The Blend
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One Magic Detail

One Magic Detail

Create interesting details with one mesh

Samuel Sullins
December 18, 2023

The Blend.

Become a better Blender artist in 5 minutes each week.

By Samuel Sullins

Recently I’ve been plugging away at my spaceship project.

Right now, I’m creating an engine.

It’s a linked ion repulsor powered by electrically ionizing a xenon mixture (warning: this science is 100% made-up.)

I had trouble getting the level of detail I wanted until I discovered a cool trick. This new technique let me finish the engine quite rapidly with fairly low effort.

Here’s the trick:

Today’s Technique

There’s no quick fast way to get details. You really do have to sit there and spend time modeling them.

The trick is to only do this once.

You need to create a single useful piece of detail that can solve as many of your problems as possible. In my case, I needed to cover some skinny panel areas, so I decided to create a thin flat detail object.

It’s important to create a model that best solves the given problem. For example, this piece of detail won’t work everywhere on my spaceship. It’s only for solving the engine problem.

It took me around 20 minutes to create this shape, but saved me a ton of time in the end. To complete my engine I re-used this model all over the place, and it looks just fine.

Can you spot it?

In several places, I made slight changes. I had to bend one duplicate to fit around a curve, and I had to squash one duplicate to fit in a thinner spot.

All in all it was a massive timesaver. Instead of spending time creating a lot of different details, spend a bit more time to create a decent detail piece, then use that to its full potential.

Next we have a beautiful render:

Really Random Render

Today’s random render is by pompoko:

Based on a 2D work “Singing Doors” by Stefan Große Halbuer

I only have good things to say about this render.

Here’s a little list of them:

The thick, clay-like styling.
The simple-but-not-low-poly style.
The limited color scheme.

And of course my top favorite bit: the plaster flaking off the brick wall.

Score: 10/10

Samuel’s Selections

Paul Chaidesson released a very cool short (think 10 minutes of massive spaceships, made in Blender)
Troy Sobotka’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To Digital Color blog should be required reading for any 3D artist. It does an expert job demystifying the complex topic of color management
Have a look at this cool black-and-white render

Can't think what to blend?

Make an electrical outlet.

P.S. I just released a new short fiction story. Last week I promised it would include a 3D render, but the render flopped. So it got 2D art instead :)

Waterfall

At the end of Time, there was a waterfall.

voyagefiction.substack.com/p/waterfall

P.P.S. Huge thanks to everybody who’s already joined Voyage!

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