I'm behind on my blog, but a lot's been going on over the last few months. I'll try my best to catch up today and recap the last three months...

May

I'm self-teaching myself Blender 3d, trawling the internet for hints and tips to help understand and improve. You quickly become aware of several YouTubers offering excellent advice and you find yourself dipping into their videos over and again to learn a technique. I highly recommend Gleb Alexandrov. He's entertaining to listen to and gives out a lot of useful information. 

I knew I needed to invest in some extra learning though and as I've been mentally planning a series of pictures set in space, (but had no idea how to do them) I purchased Gleb and Aidy Burrows' SpaceVFX tutorials on sale through Blender Market. I'm so pleased I did. Hours of useful, easy to follow, tutorials teaching everything you need to get started on some space opera style sci-fi pictures. The results below speak for themselves. I'm hugely indebted to them as I think it would have taken me ages to work this stuff out on my own.

June

Ah, technical disasters!!!

My computer decided to crash. Big time. :( 

The weird thing is though, I wasn't too upset. I'd been asking The Universe for a better, faster computer, one that was able to cope better with the new 3d work and suddenly I was thrown into a position where I had to consider making the decision to upgrade my system. In it's own way The Universe was saying, "I've listened to ya kid. You're gonna get a new computer". It didn't come with an epic lottery win at the same time. But, hey ho, you can't have it all, all the time. 

A little while later and with a new set up from PCSpecialist I'm back up and running. And boy, what a difference. New graphics card and new computing speeds. What was taking an average of 6 hours to render is now taking about 30 minutes!!! The longest so far has only been an hour and a bit. Suddenly the game has changed. That does, however, mean there's more pressure on me to create, create, create.  

July

Quantity wise, this has been the best month so far. I tried some tricky architectural modelling and built a version of The Golden Gate Bridge. Built a simple swimming pool, terrarium and iceberg. Rigged some hands to create shadow puppets and re-visited Daz3d, playing with some of their characters to see if they could be useful in my new work. It's been a busy month....