Learn Blender with us!

@Phantom and I have started on the grand three-dimensional journey of learning Blender.

This will be a catalog of our experiences as we progress. I know there are some seasoned 3D artists who lurk around here occasionally. Any feedback/pointers/insight would be greatly appreciated.

Also, anyone else who would like to learn along with us, please feel encouraged to do so and post here.

We began by following this tutorial which we were both mostly happy with:

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I actually still haven’t finished the last video in that tutorial. I got distracted playing with lighting.

Here’s where I am:

Here’s a detail from a 10k render. It’s kind of noisy. I wonder where I can control that…

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Here’s my donut render. I didn’t go as crazy as a 10K render, because I’m against house fires.

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Yours is actually finished though.

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Am currently re-rendering my Donut render.

Protip - Do not use a subsurf modifier with a Multires/Displace modifier combo. Unless you have 109GB of RAM, you will crash.

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My re-rendered donut with a tad more realism.

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I remember a while ago I gave this introduction series a try. I was not disappointed with the tutorial! I later tried to do the Anvil project but stopped when I ran into an issue.

If anyone is curious, here is my render:

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That’s some good looking donuts you got there! I am impressed with how it looks!

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Thanks. You’re lighting on that one is pretty great. And you put actual effort into the plate, unlike me, haha.

Working with nodes and modifiers really makes a huge difference in terms of realism.

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After the beginner tutorial, I followed another one that focused on fur and particles.

My render turned out pretty well, I think.

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I tried my hand at modeling a rabbit, but it turned more into a nightmare. I made a few too many rogue loopcuts, so some of the edges are a bit too sharp on the right ear and right eye, so that’s something that I have to work on.

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My latest render was great practice for modeling from a reference image, and working with emissions and glass.

Tutorial here:

My render here:

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I’m not new to blender but I’ll use this as opportunity to improve my skills anyways. This is my initial render:

I’m quite happy with the doughnuts but the scene obviously needs more work. The lighting is basic and the depth of field is off. (The logo is supposed to be powdered sugar but it just looks like a blurry mess because of the DoF.)

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Scale is super important for proper DoF. Make sure your donuts aren’t the size of a building and the DoF should work as intended. It’s super easy to make your models way too big for the camera to properly handle.

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DOF is the camera settings as well. By default it’s basically infinite. Looks like you have a custom value in there because I can see focus on the back of the table falling off.

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I know I have a custom DoF set, what I meant to say is that it needs more tweaking. I didn’t have much time so my focus was to get the models and textures right. Should have been more clear about that.

I still want to add some shadows and more colorful lighting. I’ll work on making the scene pop next time.

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And here we go with a fancy L1T logo.

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Looks great but you lose tonal separation on the inner edge of the left L. Try putting a large black plane just off camera on the left to add some contrast to that side.

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Yeah, I will have to do that with the final still render. This one is just a frame I popped out from the animation I’m making. That shadow isn’t as important when the whole thing is rotating, lol.

Edit: and of course One of my Polys were misaligned and it ruined my animation. So I guess I’ll take your advice and throw in the panel before I start the redo, haha.

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Redone with the shadow-panel. Looks a lot better now, thanks!

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