Week 1 - Barrel and Tourist Model

First proper time 3D modelling. Followed along Brackey's tutorial for making a barrel on Youtube and found it all fairly straightforward, except for UV mapping, where I started having difficulty making Blender replicate what Brackey was doing.

The second model is an object chosen from a Tasmanian tourist destination (in this case a vase-statue-thingy at Port Arthur). My biggest breakthrough was overlaying a grid on the source image which stopped me unsuccessfully eyeballing the scale. My biggest frustrations were using the boolean modifier with the difference operation, which only seemed to want to work when specific stars were aligned, and when I went to bake ambient occlusion into the vase-statue-thingy my PC was AWOL for 5 hours. I cheated on the texture for the vase and didn't make any seams with the UV mapping, I just found a free texture online and slapped it on the whole thing. It actually looks pretty good on the spherical bit in the middle.