I am rather rubbish at keeping my blog up to date, but I’ll try my best to put everything on here.

My Research and Development group wanted to use everyone’s area of expertise as much as they could, so that no one would feel left out and so the workload spread naturally and evenly. So my job in the group was anything visual, except for the promo video that we have done. I designed every logo and piece of merchandise we needed and intended to use. Approximately one and a half weeks before our presentation date my group told me that they wanted an animated 3D model of a brain implant distributed by a fictional company called Saylor Industries. So I spent week 8 and 9 of Semester A trying to figure out Blender a little more while simultaneously building something remotely decent looking. Our group ‘leader’ told me what he wanted the microchip to look like. His guidelines were: ‘ Just make it look like a microchip that Google or Apple would have made to control your mind. Very nice looking, maybe all white, with their logo on it.’

I looked up microchips and brain implants to get a better idea of what it should look like and noticed that actual brain implants look rather like a tiny mechanical pill than anything close to a microchip. So I used my artistic freedom and made the model look like a microchip instead. The reason behind that decision was, a tiny cube with pointy metal rods sticking out of it, that is supposed to pierce the squishy substance that is our grey matter, is more intimidating and frightening than a sleek pill-shaped object the size of a grain of rice. I also wanted to give the microchip an even more unsettling look and therefore tried to make it look like a bug or a spider, by giving it thick leg-like metal rods.

To create the microchip I used basic techniques such as scaling and extruding faces from the base cube. When my model was done I tried to apply what I learned about UV unwrapping in the Unreal Engine 4 workshops, but came across a problem when I UV unwrapped. The individual faces of the model were scattered all over the place. I tried to find out what I had done wrong by randomly pressing buttons, but that of course didn’t resolve the problem. After giving my laptop to Jon Holmes to ask for help, the problem was solved in less than 1 minute. It turned out that I just simply forgot to apply rotation and scale before I UV unwrapped. I spent hours on trying to fix this problem and am still amazed that it was only two clicks that I forgot to do. From then on I very rarely forget to apply rotation and scale before unwrapping. But if I do, I remember this and immediately know how to fix it. Now when I worked on this model , I was still quite clueless about how Blender works and therefore played around with it quite a bit until I either had to ask for help to fix it or achieved a likeable result I didn’t know how I achieved. So I’ll try my best to explain the mistakes I made and how I fixed them.

Above you can see that I exported the model’s UV map and put the Saylor Industries logo on it using photshop. I wanted to emboss the logo into the surface of the microchip, the way Apple does it on their laptop chargers. In order to do that I followed a tutorial on youtube that suggested that there is a very quick and super easy way to do that. I created a new material, then a new texture, uploaded the texture file from above, scrolled down in the texture setting window, went to ‘Geometry’, switched on ‘Normal’ value and that was it. And then the above right happened. In the tutorial it doesn’t say how you can tell the texture to wrap around the object with the help of the UV data, so what Blender did was handle the texture like a normal flat jpeg and wrap it around the mesh without recognizing and allocating the seperate panels. When I realised that, I put the Saylor logo on a 4096×4096 white panel and recreated the steps from earlier. And that worked fine, the way the tutorial promised. But when I rendered it there was nothing, the logo wasn’t visible in the slightest, so I deemed this tutorial not helpful and a bit of a waste of time.

After that I tried to find other tutorials that could help me and found an easy to recreate tutorial on youtube about how to make glossy plastic in Blender. This tutorial worked flawless and I was able to create a glossy white plastic material for my microchip. I then created an image texture node, uploaded my Saylor Industries logo from earlier and plugged it into the top Diffuse node. This left me with the finished microchip. This tutorial helped me a lot with understanding how the node tree works, because I really didn’t know how to use it, even though I knew what certain things do. The last thing I had to do for this project was to animate it. Thankfully the animation needed was a simple rotation for about 30 seconds. I have done similar animations back in school with Cinema4D, so it was only a matter of finding the buttons and settings, this tutorial helped me with that. Below you find the finished animation that was then used in a fictional promo video for Saylor Industries implants.