Shoving your time into the Blender - Part 1: "I'm goin' modellin'"

 

Once upon a different lifetime I was a struggling student, living down in That There Brighton, commuting between a flat in Kemp Town (allegedly a really dangerous area to live, but I never saw that side of it) and a foundation course in Art and Design. 

Back in the day, we could choose to specialise in our 2nd year and (stupidly) at the time I had grand visions of buffing up my animation skills, jetting across the world to work at Pixar. Stupid deluded fool that I was. Anyway, the upshot of the course was that I did OK, built a nice little showreel in 3D Studio Max, and went on to achieve fame and fortune as a top animator....*

(*a complete and utter lie. I went back to working in IT of course...)

I still have a lot of fondness for that time, but also still managed to keep a hand in with 3D Studio right up to the point where my old copy of 3DS Max would no longer run on any of my home kit. That was the end of me pulling control points around to make cool and interesting 3D models. Or so I thought....

A while ago I started looking at Blender which seemed almost too good to be true. Here was a package that, UI wise, was a pretty close fit for 3D Studio with some differences, but essentially the same methods of modelling and rendering that I'd been used to all those years ago. Blender is a free download (though if you're like me, conscientious about folk who provide absolutely brilliant quality software for free, conscientious enough to bung them a few quid via their donations page) and it's rapidly become something of an industry standard for 'home' enthusiasts who just want to dabble in a bit of 3D on their modest PCs or Macs. 

As a Mac user now using a half decent M1-based Mac Mini, I figured it was time I cracked open Blender again to find out whether I could still make anything in it. I love geeky stuff, as you know, and I'm obsessed with the sort of chaotic and scrappy architecture you find dotted around Japan's Prefectures, most of the buildings are old and look like they could fall down at any minute. 

I'm also a big fan of Initial D (the street-racing Manga published by Kodansha) so I figured I'd have a crack at building the infamous Tofu shop from the comic in Blender. 

As you can see by the header image, I started to make fairly "OK" progress with the modelling. Blender is fairly forgiving for noobs like me, and I started using all the old techniques I'd once used on 3DS, making loop cuts, lofting surfaces and generally arsing around until the scene started to come to life. 

The more I worked on this, the more I started to find the limitations of my skills. I love anything that presents an ongoing challenge. Like trying to think around the simple task of creating a trellis. Sounds easy? Try it!

The scene looked OK but definitely needed that iconic Toyota FT86 Trueno, the tofu delivery car that is actually a top drift-spec racer. Blender models can be obtained free from lots of places like BlenderExchange so rather than trying to recreate the car myself, I downloaded a model as a prop. It's currently the best looking thing about the scene :)

I'm still learning Blender, so at the moment I'm tackling one of the most complicated bits of it - texture wrapping, and UV mapping (probably the only part where Blender becomes a bit of a blurred and complicated beast). But I'm determined to persevere and work out how to apply some better and more natural looking textures to my scenes. 

This is what the render looks like.Yeah, it's not great. My camera and lighting work leaves a lot to be desired but I'm busily soaking up tutorials on YouTube, and learning as I go. 

It's a lot of fun but like any artistic pursuit, you suddenly realise that hours have flown by That's a good thing for an anxious clown though, right?