The Blender news makes me sad. It's like learning a pet has a tapeworm. I like Blender and hope they manage to figure themselves out before their experiments with AI suck the life out of the project.

Around 5 years ago I spent some quality time trying to learn basic 3-d modeling. I produced a couple interesting images, some of which I use as desktop backgrounds now. In the one attached below I modeled 8 different objects in the Wings3d polygon modeler. Wings3d has some interesting features for creating repetitive structures that you can see on display in the image. It's also wonderfully low-tech compared to similar tools. Besides having varying shapes the objects also have varying materials. I experimented with specularity (the ones that look plastic or metallic) and transparency mainly. Several of the objects have emissive materials (they glow in the dark), but you cannot see that in this particular image.

The green plasticy thing in the lower left is especially interesting. The surface irregularity is the result of artifacts in Wings3d, not something I put there purposely. Well, I purposely pushed the tool to its limits, which led to that effect, but I didn't hand model those surface features with purpose. Because I like to hack like that.

In Blender I put a 2-d mesh underneath the objects to catch the shadows the HDRi image was creating. I recall fiddling quite a bit with that to make it look reasonably realistic. Obviously this is amateur work---among other issues the composition is pretty lousy---but I thought it came out OK as a showcase.

#blender #wings3d #3dModeling #ComputerGraphics #hacking