Learning Blender and 3D Modeling

At long last I have begun learning 3D modeling in Blender! It is as expected very intimidating, but once you start to learn the first few tools and shortcuts it’s like the wheels are greased and it starts to come more smoothly. I tinkered with making a low-poly model of my character Laika on Monday for a few hours, then on Wednesday (yesterday) I tossed it out, started streaming to Twitch for the first time in well over a year, and redid it. Not because the old model was necessarily bad, but because I wanted to share the process and I wanted to make use of some techniques I had learned to improve it further.

I managed to redo all of Monday’s work in just an hour during yesterday’s stream, then spent the second hour working on the head! It came out really well I think? There’s a picture on bluesky.

The geometry of the head ended up being… about as complicated as you might expect. I am curious to try and reduce the triangle count, but it’s already decently low and it doesn’t matter that much. I want a low-poly aesthetic but that doesn’t mean I am hard constrained. Ultimately the point is that it looks good.

There ended up being a lot of manual triangulation of faces on the head to make sure the geometry actually looked right. Also ended up learning a lot of weird quirks about Blender, especially with regards to face subdivisions and how they seem to only really work as expected on quads.

I am not making any promises, but I greatly enjoyed doing that stream and I kinda want to try to do more regular game development streams. Possibly Tuesdays? Possibly every other Tuesday? I’m not sure. Don’t expect a regular schedule. A regular schedule will make me less likely to actually do it.

Oh, and before I went to bed last night I made a copy of Laika’s model file and did an extremely quick and dirty rig with automatic weights to test it out. Y’all. I was able to pose her. I’m so happy. I love this. I’ll do a proper rig later once the model is actually complete.