Lava Lamp

Much of this model utilzes a subdividion modifier! The polycount seen above is before the modifiers have been applied.

The first thing I wanted to make in Blender after graduating was something with my blobby fire character. Looking through the list of primitives to add, I saw the metaball and immediately thought it would be the perfect thing to animate into a lava lamp. After doing some research and concepting several lava lamp designs, I settled for a classic rocket ship.

Modeling the rocket and animating the metaballs was fairly simple, but my biggest issue came from making the toon shader. For this model, I used an emission shader for the toon style and some color ramps for the outlines. I was originally going to use a reverse hull method for the outline, but it didn't work as expected for the glass. I switched to a shader-based method for the outline instead.

Due to this animation's heavy usage of metaballs, I can only export it with its animations as an alembic file. Blender's metaball system allows metaballs to be converted into a mesh, but it doesn't allow multiple frames of animation to be converted. I understood why after some research, so I pivoted to exporting as an alembic so I can eventually import this model into Unity, even without the shaders it currently uses.