Tutorial 1

So, to start off we were given the task of learning the basic usage of Blender, a free and open source 3d creation suite. To help us with this we were supplied with various tutorial videos which were quite informative. The most informative being Brackey's 'How to Create a Wooden Barrel' tutorial.

How to Create a Wooden Barrel:

Following along with the video I created my own barrel:

I chose to do a dynamite barrel with a little wick thing at the top.

The barrel had proven to be easy so I was eager to get started on the next task; creating my own Tasmanian landmark in blender.

At first I wanted to do the Penguin penguin, but I decided against it because I kept having trouble with the rounded shape and morphing the vertices out into little wings wasn't working the way I wanted it to.

I also thought that there was a good chance someone else might have been doing this one and I wanted to be unique.

So instead I went with the Sassafras spud.

I chose this because I see it all the time when I visit the north part of Tasmania and you can practically see the vertices and faces on it so I thought this would be simple and easy to replicate.

Turns out I was right, it was pretty easy to recreate the shape of the big potato man.

Well, it's not great. But there's no mistaking, that's him. 

The areas I had trouble with were, obviously, the textures. I tried a couple of things to get the texture to look right. At first I tried to use the photo image as the texture but I couldn't make that work, it looked bad. I wanted to find a good rocky texture that looked like the actual material but I had no luck, so I just ended up using a flat colour and airbrushing a bunch of dots on it.

The eyes don't have any colour on the actual sculpture (he used to), they're just kind of sunken in and carved into his body. I just ended up using a couple of cylinders and indenting them into eyes.

I think the mouth is good.

I added a torus and bent it into the shape of Spud's creepy angular mouth and I gave him that weird black lipstick that he has in real life. The rest of the body, limbs and hat were all just cylinders.

Overall I think it's a fine replica. I'm just not sure about things like having too many vertices or junk that will have to be optimized in order to make it work well in unity. 

Tutorial 1 scene:

Here I made a scene with my potato man holding a rainbow trout I made hostage. The other objects in the scene are free assets from the unity store.