My day job is as a software engineer, and until last year I also spent my free time coding various side projects. But I started experiencing burnout and felt anxious every time I tried to work on a project. This was very uncomfortable because it felt like I couldn't express my creativity anymore, so I started looking at non-code ways to be creative.
I tried learning drawing and doing genuary in vvvv. But as part of a M8 visualizer I was making in vvvv, I had to tweak a 3D model in Blender. I had used Blender before, making the donut, messing with physics, but never felt like I knew how to use it.
So now it's been a little over a year since I started, and here are all the half-finished, false starts, the overambitious projects, and the finished art I did this year.
Robot Head🔗
This was the first thing I made, and I was just noodling around trying to make a robot head with camera lens eyes and a dot-matrix mouth. The materials are from Sanctus and the welds were made using an addon.
Pen Effect🔗
When I was trying to learn drawing, I really liked how blue-black ink looked and wanted to see if I could replicate the same pen look in Blender.
Schiit Fulla🔗
I saw a recommendation to try modeling an item you have physically so you can look at it from all angles. So I recreated my Schiit Fulla based off a product photo. Recreating a photo was a great way to learn a bunch of different things in one project. I learned modeling, how to match lighting, and how to make basic procedural materials. I also learned how to use f-spy to match the original camera.
High Voltage Plug🔗
Since the last project didn't use Subdivision Surface (SubD) modeling, I wanted to try another photo recreation that would require using SubD.
Buried Robot🔗
Since I now felt I had a good handle on the basics, I decided to try and make an animation. I didn't end up finishing this one because I was using Ian Hubert's robot arm until I made my own (and I am still working on that).
Torn Leaf🔗
This was a fun project for TodePond's torn leaf gallery. It was neat to do something that just looked cool and didn't need to be realistic.
Mechanical Hand Rigging🔗
I wanted to try to learn rigging, so this project was to learn how to do Inverse Kinematics and Forward Kinematics in the same rig.
This finger is based on Ian Davis' hand design. For the rig, I was figuring out how to do bone constraints to create secondary movement.
Spaceships🔗
This was another attempt at making an animation. I spent a bunch of time trying to make the earth with moving clouds and then struggled with how to model the ships themselves.
Pliers🔗
I recreated mbt3d's pliers to learn more complicated SubD modeling and how to make procedural wear on materials.
Machined material🔗
I wanted to make some materials that resembled machined metal for the next project. So this was my attempt at making material that looked like it was face milled using multiple wave textures and an empty.
Chamfered Block🔗
Since I now could make a material that resembled machined metal, I recreated InheritanceMachining's un-chamfered block (and added chamfers). I learned a lot about mixing noise together to make it look more complex; all the materials are procedural.
Kinetic Rush🔗
This was the first createwithclint challenge I tried to participate in. I created a blockout but struggled to figure out how to take the next steps to fill out the scene.
Infinite Pumpkin🔗
Experiment to learn how to use the new Ray Portal BSDF to make an infinite loop animation.
Machine Shop🔗
This project is still ongoing, but I started it to figure out how to make the jump from blockout to modeling the scene that I got stuck on doing the Kinetic Rush challenge.
Smile🔗
It wasn't until this project that I tried using Blender's geometry nodes. The smile is a curve that uses geometry nodes to turn it into a mesh and then fill it with little emissive cylinders.
Chasm's Call: Ares V🔗
This was my submission for createwithclint's Chasms Call challenge. This was made over three weeks and put everything I had learned throughout the year together into one project. The astronauts and rocks are from the BMS Astro Nova pack.
Hacking Device🔗
This is a hacking device from Cowboy Bebop in the episode Bohemian Rhapsody. Since I had been doing photorealism for all the other projects, I wanted to try something that was non-photorealistic (NPR). I used Malt3D as an alternative rendering engine for Blender with custom shaders to replicate the anime look of the original image.
Next Year🔗
This year was spent learning many different parts of Blender and doing many photo recreations. I am looking forward to doing more art and figuring out my style next year.
If you liked this, you can find more of my art at gamingrobot.art.