Over this summer I decided to get more into 3D Modeling. Since 3ds Max hasn't been the greatest experience for me, I figured I'd try learning Blender since it is free and looked intriguing. At first glance, the UI was absolutely beautiful. The dark color scheme and gray tones complimented by a poppy orange helped me feel a lot more comfortable and less overwhelmed, unlike 3ds Max which immediately welcomes you with bright whites and turquoise blue. To add on to that, Blender opened within a few seconds, significantly differing from 3ds Max which makes your computer growl and takes several minutes. Overall from first impression, Blender felt a lot smoother and more comforting than 3ds Max. Another great thing about Blender, that comes with it being free, is tons of great tutorials that are easily accessible on YouTube. Blender Guru and CG Fast Track are both extremely detailed and go at great paces. They give a great tour through the program for newbies such as myself, contrasting from my experience with 3ds Max tutorials which felt overwhelming and never properly touched on all the basic functions of the program. Blender Guru has a great personality and is someone I would watch just for entertainment, making 3D Modeling more of a fun activity rather than a task. I began with his Doughnut Tutorial and it touched on all the significant features in Blender, helping me explore my interests and get a hang of all the basics. This is the final render from the doughnut scene that the tutorial walked me through. It introduced me to several different modeling techniques and helped give a lot of variation through making both the cup/plates and doughnut. I fell in love with a lot of features on Blender that were new to me, such as sculpting and compositing. Blender also has a completely different workflow from 3ds Max, with features such as Loop Cuts and the Knife Tool which made it much more intuitive. It was really fun to try so many new things such as the particle system, sculpting, hand painting, advanced material compositing, modeling off of reference, adding in custom materials, and much more! After the doughnut tutorial, I moved on to another introductory level tutorial that came from an industry professional and showed some different modeling techniques. From this tutorial I got more experience with the Eevee Renderer rather than Cycles Renderer and also tried more advanced modeling techniques such as in creating the handle. One of the coolest parts was using the Stamp Tool in order to handpaint the symbols on the sword. I then moved on to the next tutorial in the series which involved composing a scene using the sword I made, which was much more complicated. Through this I got a much stronger grasp on rendering and compositing, as well as using/finding outside resources such as the rocks and character shown. Overall I think Blender is an extremely well optimized program that runs surprisingly smooth despite how many features it has. It was a much greater beginning experience than 3ds Max and I feel like I got a firm grasp of the program through better tutorials and a more navigable UI as well as modeling workflow. However, it was nice to be able to carry over some of my experience from 3ds Max so that it was less overwhelming. I would love to see Blender be more widely taught and integrated into the industry as time goes by, because I think it is a top tier program that made much more sense to me. Summary:
References: Sword Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHv4VDoCwYc Doughnut Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4 Blender Citation: Community, B. O. (2018). Blender - a 3D modelling and rendering package. Stichting Blender Foundation, Amsterdam. Retrieved from http://www.blender.org
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AuthorMy name is Quinn Peterson! I will be reflecting about my art work in this blog! Archives
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