3D Modeling - Erica Day 1

Today was my first day with George Clemens Architects, Inc. I had originally planned to spend the day working with the in-house computer graphics and design specialist, but he is currently on vacation and will come back Monday. So until then I am mostly doing work on my own learning a graphics program called Blender, which is a program that can model, animate, and render 3D graphics. I will need to have learned the basics of this program before Monday so that I can work with the designer on real 3D models of projects that the architects are working on.

I am learning the program by working through tutorials in a book called Blender: Noob to Pro (which I think is a funny title). I had originally thought that reading this book would be somewhat boring, yet I am finding that it is fascinating. Each new button I press or tutorial I follow shows me something incredibly cool. This program can do so many things, and I am constantly being surprised by new features that I discover. So far the most advanced thing that I have built is a simple house, but I am confident that I will learn quickly to make more complicated objects. As you can see in the screencap below, the program's interface is quite complicated. There are so many buttons, menus, and panels, that sometimes it can be intimidating.

After just one day, I can already appreciate how difficult it is to create 3D graphics, and how much time it takes to create the meshes, then paint the meshes, and then animate the meshes and cameras in order to create a video.