In-Depth Post #2: Mentorship

Progress Report

I have completed my first project in Blender, an animated donut with sprinkles. This was a heavily guided project, and I followed along with this 16-part tutorial, made by Blender Guru. It was intentionally made for absolute beginners, so it didn’t skip out on explaining for me basic essentials like moving around. In this course, I learned how to edit  objects with the object editor, modify properties with modifiers, edit objects with the sculpting tool, texture objects, and texture paint them, use basic geometry nodes, animate, light, and render my project. I think this course’s strength was giving me a taste of many areas of blender, so that I knew what each was about and could choose what to explore more. However, its weakness was that it only showed skills necessary to make the donut, and didn’t encourage viewers to explore more and figure tools out for themselves. As such, I made a project, but the quality of that project isn’t realistic for something I could just decide to make on my own. The final donut can be seen here. I have now moved onto working through another complete beginner tutorial, made my Grant Abbitt. While this might not seem like the best choice, since I have already done an introductory tutorial, I think it will be good to go over that same content again, with a different perspective on it to solidify my knowledge. I will also be able to move through this tutorial faster, since I already am somewhat comfortable working with blender.

During this project, the two tools that interested me the most were the object editor, and the geometry nodes. I really liked editing objects in their shape, but even more so, the idea of creating a system that could create or distribute objects systematically is appealing to me. One aspect of this project I found unenjoyable and challenging was when the program began to strain my computer, and run slower. This happened when textures were added, lighting was applied, or rendering the final animation. The animation was at 30fps, so I had to render 299 more frames than I would have had to if I was just making an image of a donut. This made rendering an extremely lengthly process.

In other news, I have recently acquired a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, which have been extremely helpful to me, and will make working with blender faster and more effective. A mouse allows me to use the middle mouse wheel as a third input, which certain blender functions rely on. The external keyboard has a numberpad, which blender also uses as extra inputs for certain functions. Finally, having a second monitor allows me to view my blender project on a bigger screen, while also having the tutorial on my small screen. This means I don’t have to flip between them while working.

Mentor

I have now found a mentor who is willing to mentor me. His name is Robert Rioux, and has a staggering amount of experience with CG animation, and blender specifically. He runs a YouTube channel called Blender Bob, which sports over 500,000 views worth of tutorial videos about blender. He has worked on numerous high-profile projects, such as Ad Astra and Stranger Things.

He began his career in photography and photo retouching, but work soon dried up. Through his photo editing, he became interested in 3D video editing, CG as we know it today. He tried founding an animation company with some friends, but it didn’t make it. On a trip to an animation convention with a friend, he left his resume with many people, and received a few calls back. He ended up joining Square Enix for a final fantasy project, but left halfway through because he didn’t like the environment or pipeline. From there, his CG career continued through many companies and many projects, usually working as a hard-surface modeller, making more technical, rather than organic models.

He is currently a CG Supervisor at Real by Fake, where he has built a CG pipeline using Blender, rather than the usual standard Maya. During these experiences, he has doubtless experienced ups and downs and learned many lessons that have made him a very knowledgable and experienced modeller. So far, Robert has impressed on me the wise idea of learning how to model properly, rather than doing it the wrong way. He told me about how he started his YouTube channel to give useful information that can actually be used in the industry, because he noticed so many amateur tutorial videos were teaching bad habits that would be detrimental if they were used on larger projects. As I develop as a mentor I could learn from how he has facilitated learning by talking about my goals, imparting his own knowledge and suggestions, and validating them with real-life stories.

Moving Forward

In my learning contract, I laid out January and February as the months where I learn the basics of using blender. So, moving forward, I am going to be watching a few more basic tutorials, and will hopefully also try making a project on my own. As I said before, I am now going through Grant Abbitt’s tutorial series. Like Blender Guru’s tutorial, it is meant for complete beginners, but the way he teaches it is very different than Blender Guru. The donut tutorial is very structured, guiding you and teaching you exactly what you need to know in order to make a donut. This second tutorial is much more open ended. Grant Abbitt often challenges the viewer to try something on their own before telling them how to do it. This latter tutorial also doesn’t actually begin the tutorial for the actual project until the third video, and so the project isn’t as polished and high-quality as the donut one. I think this tutorial will help me become more comfortable with making decisions about how and when to use the tools in blender, rather than just showing me how to use them for a donut once.

0 comments