On the 25th of October, 2023, I decided that something I had always put off as 'impossible for someone like me' was finally worth trying. I had been working in an educational system that had worn me down and sapped all energy for external tasks for 8 years, and in August I had left and started a new job. I was surprised at how much energy I now suddenly had, and wanted to funnel it into something new.
Plus I defs had a great idea of a small game and I needed a new skill.
So, with a Udemy private plan subscription and time on my hands I decided to learn blender.
Why write this?
Well, this is partially for myself, it's partially to build a single page with all my work on and it's partially to help show what 1 or 2 days a week do to your skills over a month. Please note: all this work bar maybe one or two are built by following tutorials!
The work
In chronological order, primarily so you can see the change.
Day 1 - October 28th
This introduction was a simple one. Some details about basic model construction, the sculpting tool, emissions and HDRs. The thing that I really learnt here though was how to move around Blender.
Day 2 - October 29th
I was quite excited based on what I had done in the first day, so I went a little hard.
Scene 1 - Dungeon
Building out an actual scene was an interesting one. The big thing that I learnt from this particular scene was the idea of imperfections. A lot of the work putting together each of these assets was about making them look worn by chipping edges, making cracks, all that kind of jazz.
Important note, this was the first time I modelled something outside of the tutuorial, as some of the assets here were either not included in the step by step OR were modelled by pausing the tutorial and doing it, then comparing it to the tutorial outcome.
Scene 2 - Low poly dinosaur
First time modelling off a reference, and it really showed the process of how to make somethign based of a sketch. I found it interesting that the reference provided for this tutorial was fundamentally flawed, and required active choices to deviate from what was presented. This was the first model I completely ruined the vertexes of and had to repair my work. This is something that I thought I had mastered but that came back to haunt me.
At this point I still hadn't unwrapped a texture, all this was node based materials.
Day 3 - November 4th
I guess I should learn some unwrapping. This felt almost redundant, it felt like a higher end version of the dinosaur but I have less interest in planes. I did end up outputting a cute little video for it but otherwise it was creation based on a tutorial and a reference. I also didn't have any references for the wings so I just kind of slapped some other parts of the plane on there.
Day 4 - November 5th
Roooockie. I had not completed the huge 'introduction to blender' tutorial set I had been following at this point but to be honest after the plane I felt a bit done on it. So instead, I made this guy. Why not. Elementals are cool.
On this model I learnt just because I felt like I knew what I was doing, I really didn't. He was cute, but so fundamentally flawed, for example the stalks on the mushrooms were bevelled too hard, and the geometry wraps inside itself making it impossible to do anything with this model.
I also tried to texture paint, not that it went well and this was the last time I tried to do anything like that for a while.
OH, also I felt like he wasn't looking cartoony enough so I attempted to create a grease pencil system for outlining him. It looks ok in this final render but it does to an extent feel like I cheated to make him look better.
Day 5 - November 11th
I loved this piece. I saw this idea on youtube for mushrooms in a bottle done in blender and I had to follow along. This is an incredibly polished model, with absolutely no textures beyond just well set up materials, but I think it was the first flawless model I put together.
I learnt about curves and the use of subdivision modifiers to create beautiful work with a base that was little more than 12 poly surfaces.
Fun fact, Rockie was 600 polys, this is 48k.
Day 6 - November 12th
HILL GUY. Uses almost all the techniques from the mushroom bottle but extrapolated into some more complex shapes. I love this guy.
Day 7 - November 18th
This was the largest model I had done by a lot. I don't think any other individual model took even half the time this took, except maybe the dungeon (which was so early in my learnings that most of that time was taken learning new techniques).
Nothing in this model was really 'new', but god damn was it taken to a new level of complexity. The house alone had beams on almost every surface which were individually modeled. This was all still low poly renders, but the whole island was about 3.4k polys, with the house alone being 1.5k of those.
All the colours were still just good use of materials, with no textures applied to anything at all.
I also discovered how to render out the background withn transparency, which was fun.
Day 8 - November 19th
I LEARNT SO MUCH ON THIS ONE. Primarily I learnt how to texture paint directly onto the model and I LOVED it. Seriously, this was the part of the process I thought I would be worst at, but I had such a great time with it. So many lessons.
I won't say they were all good lessons though. You may notice that the body and top rim are quite low detailed compared to some of the other sections.
Guess which idiot typed the wrong numbers into the 'create a new texture' textbox.
The overall texture was 1024 rather than what I expected it to be (2048). On top of that this was my first time unwrapping a texture properly for painting and lets just say some important sections were NOT given the space they deserved for how important they were.
ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: This was the first time I didn't lean on the lighting or material node strcute to make a thing look like a thing. Metal, stone and wood was represented purely through the texture painted on, instead of uping a roughness or a metallic node on a shader. This actually was a big eye opener on how some of the things I had been eyeballing and thinking 'not perfect, but good enough' can be refined just a bit more.
