4/9/2024 0 Comments Blender cylinder to donutI had heard of digital sculpting in the program ZBrush but I wasn’t ready to plunk down the money for that program just yet, being such a beginner. During my fledgling research I learned that Blender had sculpting tools and this approach immediately appealed to me. I returned to the safety of tutorials with this sculpted dinosaur by artist Zacharias Reinhardt. You get a very detailed education from one person’s point of view, and if you aren’t careful you will end up with gaping blind spots. I think this is one danger of learning via Youtube and other online sources. This is so elementary, but being self taught, I actually didn’t know it at the time. Visual effects for film will have a different technique from modeling for video games, which is different from modeling for a 3D print, etc. I learned that there was more than one way to model based on what the aim of the project is. I began to research 3D outside of the Andrew Price method at this point. My limited knowledge kept putting up restrictions on what I could achieve. At one point I needed to make a hole in the mesh where a screw holds the visor on, and I just spent hours trying to cut that hole without weird shading errors cropping up. I remember trying to translate Andrew’s subsurface techniques to this and just banging my head against the proverbial wall over and over, wondering why it didn’t look right. Regardless, I finished the anvil because I was determined to overcome it.Īfter the anvil I felt like I was ready to take the training wheels off and model my own object, so I chose something way too hard: a knight’s helmet. Andrew’s videos were giving me hints but I did not get the entire picture or how they related to each other. I was missing some key education here – the entire concept of what normals are, what image maps are, and how UV’s work. Every bake I attempted looked off and I didn’t understand why. It was more than intermediate at the time, it was infuriating! Somewhere in the middle Andrew throws in normal baking for adding textural information without geometry, and my mind struggled with the concept. Also, this one was marked as “intermediate,” which I felt like I was ready for It had hard surfaces, texture, and more complicated modeling and geometry than the donut. The donut was satisfying but the anvil just felt more useful. Having no idea what to do next, I decided to take another spin on Andrew’s tutorial series – the Anvil. This experience has become so quintessential to many 3D beginners that it’s a bit cliche to talk about The Blender Donut now, but I would still recommend it to just about anyone looking to get started as an absolute beginner. I remember following every video exactly, duplicating his instructions in Blender and being surprised at the results I was able to achieve. Looking at it now, I laugh to myself because it is so simple, but I learned a tremendous amount from this experience at the time. Going through Andrew Price’s famous Donut Tutorial opened my eyes. I had opened the program before, but never managed to achieve much beyond a cube or cylinder. Back in April of 2020, I was considering how best to get started in 3D and was most attracted to the open source software Blender. Well, it was a toe at first, but then I took the complete plunge!Īnd here it is, my very first baby render. Maybe it will inspire other 2D artists who are considering dipping a toe into the 3D realm like I was. And since April of 2021 will soon be here, it will nearly be a year since I started, a benchmark for what has been one of my biggest years of growth as an artist. Since we are both self taught, the journeys are remarkably similar: a lot of personal struggle on what can sometimes feel like an endlessly meandering path in the dark. It occurred to me that I’ve been doing much the same, but in the opposite direction – moving from 2D to 3D. I was recently reading a blog post by influential Blender educator Andrew Price about his 2 year development in drawing and painting. It’s been a long journey, and while I’ve spoke often about my experience, I’ve never actually put the entirety of what I’ve learned into one post. Since April of 2020, I have been educating myself in 3D. This is a long post in a two part series – if you’re just interested in seeing my latest project, feel free to check it out at my artstation here.
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