Blender Assignment 01

This is my first attempt at using Blender. It was, at first, excruciating and painful. I tried to figure out the curves to make a tree, as I saw someone do in a time-lapse video, but I was unsuccessful. The poor quality of the video made it hard to see exactly what the person did, so I decided to save curves for another day...

I abandoned the tree, and resolved to build a "simple" character out of a few cylinders and a sphere. It looked like it was going well, but in reality, the functions I used to join/cut the pieces were not executed properly (by me). FUCK. This thing was a mess. I ended up with all these weird pieces, and I had no knowledge of where it went wrong... At this point I was three hours into the program and pissed, so I took a short break.

I didn't want to go back, but if there is anything I have learned, is that you can't let new software keep you down. That is because, the assignment will always still be due. So, it's better to just figure something out.

The next couple of hours went remarkably better. I decided to go back to the tree idea, but since I couldn't make the curves, I decided to use extrusion.  First, I started with a cylinder at the base, and extruded different "regions" to build a basic tree structure (moving, scaling, and rotating as I went).

After I had my basic shape, subdivided all the faces a couple of times, and used the SCULPT tool to refine and make everything more organic. I also experimented with the particle tool to make "hair" hoping to get a leaf-fro sort of thing, but I didn't like the result. In the process of rendering the scene, I found out how to make changes to the backdrop.

So there it is, six hours of work and painful learning later, a tree with three branches... I don't know how everyone else is feeling; but for me, tiny triumphs make it worthwhile to keep trying to learn new things. I wanted to make a tree, and what I made kind of looks like a tree.

At the end of it all, I have a slightly better understanding of how to build/refine shapes in Blender, though, even some of the most basic techniques still baffle me. I also came to the realization that, like many programs (like Adobe programs, for example), Blender has an extensive number of key commands that make the work easier/more efficient.

Here are some links to other resources I found useful:
wiki//blendertuts  - a list of tutorials for Blender (some of the links are broken, etc. but the list is LONG)
wiki//blenderbook - a free blender textbook

Larin!