Learning 3D Modeling

For a while, I've been struggling with continuing to work through the drawing exercises as part of Learning to Draw. The last exercise I tried was drawing a chair to learn about negative spaces. Despite my progress, I was ambitious and crashed and burned in my first attempt. Since that incident, I've struggled to get myself motivated to continue improving.

This is bad. I have a pair of costume ideas I'd like to start on for DragonCon. Both are going to involve months long build times and need significant visual preparation. And my drawing skills are just not there yet. My fiancée has pushed me off the starting line this weekend. Over the past year or so, I've been collecting various Udemy courses during their big sales. During the Thanksgiving Day sale, I grabbed Learning 3D Modelling - The Complete Blender Creator Course. Sunday, we started the course and came away excited.

Much like Learning to Draw, I have little prior experience. I've tried using Blender before but never got anywhere. The first section of the course focused on installing, configuring and understanding the basics of the software. It helped a lot to spend that time getting familiar with the interface.

After dinner, we started working through Section 2. We didn't finish the section but we made it past the mid-section quiz and completed our first major model, an airplane. We scanned an image search for wooden toy plane and located this one from Etsy.

Here's my finished model in Blender. I'm pretty happy about it. It took a couple hours for me to build but I think it looks great. I'm meticulous in creating things and I hope it shows. This course will likely take me longer than I hoped.

With the model completed, I transferred it over to my old laptop and ran it through Netfabb and Cura. And then I printed it on our LulzBot Mini! My first print of a model I created. Now to start work on my Invincible Iron Man armor!