What is Blender??
I love Blender! Blender has been my step into the world of 3D. If you don't know, Blender is an open-source 3D modeling tool, sculpting tool, VFX tool, video editor - it's a bunch of things in one. It is truly the Swiss Army knife of the 3D world. Not easy to pick up or learn, but if you can figure it out, it is an invaluable tool.
My Blender Journey
Round 1
My first time using Blender went as well as it could have. I initially started back in high school during my junior year when I was eager to try to make a game. I decided to open up Unity Game Engine and figure out how to do so. Though, you do need assets, and in order to get those assets, I decided to try to make them in Blender. The first thing I ever did was follow a video on making a floating island thing in Blender. Most people usually start out with the donut tutorial from Blender Guru, but that was not me. I believe this was as soon as Blender 2.8 came out, which was the revolutionary version that overhauled the entire UI and made it really nice to use. That project ended up lasting around a month, and then I pretty much never touched Blender again for the rest of high school, as there was really no need to. Blender was just too hard for me to pick up, and I never really had the desire to go check it out again.
Round 2
My second foray into Blender was right before college, funny enough. I'd seen a video where someone took their entire room and remodeled it in Blender. I thought that was really cool because I was about to head off to college and wanted a memory of what my room looked like before this big step in my life. I painstakingly took about three days to model my entire room as well as I could from a video capture, and then spent a good 30 hours working through and adding every little detail I possibly could to my Blender room. The idea was to turn this into a VRChat world so that people could join and they would be in my room, or I could set my VRChat home to be my room and walk around it potentially if it was synced up. This idea really forced me to dig into Blender and learn a lot more about it.
And this is when I started learning about more of the artistic side of Blender. I wasn't quite fully into the style that I like today, but it is definitely where I learned the fundamentals of Blender, like fully understanding what UV unwrapping and all that stuff was. Around this time, I also got into doing fluid simulation. I made a fluid simulation of a river flowing with glowing particles in it, and I was really happy about doing that even though it was me just following a YouTube tutorial and rendering it in Cycles.
It truly did open up my eyes to how easy it was to actually create a fluid simulation and how easy it was to make these kind of realistic scenes that I could almost imagine myself in.
My college has something called the Aggie Coding Club. In this club, I can work on projects over the course of the semester that utilize my skills and at the end of the semester present to the rest of the club and see what other people did with their projects. My first project was something called Brute VR. It was a game made in Unity Game Engine where it was a VR game kind of like Blade and Sorcery. This was right after I had modeled my entire room and gotten a bunch of experience with Blender, so I knew how the pipeline worked and how to make decent objects from scratch. It was a very lucky break because then not only did I get to spend 30 hours in Blender, I got to spend 200 to 300 more developing assets and coding the game to be something coherent in VR. But after this project ended, I didn't really pick up Blender again for at least a couple of months.
Round 3
This is my current phase of the journey. I found a channel called Kevandram and saw a video of him making something stylized. He used something called grease pencil and created a little bakery, and that blew my mind. It looked so good and I didn't even know something like this was possible in Blender. This is like a completely new art style direction that I didn't even know could exist, and I immediately fell in love with it. This is my current style that I really love doing because:
- it's easy to render and there's not much GPU power needed to generate a single, good-looking frame
- I just really love the cartoon aesthetic So I binged every single video Kevandram had and started learning how to use the Blender shader editor to create some nice toon shaders. This eventually led to me learning about watercolor-styled toon shading, which is what I really love today and what I usually try to aim towards. I felt like I needed a way to express myself and my journey through Blender while also potentially sharing whatever I'm doing with the world in some way, shape, or form. So I decided to make a YouTube channel that I will not be naming here. I now upload pretty much every other day with tiny YouTube shorts where I kind of just check out something new or try to keep the series going because at this point it's a streak and I don't want it to end. And this is why it's on my blog because now that I have all this kind of stuff, there is a bunch of technology that goes into storing all these Blender files and making sure that I have backups and all that stuff in case things go wrong.
The Future??
So that's what I'll be mostly talking about here. Now that you've got a brief understanding of my Blender journey, I guess I'll post stuff that I make and behind-the-scenes stuff on this blog.
