Key pendant

I was lazy this week. It would be tempting to say it had something to do with me finishing two large projects in short succession, but I think I was just lazy. Consequently, this is not as much a week's project as it is a week-end one.

In an effort to find something fairly simple to make, I turned to eBay once more and I found this interesting necklace.

When I started modelling I noticed that one of Blender's many add-ons-I-had-enabled-and-then-prompty-forgotten-about gives me the option to add gears as (parameterized) primitives. Hurray, I thought, I'll be finished before lunch. 

Not quite. There was still a fair amount of tinkering involved. One, almost every cog wheel is sufficiently different to warrant its own variation, and second, the meshes can be very dirty, based on the craziness level of the parameters. Many duplicate vertices, weird no-area faces that are nearly impossible to get rid off... fun times.

Then there was the bevel story. I've become quite comfortable using the modifier, but once in a while it grows an extra set of teeth and bites my ass. The worst part is that even when things seem fine in Blender, they might be very much broken in Substance Painter. I routinely apply modifiers during the export, which means I get all the visual goodness for texturing without destroying my modifier stack in Blender. Bevel can, however, sometimes mess up the UV unwrapping. I spent an extra half-hour trying to figure out why the texture is so badly distorted. (This involved applying Bevel on each cogwheel, refreshing the UV unwrap and checking if that was indeed the bad apple wheel).

Once I finished battling the pendant, I started thinking about presentation. I decided to include one of those necklace mannequins, but I had absolutely no idea how to make one without sculpting and retopology. Turns out that being short on time can sometimes work out for the best. I made the body by extruding a single vertex inside the Skin modifier. I added a cylinder for the neck part, and roughly positioned it. And then I joined both meshes and manually sewed the neck to the body. It worked surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that it might become a legitimate way for me to create body base meshes. (I had used Skin modifier before, with underwhelming results, but maybe the way to go is to create individual parts and then put them together.)

With the mannequin finished, I created the pearl necklace. It's a pearl run through an Array and Curve modifier, which always means trouble. I got off easily this time, I only managed to break the "Fit to curve" option. With slightly less user-friendly "Fit to length" option in reserve, however, I was able to complete the mission. The necklace didn't end up in my amazing reusable library (because I'm not crazy enough to try and make it repeatedly adjustable) but it was versatile enough for the project.

Hmm, I guess that will be all for this week. Next week, I might get around to doing what I had planned for this one: an outdoor scene. I'm not going to tell you what will be in it, but I'll give you a hint: new Farming Simulator was released earlier this week... Curious? Well, see you next week, then!