A few years ago I sold all my stuff to explore the world, creating 12 startups in 12 months and building $1M+/y in companies as an indie maker such as Nomad List and Remote OK. I'm also a big pusher of remote work and try to analyze the effects it will have on society. Follow me on Twitter or see my list of posts. My first book MAKE is out now.
Feb 25, 2016

Day 23 of Learning 3d 🎮 Filling up the street and adding shadows

Learning 3d

Today is day 23 of my challenge to learning 3d in a month. I want to create a Tokyo street scene in 3d. I’ve never done any real 3d before. Yesterday, I added rain, blinking lights, sound and built a mini VR web app for the scene.

Here’s what I’m trying to make in 3d:

makashiwakui_header

Adding shadows

I started out today accidentally finding out about shadows. I knew my scene was missing them but I wasn’t sure how to get them. I figured they would show up automatically if a light would be behind an object. But they don’t. You actually have to specifically let a light project a shadow with something called a shadow map:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 22.41.52

I didn’t really had to set anything else, it immediately looked pretty good. You don’t see shadows in your viewer, you have to render your scene to see it first:

day-25-render

One place where the shadows turned out especially well was the wooden sign in front. Here’s how it looked yesterday:

day-24-sign w sky close

And now with shadows:

day-25-shadows

That’s all shadow, not the texture. And it looks eerily close to the real photo:

Untitled-1

Adding more stuff

The thing I’d been dreading finally had to happen. I had to start adding more detail again by modeling more objects of the scene.

3d wood-carved text

I also added 3d wood carved letters on the bar front sign. You simply add a Text path:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 19.30.56

You customize it:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 19.35.27

Then you drag it in place:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 19.34.04

And you use a Loft array group layer again to make it 3d. Just like I did when making the curtains. It connects two paths:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 19.35.22

And it looks like this:

day-25-bar254-wood-carve

Then I put a light above it:

day-25-bar254-wood-carve-2-light

day-25-bar-254-wood-carve-thinner

It’s so much easier than it looks. Like literally, it feels like the physical renderer does most of the hard work and it’s default settings work great!

day-25-x1

Aircon

I built an aircon unit by extruding a tube shape from a box shape using a Boole NURBS. That’s a functional array group where you can put two objects in and the second object’s shape will be removed (as in boolean, true or false, I guess) from the first object.

Screenshot 2016-02-25 20.00.24

Screenshot 2016-02-25 20.00.17

day-25-aircon-boole-nurbs

Then I went on to add the aircon circular rings, simply by Boole’ing lots of cylinders in withs smaller cylinders:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 20.12.26

Screenshot 2016-02-25 20.12.19

Resulting in:

day-25-aircon-boole-nurbs-rings

More walls, roofs and details

I also added lots of mini walls and roofs, giving everything a better sense of space:

day-25-render

I also added tiny details like the metal bars on the paper door on the right and the finger holes in them:

Screenshot 2016-02-25 22.05.27

Screenshot 2016-02-25 22.05.58

Screenshot 2016-02-25 22.08.36

Here we are now

This is day 1 vs. day 25:

day-25-progress

All-in all, we’re getting pretty close now. With the shadows, better lighting and more objects in the street, it’s actually starting to feel a bit cosy.

day-25-b

day-25-a

Next is finding more details in the photo and adding them to finish it off.

P.S. I wrote a book on building indie startups called MAKE. And I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. I don't use email so tweet me your questions. Or you can see my list of posts. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:

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Day 27 of Learning 3d 🎮 Details, details, DETAILS!

Day 22 of Learning 3d 🎮 Added rain, blinking lights, sound, textured menu sign and a VR web app