Did a sculpt following a tutorial. I really am not seeing the allure to Blender. The UI is so clunky. Especially for sculpting. I may just stick with zbrush. I might try to do a couple more hours in blender. But I'm also going to try and study Arnold Renderer so that I understand it more.

 I actually think the move should be to:

Texture paint this table.
Render/light it.

Then just dive into NPR from there.

If diving into NPR proves difficult, continue with the project learning path. Just don't do NPR. But I think it's safe to just start with NPR. K.

My Blender Learning Path

 I started out with a scizor, and had a hard time before declaring fuck blender

I need to start smaller and simpler so here

Be rough. Don’t be perfect. Quantity over quality.
Finished is better than perfect.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Project Path:

-Pear
-Banana
- Sword
-3d simple cartoon man (think of the simple animate school rigs)
- simple robot (walle cleaning one)
- wooden shack

Hit list on things to learn:

- texture painting

- lighting/rendering

- NPR

- Shader node networking

- Rigging

- Animating

- Modeling

(Shit. So really, everything)

First Post about Blender

Wow I forgot I had this blog. Here I am 8 years later.

I started learning Blender and wanted to blog to track my progress. 

Starting out with a very simple model. A table. Yet I've learned a lot from this one model.

Things I've learned from this project:

- loop cutting

- xray mode

- x as a delete option

- 1, 2, and 3 for vertex, edge, and face selection

- M to merge verts

- shift+r to repeat last command

- Basic shading

- Basic UV unwrapping

The UVs are so clean!

Tutorials I've used for this quick 1.5 hour riff

https://youtu.be/XleO7DBm1Us?si=YqeRlfsrj_v701H5

https://youtu.be/fsLO1F5x7yM?si=i5tcaCc_gRdlklAu

Update

I honestly forgot that I had this blog.
Just a quick update on what I've been up to.

-I've been at Reel FX in Dallas since February.
-Recently I took a zBrush sculpting class under Dylan Ekren and modeled this.

I actually just started the facial rig. It should be fun!

Goose Facial Rig Progress 1

Goose Facial Rig WIP from Daniel Arata on Vimeo.

I just started to rig the goose head. I'll update my progress when I can.

Model Topology Drawover Study

I feel that the most fun part of rigging is researching, designing, and planning out the rig. I enjoy analyzing what poses the character will need to hit and from there, devise controls and ways to deform the mesh to achieve said poses.

Here are some face poses with draw-overs I did to help me plan out the rig.

Through these draw-overs I've determined that much of the controls really will have to do with shaping and controlling the curves and arcs of the character. If I can't maintain the consistency of the curves and arcs, the integrity of the character design will be lost within the rig.

Goose Head model

Thanks for stopping by. Here's what I'm currently working on. I'm very happy with where the model is and how it turned out and am currently in the process of rigging it. More on this soon.

Delete a single node in history

Here's how to delete a single node in your objects history.

For this example I'm using a polyCube with 3 inputs. SkinCluster1, blendShape1, and tweak1.
Let's say I want to delete JUST the blendshape node.
If I use the delete history tool, it'll remove all of them.

What I can do is directly select the blendShape node and delete, just as you can do with almost anything in Maya such as a nurbs or poly surface.

What I do to select this node, is simply highlight and copy

And then paste into Maya's search by name feature. NOTE: if you don't see this feature, you may have to 

hit the drop down menu circled in RED and pick "Search by Name"

Now you should see that you have your history's input node selected

Now from there you can just hit the delete button. And you're done. Here's what it looks like on my polycube with just the blendshape gone.