I've made a couple of decisions recently. I really wanted to carve out time in my schedule for regular practice to improve at 3D modelling. This is a skill that directly synergizes with D20 Creations, because my personal improvements with modelling will lend themselves to making higher quality dice, miniatures and other creations. In addition to regular practice for its own sake, I really wanted to post my work in public spaces. I'm always learning and hopefully the tricks and techniques I pick up along the way will be useful for others.

The Workshop is meant to give you behind-the-scenes and research-and-development insights into what it's like making the things I make, and the things I learn along the way. Since in the past it's always been focused on physical creations, I wasn't sure it was a good fit for a series of 3D image renders. But, the fundamental purpose is the same. My personal goal is to improve, and my public goal is to educate. Whether it's leatherwork, silver castings or digital assets, I think there's value in posting it here. I hope you'll agree.

And so without further ado, here are the images from my first rendering. Not my first-ever, of course, but the first of this series. I decided to model an Imperial TIE Fighter from Star Wars. I've long been a fan, especially of the original trilogy and the computer video games they spawned. In addition, Star Wars has attained such iconic status that there's a nearly infinite supply of reference art. Over time the most intricate details of the ships and equipment in this universe have been ironed out, and pieces that might have originally been placed where they are to give the movies a certain look, were ultimately given form and function as authors, artists and fans searched for explanations. It's also just a lot of fun to model!

Obviously, this TIE Fighter isn't particularly screen-accurate. It's a long ways off. That's OK. I do want to aim for screen accuracy one day, because I think you can't really get more "correct" than that. But for now I'm just tinkering.

I'm no stranger to Blender basics like extrude, duplicate, and modifiers such as the mirror modifier. So I had a solid foundation to work from. That said, there's still a lot for me to learn. In this case I think there were a few main skills I focused on: subdivision surfaces and greebles, in particular.

Though I had a high level understanding of subdivision surfaces, I'd never really learned to model with them. The edges always seemed to come out smoother than I wanted. So, I had to learn how to model some of the sharper edges. Mostly this comes down to strategically placed edge loops and creases. Exactly where to place them seems down to experience and trial and error, but as a rule of thumb, the closer the edge loops are to a corner, the sharper it will be.

Greebles are the small details and facets that don't really contribute to the overall shape and don't serve any particular purpose, but trick your eyes into seeing detail. This lends credibility to the model. The term was coined by Industrial Light & Magic in the 1970s, and though a few others have come up with some different terms, the name has mostly stuck.  This model doesn't have too many of them, although I did add a lot of square-ish ones near where the wing struts connect to the solar panels. For a first try it's not too bad, I think, although they don't really look too convincing either. I'll have to practice this some more in the coming week to see if I can improve on them.

There were a few other things I learned for this render, but only at very fundamental levels. I learned a little bit about how material nodes work (having only ever used sliders), and used a procedural wave texture to generate the angular lines on the solar panels. I also learned a bit about how to make the lasers and engines glow -- this was accomplished with a "Glare" node during a postprocessing after the initial model rendering was complete.