Abstract Environments

o, I'm posting this post out of order haha. However, this one is top of mind because I just completed it last night. I've decided to lean even further into world building and start working on learning how to model the basic design of models that would be best suited for virtual gathering spaces. And more important, I want to be able to create a collection of items that I could one day make available for the public with my own April-touch. I've been thoroughly enjoying the act of finding soothing color palettes on Coolors! That has actually been the best part of 3D modeling haha. I can't wait to dive deeper into materials so that I can truly make the colors pop with cool details and textures. I actually need to count to see how many more days I have left in Modeling land before I head onto the next topic of Materials. I think once I "master" Materials, there will be no stopping me!

Any who, I started to put together a private Pinterest board of inspiration for virtual venues. I know, I like my boards private. Don't ask why. But in any case I've been looking at all the shapes and what has been most intriguing are the curves. I started to explore curves last night and found one way to bend objects with the Simple Deform modifier. It's an interesting mix of 'straight-forward' and '...but you gotta do this, this, and this to make it work'. I can't shake the feeling that there has got to be an easier way to do curves in Blender. In any case, after doing a few of my own curves, I realized that I could curve an object that was duplicated with the Array modifier.

The image for this post is what I came up with. I'm not particularly proud of the end result given that I couldn't figure out how to do a boolean for an object that already had a modifier applied. Therefore, the half circle cutout on the rectangle is jagged. I'm hoping to figure that out soon. I did learn that I could use the Edge Split modifier followed by the Subdivision Surface modifier to make the cylinder shape smooth. But if I applied those modifiers before doing a boolean, the boolean wouldn't cut out the shape.

I also couldn't get the lighting to look right. When I initially did a sun light, the entire scene just looked like shapes with no depth. So, I switched to area lights, dropped the light intensity down some and it looked better...but not great. Hence this screenshot rather than a render. Oh yea, the render was being funky and completely not rendering the shapes. C'est la vie - I'll figure it out one day!

Update: I figured out why I couldn't render - I had objects in the scene that were hidden but still visible for renders. Thus, they blocked all the other objects. I'm such a noob haha.