My project is pyramids set on a cloudy night with the moon shining
Brad Halibert --- 1138316 My project is pyramids on a sand dune setted at night with the moon shining. The object creating in Blender was very simple; the commands to move and change shapes were very easy and straight forward. To create the pyramids I had to position a cube, and use the extrude/face reduction options and bring down the top edges to form the shape of the pyramid. The planes and the sphere were just creating the object with no transformations. I couldn't figure out how to blend shapes together to make something look continuous, such as my background. It would have been way better to have the background not look like a cube itself, but rather like an entire night sky. I tried many things but couldn't get it to work. The lighting was not hard, but it wasn't easy. Depending on where and how you wanted the light to interact with the objects, determined which light source you used and how intense. I ended up going with the sun light source and a point light source because I needed the moon to appear as if it was relfecting light onto to pyramids. The sun source is what actually gave the light to the objects and the point source is what helped make the moon appear to be relfecting. I used a glossy surface for the moon to help with this. The texturing was more tricky. First, Blender does not come packaged with textures to use -- you have to go search around the internet to find free ones to use. I had to make sure the size was adaquate to be stretched accross the entire surface to it didn't look weird. The texturing was not bad after once you found out how to add a UV map and change the shader values and add different surfaces such as diffuse, glossy, transparent etc. I mainly used diffuse, but the moon was harder. I had to include a mixed shader to have it as both glossy and diffuse to really let it reflect light but at the same time show the texture that I had given it. To summerize, blender is a very powerful program and given more practice and experience with it would lead to being able to create some really cool scenes. Creating a human face would be really neat but requires so much more technical attributes than simply creating a sphere. The texturing would get much more difficult as well; I only had one UV map and one texture, I can't imagine having multiple ones but it's definitely in the cards. Textures used from cgtextures.com