For this project I wanted to improve my skills in SketchUp and to learn Blender for the first time.
I tend to use SketchUp very early on in most design projects, as I find I’m better at visualising a Design in 3D first as opposed to 2D. I think the reason for this is because when I used to study Architecture we had to make volumetric models as a way to come up with initial ideas.
I’ve been using SketchUp for about 6 years now, but have really improved within the past 2 years. There’s a lot to learn with SketchUp because of how many plug ins you’re able to download, so this time I wanted to improve in how I organise my models and utilise the the section cut feature more, as I’ve only recently realised how useful it is.
Final SketchUp Model
Final Blender Model
I have enjoyed learning Blender with Molly over this unit. It was quite a big jump from Sketchup, however once you get used to all of the tools and memorise the keyboard shortcuts, it is a lot easier to pick up. There are so many things you can do with blender so I found it a bit daunting at first. Usually with software I like to try and learn the ins and outs, but with blender it’s very hard to do that in the space of a few weeks.
For the Temple in particular, I had to do quite a bit of extra research, as there were some things we hadn’t covered in Mollys tutorials. Things such as making organise shapes, ways to reduce polygons and making realistic textures were a few things I had to look into further.
The main aspect I really struggled with with the Temple door. I couldn’t figure out how to get the right shape and how to make the angles accurate. In the end I imported the door from my SketchUp model as a collada file, then scaled it up to fit the rest of the model.
I found it very difficult getting the hang of adding textures. As my model is so large in scale, I had the recurring problem of textures not looking seamless, and they would look like tiles instead of an actual texture.
I tested out different ways to resolve this, and found a few videos that talked through it. Unfortunately we hadn’t got that far with Molly yet so I lot of the research was what I did myself.
I was getting very frustrated with the model as I couldn’t find the textures I wanted for free, and a lot of the textures that fit my design cost a lot of money to download. In the end, I didn’t get much time to add textures to my blender model, so I decide to block out the basic colours, and I would revisit it before Unit 8, to improve my skills in texturing.
Regardless, I took some final renders of the model with the colours blocked out. It doesn’t look great, but I plan to improve from this point on.
Blender Sessions with Molly