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#MIXEDREALITIES

INTRODUCTION TO BLENDER

Introduction to the experiment

For this week I decided to learn how to use Blender as I wanted to understand how some of the 3D art and animation I have downloaded from the Unity asset store is made. I followed a series of tutorials on YouTube that lead me through the basics of Blender. I ended up making a flaming monkey (as shown above) as well as a photorealistic render of a donut.

Reasons for selection

I wanted to learn how to use Blender as I enjoy using various 3D software. My interest began when I used Spark AR during the first week, as well as using Autodesk Inventor for my engineering papers. Blender is also a widely used 3D content creation software so I could easily find tutorials and online forums if I got stuck.

Creating the donut

Creating the donut proved to be a much more difficult task than I had anticipated. However, I am glad I embarked on the journey as I learnt a lot about Blender. Firstly, I learned the importance of utilising the "hot keys" for this program as they save a lot of time if you constantly need to access certain editing features. Moreover, I explored the basics of making shapes, sculpting as well as manipulating child/parent relationships.

The completed donut render

Discussion

Another key aspect I learnt from these tutorials was the different rendering options Blender has to offer. There are two main rendering options, one being ‘evee’ and the other one being ‘cycles’. To render the donut I used cycles as it produces a much higher quality render, however with this it takes a lot time more to generate and requires greater computing power. This is generally used for animation where a high refresh rate isn't required. On the other hand evee produces lower quality renders, however it produces them almost instantaneously. Therefore, evee is used much more for gaming applications where a high refresh rate is needed. To create VR games it would likely be better to use the evee render to prevent the game from being laggy. This lag would essentially defeat the purpose of a VR experience as there would be next to no immersion into the game.

References

YouTube tutorial:

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Blender Guru. (2020, April 29). Blender Beginner Tutorial Series [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgEq0u2MzVgAaHEBt--xLB6U.

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