Posted on 15 Sept 2023
I've fallen slightly out of the initial plan to post weekly after just three previous entries, but that's okay.
In my first blog I mentioned a plan of action I produced in pursuit of making the most this time I have to upskill myself, but I'm finding it's been beneficial to take a kind of zig-zag, more organic approach, by following what I find interesting in the moment and layering on knowledge acquired so far. After a few days in the Lake District in a spate of warm weather I was inspired to create some stylised playful renders.
1 - Beach Scene created following a tutorial from Polygon Runway, 2 - A trio of happy ice creams, 3 - An iOS Live Activity design from a 10x Design Community challenge.
With that I started to think about how I am now competent of replicating when following tutorials I see from others when it comes to 3D, but am missing something where producing models of my own is concerned.
When I made the decision to commit to widening my design skills across disciplines I subscribed to SkillShare for a year and bookmarked some courses I'd be interested in taking. Towards the end of last week (after smashing through a load of random tutorials I came across - see the jelly below!) I surfaced an architectural visualisation course for Blender that I had saved.
Jelly produced using blender following 3D masshiro.
I've never attempted to model something with the intention of making it look realistic previously and so it felt like time to try it out. I've also been thinking about what type of roles I may be able to apply the skills I'm learning to, should I ever be involved with the planning or design of physical experiences and spaces this could put me in good stead.
I had a lot of fun following the course and created the bathroom seen below and used for the preview of this post. I also took a selection of other renders shared over on my twitter - these are already outdated as I've gone back and made tweaks, but I'll continue to share more as i progress.
Use the slider to see both day and night versions of the render.
The biggest take away for me is that while it was awesome to learn a lot of Blender features for modelling I hadn't used previously, I actually found it easier to replicate the real life shapes of objects as opposed to the thinking up stylised versions like those I've emulated when following tutorials in the past. I expect this is due to the fact that as designers and artists mature in their fields, some develop particular styles and signatures of their own which may be noticeable through art as expression.
While I plan to soon focus my efforts back to my specialism of User Experience design soon as I begin to think about my next role, I will be continuing to take more archviz courses and look to learn industry standard tools such as 3DS Max by Autodesk.
Thanks for reading,
Ste