So this week I did a number of things, mostly Blender related. But blender is still kicking my ass. My weekly goal was (in order) Get better at materials!! Get better at simple scene composition. Do some modeling so you don't forget how.

First for scene composition. I made like 10 scenes to practice quick lighting and simple composition but I couldn't get a render or save off on a single one (well maybe one) because of this issue I will talk about in the material section. But basically I am trying to make simple scenes for simple objects with simple materials. The idea isn't necessarily to be minimalistic, but just more planned and methodical to achieve a more natural look, even though the subjects may not be natural at all. There are a few artists that I am trying to practice imitating because they pretty much nail the look I want. But there MUST be something I'm doing wrong. I put hours and hours into this shit and get very little out of it. I mean, this program fights me every time I ask for something.

Second, Materials. There is this neat site that has a bunch of materials for Cycles (Blenders path tracer) and a plugin to import them directly from the web. So this week I was going to go through them and make a scene for each one to see how they look and such. This ended up in a bugged out, unstable Blender that crashed every two seconds. I don't have the organizational capacity to save every 10 seconds so I kinda gave up on that from a workflow standpoint. I can't use it for actual projects due to instability. I did end up getting this to limp along at the end of the week, but many of the materials were poorly made anyway resulting in obnoxious render times when getting up close with the materials. The bubbly white wax looking one took 4 hours at 1080p. That's stupid. But some of the other ones looked cool after Jake threw his best J.J. Abrams at it. The issue here is that to get the dramatic, cool looking shit, you have to do a ton of post. And some things don't work so hot in post like, bloom and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, you can do a FUCK ton in post, but some things don't quite work if your base image is flat as a 90s lesbian ass in faded jeans.

Also I was bored of materials so I did a fluid sim and it turned out NOTHING like I wanted. I will probably re-render with better angles and something maybe. Idk.

Here is the stuff

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5gRarvHyXZScU4wQlNiRnljbUU&usp=sharing