Last year I started playing with Blender and used the program to create the animations used in my EOY work (Surface Tension). Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and computer games, and is a good entry-level program for people wanting to work in those fields. It is also something I could easily import my VR drawings into as sculpted objects, which were then animated.
There's a running joke in the Blender community about doughnuts - for one reason or another, creating a doughnut is a common first tutorial that many people follow in order to familiarize themselves with the program, which has lead to millions of them popping up all over the internet, some even been sold now as NFTs. While the content here isn't exactly relevant to my practice, I did pick up a lot of new knowledge about Blender through the process of creating this sculpt and animation, and it's made me aware of some of the pitfalls I might encounter and definitely fell into last year when working with the program. As silly a thing, it did teach me a lot about compositing, shading, geometry nodes, and camera effects which have been previously pretty mysterious to me. Presenting a slightly over-exposed, studio-irrelevant, but somewhat useful bit of nonsense:
Some mishaps and work spaces below (I do kind of like the alien/overrun/infected sculpt):
Compositing - much easier than building and baking everything in from the ground up:
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