Will It Blend?

This week I found a couple of hours to learn how to build landscapes within Blender. With a couple of strokes of the mouse I was able to throw up mountains and sculpt plains. I even conjured a couple of houses and trees. I was feeling the powers of divinity course through my veins when I remembered that I was just a dude sitting in front of a computer eating chips. There was some clicking on things going on as well.

At first I was unsure of what kind of landscape I wanted to build so I set up a flat plane and started to sculpt it. As a visual learer I love being able to watch someone make something and then try it myself. For that reason I recorded myself making a simple landscape that you can watch here:

I’ve only been fumbling around with modeling for a couple hours now so please don’t judge the jumpiness too harshly. Or judge it, this is the internet after all.

After building the land I decided to plop some trees and some houses onto it. I decided that I would build them from scratch because I was bold and didn’t want to cheat by using a frame from online. I realized how hard of work this is and understand why a lot of artists opt to download textures and features that allow them to build realistic looking things more quickly. If a 3D artist spent all his or her time building everything from scratch it would take hours upon hours to get anything to look good. In a way artists are combining pieces from everywhere to make art, which in my opinion is what they were all doing in the first place before computers ever existed. Here are the results of my playing around with a sandy texture and modeling some simple objects:

As you can see I’m still working on it, and I do when I get time. I’ll post some more updates on my landscape in the future as it improves. In the mean time I need to learn how to stop accidentally hitting my knee whenever I get up from my chair.

Seriously. It hurts.