“Dancing Taco” Blender work-in-progress

I’ve been working on a Blender project (since yesterday) called “Dancing Tacos.”  Here is my result so far:

Jalapaño pepper from Dancing Tacos (work in progress)

It started out as a simple rig exercise, but as I worked on it I modeled it into a hot pepper (a jalapeño, probably.)

The rig consists of two bones in one armature, linked to the mesh with the Armature modifier.  I am using envelope to influence the mesh’s deformation.  The first model I rigged was quite objectionable and ugly.

The ugly vegitable. Jagged shadows and ineffective texture

But before I went on I decided to change this object into it’s true calling: a hot pepper! 😀

The jalapeño model. The blocky shadow is still apparent.

But as you can see, I had a problem: the texture made it look as though it were some green jewel, and besides that the shadows were extremely blocky and jagged.

So I sent some renders and a .blend to a friend of mine, Tim Formica who kindly fixed the pepper’s texture and the scene’s lighting, and sent me back the file.  When I rendered his result it was like “Wow, this is weird… it’s cool, new, and weird to have my Blender work modified and enhanced by someone else.”

Tim Formica's result

Then I reverse engineered what he did, which was fun. 😉

Tim added subsurface scattering, fixed the lighting, added a plane, added the red to the tip of the pepper stem, and deleted the background colors.  Thank you Tim for all your help!

From there I added the mexican background, the mist effect in the World Buttons, and ultimately came up with the result I showed at the start of this post.  Here is what it looked like when it was rendering:

Rendering the jalapeño pepper for Dancing Tacos

I will probably tweak the pepper some more before I’m satisfied with it, particularly the red in it.

Anyhow, I hope the quick concept turns into a final animation, featuring bouncing vegitables and a mock taco ad. 🙂

God bless and Happ New Year 2009!!!

-b

P.S. Gotta hit the hay, but I will be rendering a little animation overnight…

P.P.S. JaNoWriMo starts … today.  Well, in about 10+ hours for me… 😀  (JaNoWriMo is similar to NaNoWriMo, but some friends and I are doing it in January.)