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.

Diary Entry 07/08/26

 Today I went over UV unwrapping in Blender. Although it wasn't the best, I got the basic understandings of how to do it with tillable textures and using the add on Mio3 to gridify and normalize UV's as well as manually moving and scaling to fit to a texture. 

I will look more into designated deeper UV tutorials for Blender soon and I am aware that Blender has not got the best UV tools and it was made evident today. It was making me uncomfortable even manually move edges in the UV islands and making them match the textures. When working like this from using Maya before, the uniform aspect and Texel Density parts are what I liked. Where if you grab those islands in real life and unfolded them they would uniformly match up to fold up into the correct 3D shape you see.

 Here is the UV for the foam of the coffee and the mug itself using textures provided from the tutorial. All textures were provided from Poligon from the tutorial.

 

To conclude this section I adjusted the concrete to not be so pale by adding 2 nodes within the shading tab: RGB curves and hue and saturation. Both nodes I am already familiar with when using Photoshop and Substance. This allowed me to adjusted the white and black contrasts to pop more. This also revealed some green mossy colouring from the deeper concrete tones. This is where I reduced the saturation to 0 to keep only black and white tones.