Cliff Dweller

I’m finally getting into doing some tutorials in Blender. I was browsing around and this mesh based terrain modelling technique caught my attention. It could be done with only blender and didn’t need to involve fractal height maps, so I gave it a whirl. Manipulating complex organic organic meshes is surprisingly un-daunting in the Blender interface. I was able to achieve the basic model quite painlessly.

I seem to have some innate problem with completing tutorials “by the book”, so as usual at this point I went off on a tangent. Playing around with the World settings took up quite a bit of time but that resulted in a weird and wonderful sky. It was satisfactory, but not quite. It needed something. So, I set out to model a figure to put into the landscape – yes I know that is a ridiculous thing to do for a newbie, but stranger things have happened.

A few hours later, after many mistakes and a lot of searching on how to group objects, I finally came up with this very stick-figure robot with no neck. Not bad for a first try. I put my mechanical friend into the landscape, posed him thanks to a basic parenting setup, and rendered away. The floating head thing wasn’t very convincing so I put in a box for the neck and played around with a halo material till I was satisfied. A good few hours of inefficient Blendering, but a good start I think.