The model I chose to make was that of Tufdegras, a fictional character I created who now stars in his own Android game on the Play Store! In order to make this model I started with a cylinder, I adjusted the depth and the radius and gave it as many vertices as possible to produce the smoothest look. Then I created a sphere and I adjusted the radius to size it correctly and adjusted the settings to make it appear smoother. I then, duplicated the sphere and put the cylinder in the middle of the two spheres who I had moved side by side. At that point I decided to create the legs. In order to do so I created a torus made it very thin added more vertices for the smooth look and then I set about trying to split it down the middle, first trying the knife tool, which didn't go so well... Eventually I stumbled across the bisect tool which splitting the torus a breeze. I picked the side of the bisection that I liked the best and scrapped the other, then I created 3 others to use as the other three legs, using copy and paste. I adjusted the angle of the legs and stuck them to the main stalk.
The next task was then to create the leaves. My initial plan was to use a torus like I did with the legs but that proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated, leaving to scour the internet for a possible solution. My internet travels brought me to a nice tutorial for a T-Rex, it provided a lot of insight on how to do many of the different things in blender that I will be sure to experiment with later, and it also showed me how to texture my objects. So, armed with my new knowledge, I set about working on my leaves. First I created a cube, then I squished in the edges to make a thin tetrahedron and finally I started constructing the leaf, extruding and angling my to the very tip, each section getting thinner and thinner. I then adjusted the vertices broadening the leaf and finishing the tip with the nice point. Then after some copy paste, I placed each of the leaves in their new locations and set to working on the textures. Texturing Tufdegras was... Interesting to say the least. The UV map that was generated for me was not the cleanest thing I ever had to draw on and it was a bit of a pain figuring out which piece was which. After messing with that a bit, I figured out which piece was which... Or so I thought... The top layer of one the legs is two shades of green and I cannot for the life of me find out where the extra color is coming from. I persevered, however and tidied up as much as I could without spending a ridiculous amount of time on the finer details.
The most difficult parts were definitely the leaves, especially learning how to make them work, none of the online guides were overly helpful save the one I mentioned prior. Texturing was a little bit confusing but that might have been the result in my obsession with the max number of vertices I could cram on the pre-generated objects, which scared me off from marking the various sections of the model that would be used in UV map. The learning curve for Blender was quite the challenge as well, with nothing being overly clear on how the tools worked and the overbearing amount of hotkeys for pretty much everything. Overall, it did not turn out quite how I envisioned but I am still pleased with bringing Tufdegras to the 3D world in one manner at least.
