Casey
From Sketch to Render in Blender in a week
Translating my skills from Maya to Blender. Having never used Blender I thought this exercise would be helpful in identifying gaps in my knowledge and seeing my foundational knowledge put to use in adapting to a completely new program.
Day 1 saw the facial and body sculpt come to fruition. It has been a hot minute since I’ve box modeled a face but given my knowledge as a rigging artist, once I grasped the tools and Blender’s UI, it was cinch laying down the edge loops.
Day 2 was focused on styling the hair and the first layer of clothing.
There were tools in Blender that made modeling a pleated skirt easy. Even small features like the checker selection and loop tools made multi-step tasks easy. It was daunting to think about since it’s an asymmetrical object, but learning to model one made for a very educational exercise.
Amidst this, I remodeled the hat giving it cleaner geometry and a fluffier appearance to enhance its charm, in anticipation of perhaps one day animating it as a separate element to support squash and stretch.
Day 3, Rigify, rigify, rigify. Seems every rigging resource I looked up says to use rigify. After I figured out how to add bones to the generator it became abundantly clear why. It was quick and clean and moved me right into weight painting and modeling the milk tea.
Day 4 was textures and materials, a lot of time was spent figuring out translating shading networks across EEVEE and cycles. Figuring out translucency and diffusion and getting the cup into the perfect cheap plastic as I remember from my childhood.
Day 5, rendering and compositing!
I like to maintain the mindset that youth is defined by a growth mindset. As long as I keep my curiosity, there’s nothing I can’t accomplish by putting my mind towards it.