearly break into tears. There, much better.

But it was good for one thing. It pushed me into this zen-like exhausted state, where I didn't mind the lighting acting weirdly and the procedural materials not shaping up as I intended. I was through paper and hell and nothing Eevee threw at me could hurt me anymore. Except for crashes, blank renders, and crashes. I still hate those.

Not to end up on this sour note, there is one ray of hope shining through this month. For the first time during my membership on the site, CG Cookie is organising a contest. The topic is "a pumpkin", the prizes are great, but most importantly, if I manage to create something spectacular, lot of people I admire are going to see it... 

Wait a minute. Ray of hope? What the hell are you talking about? You are never going to make anything decent on time, with all these other projects going on, and---

Shhh!

See you next time.