For my pawn, I attempted to draw a figure in the 2D field which I expected to look like a flower, which would have flower powers- of course. However, once I spun the shape into a 3D model, it looked more like an atom bomb, or a water spout. While an atom bomb pawn would certainly have special abilities, I didn’t feel that this was creative, so I decided it would be a water spout pawn that would spray it’s contenders off the board. I tried many different water texture images, but for some reason they all turned my pawn into a different shade of blue rather than the pattern you would expect to see at the bottom of a pool. I said c’est la vie and moved onto the modeling. It took some playing around to find the right sculpting tools to get the effect I wanted. I used flatten on the thin part of the spout to create that sort of movement I would expect down there, and blobbing and clay on the “folds” of water at the top. The central “nub” of water at the top was still square though which looked odd. So I then used the snake hook feature to give it a nice little swirl. I played around with the lighting for a very long time, because the shape of the water fall looked more solitary depending on where the lights were, and I really wanted the water fall to look more alive and as you might see a decorative waterfall at night. There were six different light sources by the time I was happy with it. I like that my piece looks elegant and effective. Overall I am very pleased with my pawn, as I think it looks quite natural, I only wish that the texture worked out better.
I then decided I wanted to mess around with my pawn from Lab 6. At first, I wanted to cut a hole through the middle that would consume its opponents- but I couldn’t find a sculpting feature which could accomplish this. The closes I got was the blob on both sides, but blender didn’t understand that I wanted the blob to open up and make a hole on both sides. So then I thought it would be cool to put a scary face on the pawn that would scare it’s opponents. Weirdly enough the features which I expected to work to add more surface onto the pawn worked in the opposite manner, and I used the scrape tool to add a face shape onto the pawn. I then used blob to make a hole for the mouth, and the elastic deform and grab tool to create eyes and a nose. I played around with the lights for a while until I had it where it looked scariest. The face is not as realistic as I would like it to be, but for just messing around I am pleased.
