This week my aim was to familiarize myself with the Blender workspace by focusing on creating a 3D model. After searching around on YouTube I decided on using a beginner’s tutorial created by Blender Guru. The first part of this tutorial series can be found here. I felt this would be a perfect start to my learning as it goes through the entire process of modeling, shading, animating, and rendering a donut from start to finish with step-by-step instructions. My completed donut as well as a gallery showing some progression in my model can be seen below:

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Making it all the way through the tutorial was a huge time commitment. And while I had expected the process to be time consuming it surpassed my expectations. The tutorial series I chose is comprised of 16 parts which, all together, have a watch time of just over 6 hours. That being said, it covered many aspects of 3d modeling I had not even considered such as lighting. Even though the tutorial went beyond the scope of what I had initially planned on learning in my first week, I decided to commit to completing it. The creator Blender Guru did such a fantastic job of showing every step and explaining things in beginner friendly terms. I also appreciated that while the tutorial was step-by-step, there was still freedom to add my own details and make design decisions.

Ultimately my Donut took around 8-9 hours to complete. I enjoyed the learning process so much I decided I wanted to test what I had learned by creating a new object without any guidance. I decided I would create an apple. It seemed appropriate as a future educator, and I felt it would allow me to apply what I had learned without getting too complicated. I also wanted to experiment with methods of documenting my progress. I decided to record my screen while working on my apple model in order to create a timelapse. The video below shows my timelapse, I should note that I did not record the entire process as I am still experimenting with the idea. There was also a lot of trial and error I did not want to include.

In total modeling and animating the apple took around 6-7 hours. I was very pleased with how it turned out, especially the colouring.

Reflection

I believe YouTube is a perfect resource for learning this kind of skill. As a beginner I feel it would be totally overwhelming to hop into Blender without being shown where to find the various tools required and how to properly use them.

Key things I got to practice include:

• Building 3D models using the mesh system as well as sculpting
• Colouring, shading, and using textures
• Lighting the object/scene
• Simple animation (rotating the object)
• Rendering settings
• Compiling Renders into a full video

Thoughts moving forward:

• This learning project is a huge time commitment. I may need to adjust my expectations of what I can actually achieve each week.
• As I move forward with learning more complex animation, I will need to limit how much detail I put into my models. Both due to the time it would take to create but also render. (The 10 second donut clip took 1.5 hours to render)
• In future weeks if I am focusing on learning how to animate, it may be in my best interest to find and use models created by others online.
• I think it will be difficult to find resources in other locations besides YouTube. It will be something I will have to explore.

Plans for next week:

• I plan on learning how to prepare a humanoid model for animation. I will try to create a model myself and set of the rigging so I can move individual limbs.
• I will most likely use more tutorials from YouTube but see if I can find other sources.