I decided to try learning some 3d modeling. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been following this beginner Blender tutorial where I had to make donuts. (Link to the tutorial series on Youtube.) Here’s my output!
This image took around 40 minutes to render. I had to do 2000 samples per tile which is why it was so slow. I was getting too much noise/graininess at lower sampling rates.
I didn’t follow the tutorial exactly. My plate is square and made of glass for one thing. The chocobutternut donut wasn’t part of the tutorial, I just wanted to try it (obviously did not turn out too well and all those orange particles on the donut probably really slowed down the render lol). I also didn’t bother too much with the stuff in the last two videos of the series which involved adjusting the lighting and other stuff to make the image prettier (wasn’t really interested). I actually also tried to model a fork (not in the tutorial), but I couldn’t get the tines right and gave up.
A long time ago I read an interview in an old PC gaming mag about how they implemented Age of Empires and there was an image of a 3d mesh of a knight on horseback and I remember thinking “That looks really complicated, I’ll probably never be able to do something like that.”
And now that I’ve tried this tutorial, I have to agree with that initial assessment – any complex modelling would surely try my patience. But I was also pleasantly surprised with how advanced Blender is – I sort of imagined that you had to position and adjust all the mesh nodes/vertices/faces by hand a lot, but actually there’s a ton of functions to make some common operations simpler (but it’s still a lot of work).
One complaint is that Blender’s user interface is very obtuse and daunting though – I don’t usually do video tutorials but I doubt I could have figured this stuff out on my own. Though I suppose it can’t be helped given the sheer complexity of the task involved.
I’m probably not going into any sort of significant 3d modelling or 3d artwork soon (like I said, not enough patience), but it was good to give it a try so at least I have a passing knowledge of some of the concepts involved.
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