Progress Report

Since last post, I have worked more on my headphones project. After cleaning it up and making it better with my mentor last post, my goal has been to try and ad two joints so that the headphones can fold up like they do in real life. During this process, I made some bad decisions that were hard to change back or fix, and ended up needing my mentors help during our meeting to fix them. First, I separated the headphones into two pieces and began modelling the joint area. I first made a groove in the side of the headphones’ neck. However, when the joint turns, part of the inside of the headphones’ neck is visible, so I had to give it a thickness, rather than having no thickness. This thickness caused destructive artifacts and bad subdivision to happen as it interrupted the inset of the groove. My mentor helped me by again showing me that there were more ways to bevel. So far, I had only been bevelling by weight and manually, but he showed me I could set my bevel modifier to angle, which bevels only edges of a certain angle. He then introduced the idea of applying this bevel in order to manually fix the problems it caused.

Below is a video of the joint in action. In the video you can also see the weird shadows, pinching, and other problems with shading that I have been talking about in the paragraph above.

Screen Recording 2022-04-03 at 9.57.49 AM

During our meeting, we weren’t able to fix all of the problems, but it was still a good learning experience. While I learned a lot from this experience with this project, I think most importantly I have learned that I shouldn’t have jumped right into modelling a fairly complex model like this. While I may have taken two very basic tutorials, I think that I need some more guided practice to avoid these mistakes I have been making, and then I can get back to making my own models. So, I am pushing pause on this headphone modelling endeavour, and am instead going to work on modelling a chair using Blender Guru’s Beginner Modelling Tutorial, which is the next playlist of tutorials he recommends for those who have finished his donut tutorials. While it is regrettable to leave a project unfinished, my hope is that these tutorials will show me many good techniques that will prevent the hardships I have been having with my headphones in the first place. For example, as I began watching, he put a lot of importance on using blueprints, rather than just pictures, or a real life object, like I have been using. From what I have seen so far of his tutorials, I think they will be a big help.

Mentor

So far, the most difficult challenge I’ve run into when it comes to mentorship is communication and coordination with my mentor. Since we have to meet through video call, it can be hard to communicate and coordinate in a few ways. First, just straight up talking can be hard, as mikes can sometimes clip or cut out and I often have to ask him to repeat sentences he’s said. Second, it makes it very hard for him to help me clean up my mesh. In person, we could both use the same computer, and we wouldn’t have to screen-share, and do each change that he made twice on our own separate documents. I could focus more on what he is saying if I didn’t have to follow along with my own project, and could just watch him make changes.

As for what’s working well, I think having reason to spend a lot of time with my mentor has worked well this year. Last year, I didn’t actually work on my project with my mentor, as that would be kind of hard, and instead just asked him questions that I had, or asked for his help on the softer part of stop motion animation, like brainstorming ideas and storylines for videos. This type of conversation didn’t last long, as once the questions are answered, that’s kind of it. This year, however, we could actually work on my project together, and so we’re able to spend upwards of an hour on video calls. I think this has been beneficial, as I have been able to learn more from my mentor, and get help from him directly.

I think in my next meeting, I could do a better job of making sure I learn what I need to learn from my mentor. The problem with working on my project together, and following along with him, is that sometimes I can just do stuff he does without needing to find out why, and so it isn’t very helpful for my overall learning journey. I can make sure this happens by prefacing our meetings by making sure my mentor knows that actual progress on improving the model isn’t as important to me as learning why we do what we do to improve the model.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, like I said before, I will be putting my own project on pause, and watching and following along with more modelling tutorials. During my next meeting, I will likely not work on my project with my mentor as much, but rather ask him questions I have about modelling techniques that I have learned in the tutorial series. We may also look at the model I made in the tutorial together, and see how we can improve that.