In one of my previous posts, I decided to go on a game development journey. The model used for the spaceship was a model that I got from this site, which has low poly models from Poly by Google (Poly by Google was closed as of 30 June 2021, but the site I used has an archive). As I progressed on, I wanted to make my own 3D models because it might be a valuable skill, and I didn’t want to depend on free assets. Maybe create assets for background, or even model a character that can be used as a virtual avatar, or game character. How bad could it be?
Turns out, very bad.
Coming from Unity, my first thought was to move or rotate around the camera using right click. However, the actual key was middle click (yes, press down your mouse wheel. If you do not have a scroll wheel mouse, you might be out of luck). To move the camera, you need to shift + click. The up and down axis is the Z axis, instead of Y in Unity. After getting used to navigating the camera, I noticed the tabs above, which are layout, modeling, sculpting, UV editing, and many more. Yeah, I’m lost already.
The approach I took in order to learn was to find a Blender tutorial playlist that is long, so that I can do one episode daily to build a constant schedule. After googling around, I decided to take a tutorial on how to make a donut, and animating it. This tutorial was so famous that the creator of the tutorial started a NFT based on donuts made in blender (I have a generally negative reaction to NFTs, but to each of their own). After around 2 weeks (I had a full time job, and my daily Genshin comissions won’t do itself), I completed the donut and animating a simple rotation.
The donut animation can be seen in my Instagram reels.
I would like to say that I’ve learned a lot, but the reality is that I probably have forgotten quite a lot on modeling the donut, because the later parts of the tutorial was too focused on lighting, animating, compositing, generating random sprinkles, etc. This is ironic, because I wanted to learn blender to create low poly assets for my games, not realistic high quality renders or high poly objects.
So, what’s next?
I stopped learning game development because I got sidetracked by Blender. I will resume my game development course daily, and use free assets instead of making them myself for the purpose of following along. After all, I need to learn what Unity has in store, because only knowing C# is not enough to be a good game developer in Unity.
I might revisit the basics of blender again, but through a different tutorial playlist. Grant Abbitt’s tutorials seem nice, so I might follow along the beginner’s guide, and then move on to the low poly playlist, or do his beginner exercise playlist. After that, I might learn how to make characters (adding bones and animation to an object) to make animated characters on Unity.
Frustration in learning something completely new is normal. Unlike Unity, I had zero 3D modeling experience (versus the ~5 years of programming experience, just not in Unity). I won’t let this discourage me though, and keep learning. But for now, I want to carry on with game development first, to explore the features Unity has to offer.