So the adventure continues...

April has been a busy month and I've been focusing on upping my productivity in Blender.

When I started working in 3d at the end of last year I had no idea how long each picture might take. You need to be patient: with the software; the modelling and the rendering. At the beginning, I was shocked by a four hour render time and now I consider that a bit of a luxury as a few have run into 18 to 20 hours. It all depends on what I'm asking the render to do and it isn't always helped by my ageing computer. Several times I've had to redo a render as it wasn't quite how I would have liked it. It pays to do a quick render first to check these things, but sometimes my desire to get work finished quickly gets in the way.  It does mean my computer's switched on a lot more than it used to be and, where possible, I'm running renders throughout the night so as not to interfere too much with the daytime hours.  

April began with stairs. Keeping it simple and improving the work through interesting lighting and textures. These two elements (combined with composition) can really transform a simple idea into something greater. I'm using the Quixel Megascans database of textures and materials more and more. There's so many to choose from. I'm paying closer attention to the UV maps I make to apply the textures to. This isn't my strong point and it's the bit that usually puts my mind into meltdown - trying to picture an object as if it were a flat piece of paper that can be folded into shape. Working out where to place the seams so that it all joins together in an almost imperceptible manner. This is where tutorials and online help is invaluable. The UV tutorial by Blender Guru is an incredibly helpful starting point... Blender Intermediate UV Unwrapping Tutorial 

The second half of April turned to landscape generation and snow capped mountains. I've been experimenting with both Blender's built in landscape generator and the Mirage landscape addon. Both do an excellent job of creating landscapes from canyons to mountains and all sorts of terrain in between, through tweaking the settings to determine size, height and so on... I've mainly been mixing the mountains with photographs of skies from my collections, but I've also attempted a few of my own 3d sky creations with the help of BlendMaster's Realistic Cloud tutorial. The mountain shots gave me an excuse to mix up some textures in Quixel's Mixer . Combining different snows and rocks to make new materials. I've only played with Mixer a few times, but I think it's something I'll be spending more time on in future. (I've already started creating textures for a space / planet set of pictures I want to work on in May). 

Finally, April included a lovely shoot with local model Ettienne. It gave me a good opportunity to experiment a bit more, mixing traditional photography with 3d skills.  There's potential in this technique so I'll push it some more when I can. I've noticed that my mind is working a little differently when I take pictures. I'm not just thinking about traditional photo editing software anymore. 

And so that's April's adventures finished... 

And onto May...