Patrick’s Blender Adventures

How I created the models for my Asteroids clone

I wanted to create the artwork for a game from scratch. The following is how I did it in Blender.

Procedurally generated asteroids

Instead of modeling individual asteroids repeatedly, I saved time by generating them procedurally and tweaking the inputs until I found something I liked. I used a chain of Geometry Nodes to produce the asteroids. In order, these were

1. Node to create an icosphere that was distorted into a random, less spherical shape. This is the base for the asteroid.
2. A node that created random craters.
3. A repeat of the random craters node to apply more craters of a smaller size.

Nodes for random asteroid shape

I used an Ico Sphere node to start with a round shape and then used a noise texture to offset the vertices into random locations to produce a random, yet natural-looking shape. Here's what the final Geometry Nodes ended up looking like:

Nodes for craters

I followed this tutorial video but used the following simplifications.

• I used the new Geometry Proximity Node which makes it much easier to compute the distance between any point and the center of a crater. Note: The Transfer Attribute node used in the YouTube tutorial has been removed in Blender so you may need the Geometry Proximity Node alternative anyway.
• Instead of having the same Geometry Nodes modifier generate all craters, I applied the same nodes multiple times. This made the nodes easier to write and gave me more fine-grained control.

Here's what the final Geometry Nodes ended up looking like:

Modeling the spacecraft

This was pretty straightforward so I won't go into detail. I rough sketched a basic spacecraft whose silhouette is inspired by the original Asteroids craft. I resized, extruded, and added edge loops to a cylinder until I got the desired shape. I used a boolean operation with a stretched quarter sphere to add the cockpit. After applying the boolean modifier, I manually cleaned up the topology. The main goal was to keep the topology clean so I could reduce the poly count by removing unnecessary edge loops in the final model.

Rendering exhaust and laser sprites

Coming Soon

Baking normal maps

Coming Soon

Mickey Bars

My wife is a huge Disney fan and I wanted to create a card for her. This is how the Mickey ice cream bars above were born. My inspiration was Blender Guru's famous donut tutorial. I decided to take the techniques in his tutorial and do a Disney-flavored version of it. First I tried to model the ice cream bars as quick and dirty as possible by ignoring topology and extruding a basic outline of Mickey's head. Honestly, I was surprised that it didn't look that bad.

But it still wasn't good enough, so I made a better version with clearer flows in the mesh. Below is what I ended up with in the end. It's not perfect, but is definitely good enough for my purposes.

Other Renders:

Little Robot (not my model)

Below is one of the first complete scenes I ever rendered with Cycles in Blender. I created the building geometry but used free textures, a free HDRI, and a free robot model. (I'd link credits here, but I've lost the links to the assets).

Mercedes-Benz (not my model)

I made the following renders with a free model. The flow of the mesh doesn't perfectly follow the curves of the vehicle so the reflections look a little jagged. This is most noticeable in the headlights.

Triangular, Abstract Music Visualization

I was inspired by the on-stage visualizations I've seen at concerts and tried to produce one of my own. The full video can be seen here. It's short, but it's perfectly loopable at maintains a consistent number of beats per minute.

D&D Campaign Title Screen

My friends and I have a Dungeons & Dragons campaign titled "Smoke in the East." For fun, I decided to make a title screen for the campaign as if it were a Netflix series. I used this as an excuse to learn the volume and fluid flow features of Blender. The concept was a D20 agitating and swirling smoke through mysterious, green magical energy. See the final render here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/yK69g9NraQje1Zse9

The render uses a ring that emits smoke and a vortex force field at its center where the die is.