Self-Study 01: Barrel & Hobart Cenotaph

Barrel Tutorial

The first model I made in Blender was a basic barrel, following a tutorial by SirPinkBeard.

This helped me learn the basics of modelling and shaping an object, preparing a UV map (unwrapping the model onto a flat image), and texturing.

I found the process rather difficult at first, and ended up restarting the whole tutorial after messing up the UV mapping, but I got there in the end and made my barrel! I decided to texture it as an explosive barrel and gave it a slight metallic look in the material properties to add a bit of shine.

I also took the time to prepare a simple render of my barrel.

Rendered image:

Portfolio Piece

I recently had the pleasure of showing a friend around Hobart while they were visiting from Melbourne, and one of the first places we went was the Hobart Cenotaph. I decided to model this as my first portfolio piece.

Reference image my friend took:

Creating this piece really helped develop my skills in Blender. I had a lot of fun with it which I wasn't expecting due to how difficult I initially found making the barrel was.

Rendered Image:

Making sure the brick texture was straight required me to spent extra time preparing the UV map. It's not entirely perfect as the back of the model near the top isn't  connected properly. I wasn't able to fix this without creating obvious seam lines so I left it as is.

References:

HDRI (for centopath render) -  https://polyhaven.com/a/kloppenheim_06_puresky

Brick Texture - https://3dtextures.me/2018/12/03/brick-wall-015/