I've been spending a bit more time with Blender, and it's beginning to make me remember how utterly addicted I was to 3D Studio Max back in the late 90s, around the same time as I was finishing off my last showreels on an animation module on my Foundation course.
Back then 3D Studio Max was a big deal, able to run on my meagre Pentium 133mhz based PC, taking an absolute age to render an animated scene (I remember leaving a render running all day for around 40 seconds of animation and counted myself lucky that it got done that quickly).
In the world of Blender though, the above Donut scene took considerably less time (but made me feel insanely hungry / craving a sweet treat by the time I'd procedurally geometry-noded those sprinkles all over it).
There's a fantastic YouTuber called BlenderGuru whose stock-in-trade is providing witty and watchable tutorials on the darker arts in Blender modelling and rendering, and he's been putting together the "Donut" tutorial for just about every release in Blender. A 15 year veteran with the package, there's not a lot he doesn't know about it - and the results he comes up with are amazing. In fact just watching tutorials on YouTube I find that though it's my least favourite way to learn anything, there's far more to pick up and digest when learning that way as opposed to picking through someone's rather dry text-and-pictures tute on the web.
The guy who first came up with Blender wanted to put it out there as a serious challenger for hobbyists and those of us working on a budget, to allow them to use a package that could produce professional results with an easy to use UI and intuitive features to give novices a leg up the modelling and animation ladder. Blender is now an industry favourite and though most professionals will opt for Maya, Unreal Engine 5 or ZBrush, Blender can do a heck of a lot of amazing things without costing you an arm and a leg. Even the sculpting stuff is a really nice 'rival' to ZBruch which - last time I looked at least - Still had the world's worst user interface (though arguably it might have slightly better tools).
I love building scenes in it, just seeing what can be done with the basic eevee (realtime) renderer
My models and renders might be pretty basic but I'm getting to the point where the actual 'problem solving' aspect of modelling is all part of the fun. Looking at a real-world object or scene you even start to break it down into 'which primitive could I use for that bit? Or which intuitive tool in Blender could I use to short-cut making that weird shape?"
I've just started dabbling with Materials and Geometry Nodes - and that stuff is like witchcraft once you start to figure out how it all works.
There's something weirdly fascinating about having a digital workspace that feels like an infinite box of lego or an intangible model kit, where the possibilities of what you can build are limited only by your imagination (or in my case your lack of skills in the package itself). The founder of Blender recently admitted that money means nothing to him, and the satisfaction of knowing that his development team are putting a seriously powerful piece of art creation magic directly into people's hands is far more rewarding just makes me wish more folk out there were like him. What a guy.
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