Fancy Little Rings
Monday • June 27th 2022 • 7:21:50 pm
I started by learning Hard Surface Modeling in Blender,
and creating a whole box of wallets and dodads that I printed.
Then I jumped to Krita to brush up on my Drawing Skills, creating many portraits,
I really enjoyed using the Reference Images feature and its impact on color picker.
I returned to Blender to learn to sculpt,
I really appreciate the huge range of sculpting tools.
Then time came for Geometry Nodes,
and I created a Procedural box with self generating hinges and a couple of rings.
With all these powers combined,
I felt ready to create my first Captain Planet Ring.
When I was working in Krita I came across a Baroque Kitbash,
and this afternoon I spent $5 dollars on 150 very neat Baroque Decorations.
They all appear to be hand made,
and I hope the Author is feeling well, I left the highest ratings.
I performed my first Import of 3rd Party Artwork today,
and it being hand made, required very little tweaking.
“Set Origin > Geometry To Origin” and reset position, rotation, and tweak scale,
I imported the *.fbx files, there were no *.blend files, or blender native files.
I am still learning Blender so I immediately jumped to using the Lattice Modifier,
with a lattice of resolution set to 4; you will find setting in the right hand pane.
And I tested to see if the mirror modifier can work,
to mirror the decoration across the ring, it did, it was crazy, and I made several cat noises.
But in the end, I added too much and the Boolean Operations do not work correctly,
meaning I can’t fuse the rings geometry into a singe object.
This is OK, because I really like the design, so I’ll bring it back,
in the next version of the ring - those wings on the front look so neat.
The way to achieve stable geometry,
is as always, to keep things simple.
All the shapes that are imported,
must lay down flat at zero.
Then you may use a lattice modifier,
to distort the flat arrangement around a ring.
Here you may make a linked copy,
and reuse the arrangement on multiple sized rings or bracelets.
I additionally recommend the use of the mirror modifier,
so that you will only ever need to work on one side of the ring.
This is something I only did for the little flowers,
I copied the three items on the side of the ring by hand.
But don’t do that, as decorations always need adjustments,
and now they require the same adjustment on the other side.
Even though you are just adding a minus sign,
it is annoying and error prone.
In the end you should only have one Boolean Operation,
and one source of potential problems to fix, if the union operation fails.
Just return to your original motif arrangement,
and make your repairs there.
In closing I must say that this ring does not have enough complexity,
for a 3D modeled ring.
It needs flowers everywhere, and around,
it needs soooo many little crazy flowers...
That if a jeweler had to recreate this by hand it would take many months,
and a lot of patience.
If you are just Starting Out with creating Jewelry in blender,
simply loosely re-create the Captain Planet Cartoon and Dark Souls Game Rings.
It should be a lot of fun,
and lots of practice.