Diary Entry 7/09/26

 Today I am beginning to get back into routine of working on my projects for the foreseeable future. I was very busy today and only had time to work on some python projects. I am continuing the python tutorial videos and writing comments beside them to explain the lines of code. The tutorials fail to explain them in detail so I am ensuring I understand the functionality.

I began by following up from the last coding session which focused on lists, sets and tuples.  I created a program to create a custom shopping cart where you type out the food item and then the price you want to list it as.

Writing the comments is going to help me to learn a lot easier alongside the tutorials to learn the functionality for myself to apply it in my own projects to come back and look.

 Next, I moved onto learning 2D collections. This was a bit confusing to learn but by the time I completed the exercise developing a number pad I figured out how to work it out easier.

I wrote some comments in the exercise to help me understand it better and it helped a bit.

 

Diary Entry 17/08/26

 Today I finished off the Blender basics tutorial with rendering and basic lighting. I added in some point lights to act as a skyline as well as a sun. I then added some planes to act as blockers for directional light and to give the environment a more roomy feel. I played around with the lighting in the scene as well as some camera settings and render engines, both cycles and EEVEE.

As you can see here this is the scene as well as the hierarchy with items parented to each other. Below you can see the renders of the doughnut and the mug. The first image was rendered with cycles and the second EEVEE. You can see the stark difference. Cycles looks much better but needless to say lighting needs improving. In future tutorials I will play around with more of the tools to offer.

 

 

As well as the point lights, a volume light probe was used to project more natural casting shadows around the doughnut as well as depth of field adjustments for the doughnut to be the primary focus. 

 

 

Diary Entry 10/08/26

 I went back to Blender and worked on the scatter to surface modifier for the use of sprinkles for the doughnut. I struggled to use this one while applying it. It involved some weight painting too, my nemesis.  I began by just making basic cylinder shapes and then played around with the modifier's tools that were available until I reached decent positioning and density. In this stage I was mostly just messing around with the modifier.

From here I went into weight painting and made a basic heat map layout for where I wanted the sprinkles to reside in certain areas. The top being most dense and the sides not so much.

Creating the sprinkles separately and then using the modifier must have caused some issues. When I went into shading the sprinkles did not have randomised colours despite assigning the material to all sprinkles and applying a colour ramp in shading. The sprinkles appeared to show the colour range on the individual originals, however on the modified versions on the doughnut, they only presented one colour. To avoid wasting time, I kept this single colour. This is something I should look into further with this modifier as I must have made a mistake with the layout of materials alongside the modifier.