I've made a Donut

It has been a while since I posted last time here. Well, what can I say? Life happened. As this is a hobby project for me, I don't really have a timeline or time pressure. You know how it is — sometimes other things in life take priority.

However, recently I got the time to pick up this project again and continue honing my skills. It was around November / December last year when I started to learn how to use Blender, as 3D modeling, texturing, rendering, and animation will be an important part of my fancy tree project. If you don't know what Blender is, it is an awesome 3D modeling, rendering, and animation suite, which is so incredibly complex and powerful that — as I have heard — it has become serious competition in the industry, especially with the most recent major version iteration 4.X. Even whole high-production-value movies were created using Blender, like the animated movie Next Gen from 2018, which I watched on Netflix just this very evening. And the best part about it: it's free open-source software, or FOSS, as some like to abbreviate it. So make sure to check it out if you want to learn how to create 3D assets for games.

Official website: https://www.blender.org/

Source code mirror on GitHub: https://github.com/blender/blender

It might be overwhelming and intimidating for new users, as it's really not that beginner friendly. But fear not, one of the best ways to learn it, is learning by doing. It's really nice that there are so many tutorials available. Probably the most recommended one is the Donut tutorial by Australian 3D artist Andrew Price, known as "Blender Guru." A name well deserved, I suppose. And like many before me, I also followed the path of the Blender Donuts. I can definitely recommend it.

If you want to learn how to create something like my Donut here:

(I staged a comparison to make a nice wallpaper, showing the progress on the donut from left to right.)

Then go on and not only check out his Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewPPrice

But also, just go ahead and start making your own Donut using his newest tutorial on the newest Blender version 4.X here:

I've made mine based on his 3.X tutorial, as Blender 4.X was released just after I had already started following the 3.X one.

Another tutorial about Blender basics was provided for older 2.X versions by the official Blender YouTube channel here:

I don't really recommend that one, as it touches rather briefly and quickly on the very fundamentals and is less project-oriented. However, if you want to get a good overview quickly, it might be worth a watch. Keep in mind, though, that some of the content is no longer up to date due to the newer Blender versions.

This should get you started and make you familiar with Blender. And there is still so much more to learn after that. It was really fun to work on that Donut. Who knows, maybe I'll take up 3D art in general as a new hobby. 🤔

Next up: I'll see what happened with Godot as it got a few nice updates. Then I'll go on to make the very first scene in Godot with a minimalistic and very simple 3D tree. For that, I'll also need to see how I can get a model from Blender into Godot.

Until next time!

– Zacryon