As of writing this blog post, i have finished my Shrine. I more or less finished the colouring and lighting in the previous post, so all that was left to do was rendering.

I was having a lot of trouble with Rendering at first; I couldn’t capture my whole world properly, as it was too big. I tried moving the camera around to show individual parts of the shrine, but it made for a very fast and unclear video in the end (unfortunately at the time of writing this I’ve saved over this version of the render, so i can’t include the video). I knew i couldn’t hand in this video, so i had to fix it in some way.

My first step in improving my render was deleting the camera and re-making it, as it moved around way too much and it was hard to fix. I then played around with shrinking my shrine and making the camera bigger, until it captured the whole thing well enough. I added some animation, which was simple enough, and with that my render was done.

My aim was to have the camera slowly move up on the model, revealing small details and then the whole image, and making the viewer wait to see the full shrine, which added a sense of suspense.

I was okay with this first render, but there were a couple problems. My fish stopped moving at one point, which looked odd, and at the end the camera wasn’t really centered in the way i wanted it to be. So, i re-did my render after going back in and fixing my problems with it;

I moved the fish for a longer period of time, so they didn’t randomly freeze at one point. I also tried moving the camera around to centre the last shot a little better, but i don’t think it made much of a difference.

This project was something very new to me; i had always wanted to try 3d modelling, but i never knew where to start. It was fun and interesting; it felt different from creating 2d art, as there was more to learn on the technical side and you didn’t have as much control over how things turned out, as you would if you were just drawing directly on to paper. The part i enjoyed most was watching my model slowly come more to life as i added things like light, colour and details like 2d objects. The hardest part for me was sculpting and getting the shapes to look how I wanted them to; I ended up not doing a lot of things that i wanted to, because they didn’t come out right when i tried to sculpt them and i didn’t want my model to take too long. I think if i had worked with a little more patience and diligence, my model could’ve looked a lot more detailed. I also think my animation was a bit choppy and unnatural; i need to improve on timing things so that the movements don’t look so abrupt.

I enjoyed this project a lot, even though i didn’t think i would. I think i’ll definately carry on experimenting with 3d modelling in my free time, although i’d still like to do 2d professionally. 3D is a useful skill to have because it can also be used to create references for 2d pieces, and it helps with visualising how far apart things are and the scaling of different objects.