Learning Blender

Over the last few weeks I’ve been learning Blender, an open source and extremely powerful free 3d software.

With a long time interest in special effects I’ve wanted to explore this for a long time. I actually downloaded Blender a few years ago but found its UI to be indecipherable and quickly dropped it. But it’s new version is way more intuitive and usable. Having just learned the basics of Fusion, the node based portions of the software were much easier to understand. I lucked into the BlenderGuru on YouTube. He was giving an updated basic training for the new version and I followed along as they episodes dropped.

Starting with geometric messages and basic sculpting I was able to create the basic form of the doughnut. Full 3D creating is a slow and iterative process.

Then it was time to create the basic material, a sprinkle particle system, texture paint the detail and create a more pastry bump map.

Once that was tweaked and retweaked it was time to build a cup and saucer. The best part of this education is to learn to do something wrong and then cover it up so you didn’t have to start it over from scratch. Also how cool glass looks with its distortions and refractions.

I’m enjoying sharing these small victories even though this is the 3d modeling equivalent of a spelling bee. Anyway here we go. The next lesson was to then create a liquid to fill the glass.

Which is neat to see how the program handles the disruption of light they the object but it should really be more breakfast appropriate.

The coffee material taught about the way light moves thru a murky liquid which is a color but also absorbs more light as it goes thru.

I slowly learned these lessons over weeks and I probably have to do them again to have this information stick better as shortcuts and operations fade slowly back out the mind without reinforcement.

In photo it’s been so long since I’ve felt the awkwardness of being a novice. It’s terrible and exciting all at once.

Once I had the whole scene set up the final lessons where in texturing with downloaded materials for the counter and create a background wall. I changed the frosting to chocolate (which I got the actual color code off google to make sure it looked right.
Deviating from what BlenderGuru was telling people for the camera settings and decided to stick to focal lengths that are available for macro. The tutorial was to use a 35mm up close and craft the image according to that. The problem is macro lenses don’t come in 35mm. So I went with a 100mm as that’s more like what you’d expect to see. And after enabling the depth of field I stopped it way down to f22 and focused mid doughnut. This is because when you want the focus to cover a photo in macro you focus in the middle of it and the front may be a touch soft but the whole object is in possible focus. And here it is…

Now as I rarely write in here I would like to make it more of a habit. Please comment below and check out my Instagram account which I am much more active on.