Blender Saga: Prelude

The end of spring quarter at college brought with it a completed experimental animation project. Made in Blender, an open-source 3D creation suite, I figured out some basic features to move a camera around a surreal environment of cubes, floating planes, and grease-pencil animated objects. Towards the end of my time, I realized that the initial intimidation factor of diving into a completely new piece of complex software had worn off, so I wanted to continue learning about what Blender could do. It's been around a month now, and I can certainly say that I have learned quite a bit.

This blog will be my effort to document what I have learned (and will continue to learn), partially to organize my own sources (the unholy amount of reference tabs I keep open could do with some organization), partially to have something solid to lay out and be proud of beyond a few gifs and a general sense of accomplishment when I say "I learned how to do 3D stuff" at the end of this season, and partially to keep myself accountable, since summer is starting to really hit and I have a dearth of other obligations due to a particular pandemic.

I'll start this series off with a few inspirational links to what other people have already done with Blender. Aspirational goals are important to have, after all.

Andry Rasoahaingo makes use of Blender's grease pencil, creating hand-drawn animations that live somewhere between traditional 2D and 3D work.

CG Matter posts a wide variety of tutorials on his YouTube channel; his Patreon page also hosts a treasure-trove of files to pick apart and learn from as well.

Going onto Instagram and searching Nodevember gives a lot of aspirational content as well! The particular focus on nodes isn't an accident; procedural art has always been cool to me.

Looking forward to seeing how far future-me gets!