Blog Post and Work Log 11/22-12/03

Reflection Page:

In this picture, you can see my first try at making grass. To make this grass, I followed a quick tutorial that showed me how to easily use hair particles and an image to create realistic looking grass. I was pretty happy with how the grass came out, and I thought it looked realistic enough for my scene. However, I think I made it too small, because in the final animation, you will be able to see the end of the world. Because of this, I decided to make a bigger plane.

Here you can see I made the bigger plane of grass that should help to fix the problem of seeing the end of the world. I was also pretty happy with how it looked in the end. The thing that worried me about this, was the fact that I had to use many more particles (because of the larger space) than I did in the previous attempt. I thought it might cause problems in the future with lagging, and unfortunately I was right.

This is where I started texturing the tree. I had previously tested out texturing in another file a couple weeks ago, so I was already familiar with how to texture paint using a picture stencil. I was happy with how it was starting to look. It does take a while since there are different angles I have to account for, especially near the base of the trunk. Hopefully I will be able to make faster progress as I get closer to the branches.

The picture here shows when I started to have problems. The day after I started stenciling, my file was being really slow, and any time I tried to continue texture painting, it would crash. When I say crash, I mean that I was given a loading circle, and there would be words at the top of the screen that say "Not Responding," as shown circled in red. I tried multiple times and each time it would crash. I figured out that the big plane of grass was probably the one causing the lag. Because of this, I will either make the grass be smaller and have a hill, or I will just wait until the end to make the grass.

 Work Log 11/22-12/03

Monday (first week):

Started making the grass.

Tuesday (first week):

Finished following the tutorial to make the grass, and started figuring out the size of the ground.

Tuesday (second week):

I started creating another plane of grass that is big enough for the whole scene.

Wednesday:

I finished the big plane of grass, and began to texture paint the trunk.

Thursday:

I began texturing the tree with a stencil.

Friday:

I tried to find a way to make my file not crash.