This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
Still working on learning Blender, health and family allowing, and building a list of thing I want to make as time goes on. Current goal is still the texturing workflow. Made some good progress through the current tutorial this weekend, but finding time has been tough.
A few years ago I had a bit of a 3d modelling streak, but I mostly used Maya thanks to my school getting the adobe licenses. I really enjoyed the actual modelling over things like texturing or rigging, and never really learned them. What's motivating you to learn Blender? I was mostly into it to make things I thought were cool (guns, tanks). I've been halfheartedly pondering downloading blender over the summer to try and make some sort of short action scene. What's your current project?
I've been an artist in the video games world for more than a decade, but almost all of that time was spent on projects that used fairly lo-fi art, and early on I moved to a stripped-down modelling program. The project I'm current on is wrapping up, and I'm not sure I'll have a job once it does, so I want to brush up on my generalist skills in preparation for a job hunt. I've generally made guns and tanks and spaceships in my free time, but I've always wanted to get deeper into the tech, simply because it allows you to make cooler things; a gun is great, but a gun held by a character is better. A mech is great, but a mech with full texture and rigging stomping around an environment is better.
I've tried to learn Blender before, and it was going somewhat well, but I ended up going back to my old low-key modelling package for work, which killed muscle memory, and I never got back to it. Also, I don't think my approach was nearly organized enough to handle the complexity of Blender. This time, I'm taking a more serious approach:
First, I'm burning my ships. I'm making a personal commitment to never touch my old modelling package again. Blender or bust.
Second, I'm being much more structured about my approach to learning. There's a bunch of tutorials online for learning blender, but rather than just working through them, I've set up a google doc and am taking copious notes of hotkeys, techniques and so forth, essentially writing my own manual. This helps a ton with both retention, and with having a quick reference when I forget things.
Third, there's a ton of "quick tip" content online, showing random disconnected features of the program. I used to see this stuff and think "wow, that's neat", and then forget it. Currently, I'm collecting those links in the same doc, with the goal to work them into my notes and workflow when they become relevant.
Last time I tried learning Blender, the goal was to get to modelling as quickly as possible. This time I'm aiming more to learn the deeper toolset; it's obvious to me that I've wasted a huge amount of time doing things the hard way, when tools are available to make those things much easier, and that's bad both in a professional sense and an artistic one.
My current project is a gun; I've got a pretty good low-poly model, but I want a high-poly, normal bake, textures and simple function animations, the standard game-ready pipeline. I have a bunch of spaceships I'd like to finish the same way, and I've got some characters/environments/action scenes I'd like to try as well, plus a ton of other stuff; I've got a huge backlog of projects and Ideas that I've never had the chops to really execute on.
This tutorial is a really good introduction to the modelling end of things. It's a bit of a slog, but it handles setting up hotkeys and a number of addons for a more efficient workflow, goes through the basic modelling tools, and dips into materials, modifiers, a touch of simulation, and rendering. Be warned, some of the plugins he recommends (Jmesh in particular) currently don't work, and in some cases you'll need to figure out how to work around them.
This tutorial is a good follow-up, and is the one I'm currently working through. The modelling is more intense, and Jmesh being broken meant I needed to take a detour to learn some other methods for handling circular arrays, but it demonstrates a ton of useful techniques and approaches to a lot of standard modelling problems, and gives good working practice with the modifier system.
I've also been working through overviews of the shader and geometry node types, in preparation for texturing and environment generation. I've dipped a bit into some of the simple rigging, but want to tackle true high-poly > normal maps > texturing > rendering before diving into that.
Overall, the thing that makes me excited about Blender is seeing examples of how it seems to bust the general trend of overspecialization. videos like this one are pretty astonishing in terms of what is actually possible with a deeper understanding of the tools. The multiplication of effort is real, and I've got a wealth of experience of how limiting it is to be stuck with the old, slow way of doing things. An obvious example: I've spent probably hundreds of hours modelling rock over the years for various environments. I'm pretty sure I can spend maybe twenty hours learning the geometry nodes system, and then produce rock environments with ten times the fidelity in a small fraction of the time. I'm tired of doing it the stupid way.
Also, if you're comfortable posting any of your art, I'd love to see it!
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