3D
Projects created using Blender.
Shortly after finishing my first year, I decided to challenge myself and put together the famous “Blender Donut” after seeing a tutorial by Blender Guru on YouTube. He made putting it together look way easier than it was.
To this day, this project remains the most educational; not only was I asked to utilize a number of Blender’s available tools, I also learned about various helpful add-ons (like Node Wrangler and Loop Tools) and how to use them effectively. I had a lot of fun putting this together.
Another project inspired by a tutorial I found on YouTube. It was a tutorial on how you could make stylized, wavy grass using particle systems and colour ramp. Once I had put it together, I felt like making a scene out of it.
The look of the grass reminded me of the newer Legend of Zelda games, so I decided to import a few free models from Sketchfab and an image of clouds in order to create a full scene. Add a bit of music from the games and boom: a cute landscape composition.
I gave myself the challenge of creating something visually pleasing by only using basic shapes. After being inspired by a post I saw on Instagram, I decided to put together an isometric room. I figured I could make most things out of cubes, and I was mostly correct.
After putting together the initial room (first image), I was left feeling like it looked rather dull. With the help of some plant meshes imported from Poliigon, image textures from Google, and some lighting using emission and translucent BSDF nodes, I feel as though I was able to bring quite a bit of life to the scene and was pretty happy with the final result. It felt good to have fun putting in the extra work even if it wasn’t for extra marks on a project. My favourite projects are ones that don’t really feel tedious.
One of the projects we had in our first year was to put together a scene with the theme of “game night”. It involved following a series of instructions to familiarize ourselves with the basics of Blender. It touched upon sculpting (the SORRY!-esque game pieces), using Boolean modifiers to cut out the numbers on the dice, and adding an HDRI in order to bring the scene together. While many of my peers weren’t (understandably) a fan of following written instructions, I had quite a bit of fun assembling this scene.
While we had to follow instructions for a large portion of the assembly, we had some creative freedom in the placement of objects, composition, and lighting. We were also free to add some extra flare if desired, so I made a house of cards and put together some ice cubes in the glass.