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abtheb · 2 years

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What are some pieces you're particularly proud of?

This is a really great question and I wanted to give it a thoughtful answer so it took a few days.

I'm most proud of the art I made when I first started learning Blender a little over two years ago so I could do gamejams with friends.

Very early on, I remember thinking that I wanted to save and keep all my progress so I could look back on it one day -- so I saved more or less everything I've ever made, in chronological/numbered order, so it's easy to look back fondly and get a snapshot in time of what I was making and how goofy it was.

This is the first thing I made after fumbling with Blender's sculpting tools, and realizing I could make muscly-men-shaped things and also bird-shaped things.

I would try to keep sculpting things for a while and get super frustrated at my computer not being good enough to handle the files. Eventually this would nearly cause me to quit learning altogether, convinced that my computer was too underpowered -- not that I was working in absurdly high-poly without realizing it.

This attempted gimpsuit Bowser I tried making for a friend, for example:

75 million triangles!!!

400mb!!!!

Not really knowing any better, it took me a long time and a lot of trial and error doing gamejams and working with my smarter, more wizardly gamedev friends to start getting an understanding of poly counts and optimization. Eventually, with a lot of practice and models, I would get better at working in low-poly - a style I really like. By comparison, my last model was 33,116 triangles (7mb)

I can tell from looking at my pile of projects that something clicked after our third gamejam. I started having a better understanding of how Blender worked as software, and how 3D modeling worked conceptually. At some point, I started seeing misc art ideas on tumblr etc. and thinking "i think I know how to do that!", and some of the time I actually could (or at least, a bootleg quality version of it)

But the biggest turning point for me, and the closest I can get to answering the question about projects I am most proud of, were these two models.

I had started playing Dragon Quest 11 some time before I started learning art, got bored/burned out on it, and unknowingly quit right before the big mid-point events of the game. It wasnt until a year or so later that I picked it up again, and immediately saw it with the noobie "cube eyes" I'd been developing over the last few months.

I realized that the art style was beautiful yet simplistic enough that I could try and copy it, and was indeed able to make pretty decent versions myself (though unusably unoptimized it has to be said). It was also my first deep dive into Blender shaders, something which would take me another year or so to even scratch the surface of.

That moment not only empowered me a ton as an artist, but it also opened a whole new way for me to play and appreciate games that I had never experienced in my like 25+y of viddy gaming up to that point.

Honorable mention:

I went through a BOTW phase earlier in the summer when I replayed it looking for art to make. My eye crimes are buried deep in my #my art tag, but tldr I made a rito first, then zora, a goron... building up to the big man himself - whom I was afraid to try making because I was afraid I wouldn't do him justice.

Kass was easily the most complicated model I had ever made until that point - involving handpainting his colors and patterns, a complex rig for animating both the body and the accordion, and just a lot of decor and misc outfit accessories. I cut some corners from the original design, but I was still really happy with both the result, and myself for being able to have achieved it.

Thank you for the ask!!

#my art #art progress

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