It's the End of the World as We Know It - Milestone One

 I can't say I expected the journey of Apex Predator to end up here - slick and sleek. But this week we began to reassemble our creations in Rhino 6, assigned them materials, staged them, lit them and hit that magic render button. 

I was impressed. By this point I am comfortable in meshmixer, and that made this process a lot more streamlined. I've always been a bit of a perfectionist, and it took a while to polish up the objects, import them and align them just so. 

But it was worth it. Materials were a lot of fun - I even went looking for extra .rmtls online. The leather look was a nice addition to the predator.   It was pretty cute just plain, on a white surface with ambient skylight or studio setting light. 





But we could get gnarlier and add to the scene with more finesse- so I changed up the setting colours and set up a point light and a slightly tinted spotlight. I liked the studio light effect as it highlighted the metal and oil textures. Leaning into those textures was something that came up in my peer to peer critique group. 




I didn't love the darkness of the tail blowing out that night green so I adjusted with a soft point light to the rear. But this still wasn't as dramatic as I knew it could go. No, I knew we could get a different feeling with a teal point light for contrast. 



But every Apex has an apogee - and this predator is doomed to decline. So with the help of my trusty lights, we went for apocalyptic. 


It was a good thing I got these renders saved as they finished - when fiddling with light settings for one last try, the program crashed (as it had been doing all evening) but this time taking the current model with it. Opening the program and file brought up my work of about an hour previous, which was quite sad.

I appreciated how much easier Rhino6 made things otherwise, but also looking back over the past few week, I also appreciated how smooth this method of learning had been. With no experience in 3D objects, I had managed to bring this model to life, setting the old against the new.



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