my journey learning 3d art with blender from day 1

I want to write about my journey towards learning 3D software.

I studied filmmaking in university, did a master's in marketing and I have way too many hobbies.

• Street Magic
• Linux
• Programming
• Stoic Philosophy
• Note Taking Systems
• Web-Design
• Photography
• Constructed Languages

And I feel like adding a new skill to my list. I was watching a YouTube channel called Tiny Houses with my family. In the middle of an episode, there was a creator of tiny houses who was using 3D software to plan out the space of one of the houses.

Artwork by: Will Morriss

I thought this was awesome and something I'd like to try out, using 3D software to create art.

I've been curious about 3D modeling in the past, but I've always postponed learning it.

I've been curious about 2D animation as well, but I've always lacked the patience when it comes to drawing for hours.

Now I feel it's time to dig deeper into 3D because it feels similar to video editing and tech stuff, which are two things I feel more familiar with.

I got started by watching YouTube video's trying to figure out what's the best tool to learn. There are amazing tools, but at the end of the day I decided to go for Blender.

Feeling an urge to learn

I woke up early, around 6:00 am on a Sunday, out of excitement. When I get this desire to learn something new, I get obsessive. It is an awesome feeling, and I simply cannot wait to start learning a new skill.

I've been watching video tutorial, and right now I'm listening to an awesome podcast about 3D art.

Right now I'm about to download blender. I'm on Linux (Manjaro with "Awesome Window Manager") so I can't say how happy I am that blender is free and open source.

Note: This is a note from the future. I am writing this note 2 years, 4 months and 27 days after I published this original blog post. I am no longer using Linux. I switched to Windows. Blender works super well here too.

I also found out that one can use a programming language as python to create inside of blender. I'm super excited to learn python for this purpose one day.

I am also extremely happy to know Blender works great for Linux, the fact that Adobe hates Linux, has made me stop using Adobe and replacing it for other software. This is a shame since Adobe love it or hate it, is amazing, so I've kind of lost the habit of designing cool stuff because of this reason.

I'm also happy to see if I can even use Blender for video editing in Linux, since at the moment I'm looking for good video editing software for Linux (again).

Today I watched Blender Guru, he had some amazing advice for beginners.

I found who the classic YouTuber's are. I even found an awesome podcast where they all talk in a round table (Blender Nest Podcast on YouTube).

Then I got super excited for starting my first project and I found this amazing tutorial series by CG Fast Track.

Can't describe how excited I am to learn from this amazing tutorial.

I started listening to all podcasts by Andrew from Blender Guru.

Downloaded Artstation and started saving some of my favorite artwork in moodboards for inspiration.

I started working on the CG Fast Track tutorial series, it starts with creating a simple MineCraft scene.

After my first computer freeze with blender (after my first explosion effect)

I had to restart my computer, everything went pink.

fixed it! I just moved the location of the texture in my computer, I just needed to relink it!

I continued this amazing tutorial to build a minecraft structure. It took around 4 hours across two days, but I learned a lot from it.

My first second explosion

HOUR 6

As a continuation to CG Fast Track's tutorial I had to design a gear.

Hour 7

Started working on the rite of passage for every blender 3D artist.

This is the famous donut tutorial, by Blender Guru.

Hour 10

I'm starting to get familiar with some basic concepts. So I started playing around with some original simple concepts.

This were just some tests playing with simple shapes, light and some color.

HOUR 13

Playing with sculpting some basic shapes

HOUR 17

I've been meaning to do create an animated film for a long time now. I finally started.

This is an asset of a spaceship I got (I didn't make the spaceship). I started learning how to create stars for the bacground of the ship.

HOUR 19

I was doing some random experiments and accidentally generated this shape.

I added some color and dramatic light.

Happy Accidents

HOUR 20

For the past few weeks I've been fascinated by Grease Pencil. An awesome way to draw with a 2D brush in a 3D environment.

This is me vandalizing the default cube testing some concepts from a Grease Pencil tutorial.

HOUR 43

I haven't been documenting my progress recently, however even though I'm not where I want to be yet. I'm pretty happy with my progress

This is my latest artwork which I'm using as a thumbnail for my YouTube channel

In this imge I didn't create the phone and the computer, but I did recreate the ceentral logo of an app called Obsidian, which is a super powerful note-taking tool, I make video about.

Fast forward a few years

it's been 2 years, 4 months and 27 days since I first wrote this post, I definitely wish I had documented my journey a lot more. I stopped tracking, but if I had to guess, I got a few hundred hours of practice with Blender.

I've mostly used it to create YouTube thumbnails. Here is one of my favorites that I've created.
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5 Simple Obsidian Plugins to Supercharge Your Workflow

If you are curious, you can skim through the thumbnails on my YouTube channel and you will be able to spot the ones made with Blender.