A friend of mine is studying Game Design in college. When I asked him what he was up to this week, he said he was building a door in a blender.

Or something like that. After asking more questions I found out that he is learning to use some software called Blender. It is FREE and PROFESSIONAL LEVEL — people actually make games with it. Hard to believe? Well, check this out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_%28software%29

Blender is a professional free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. Blender’s features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing. Alongside the modeling features it also has an integrated game engine.

I watched a few of the tutorial videos. This is some very very very deep software (I mean, it will do a billion and one things). But there were also some tutorial videos that were more approachable — they were mini-projects. “How to make a landscape” “how to make a fuzzy stuffed bear” “how to make a planet bursting into pieces”. For some reason these reminded me of the old Bob Ross painting shows  on TV…

…which gives you an idea how old I am, since he passed on to the land of Happy Happy Trees back in 1995. Anyway, the Bob Ross classes were formulaic (here’s how to paint a tree, here’s how to paint a mountain) — not “real” oil painting. But they got you elbow-deep into the paint, and you could continue learning from there.

Here are two of the Blender tutorial vids I watched this evening. This one is on how to build an island…

and this next one is an inspirational video on the creative process itself — encouraging you to just get out there and try stuff, and not worry if people criticize it…because, they will. So don’t let that stop you.

“I guarantee you, no matter how good you get in your art, or how correct you think you might be in your art, there is ALWAYS going to be somebody who says that it’s not the way it should be. Because for those people, they think art should conform to a certain thing.”

Thank you to my friend the Padawan Learner in Computer Graphics. Best of luck in your Jedi training, and thanks for telling me about Blender!