Another Environment Attempt

decided to give creating an abstract environment yet another go. I'm pleasantly please this go around! I spent the weekend in bed browsing Pinterest and watching Blender tutorials. In the midst doing both, I decided to figure out the best way to create an arch. I found a relatively simple workflow which consisted of creating a cube, taking the top left and right edges and bringing them in followed by beveling to create a nice curve. Afterwards, I had to merge by distance and voila - a beautiful arch! That arch then led to me using it as a boolean against a wall to create the most perfectly arched entryway. Which then led to me creating an entire room of arched entryways haha.

I also wanted to figure out whether there were any best practices with regards to creating walls. I found a forum response which insisted that I start with a vert, extrude to my preferred wall thickness, then angle one end and go to town with designing my preferred layout. Afterwards, the suggestion was to extrude on the Z axis to raise the walls up to my preferred height. Honestly, the workflow was genius.

I also found a video which explained why the subdivision surface modifier didn't work too well with cylinders. Essentially, the subdivision surface modifier doesn't like n-gons. Therefore, the suggestion was to delete the top and bottom faces, do a Grid Fill, and then rotate the Grid Fill until it aligned with the rest of the cylinder geometry. That's how I got these perfectly curved circles in the room.

What I rendered for this post is just the beginning of what I hope to accomplish. Now that I have these new skills under my belt, I'm ready to start designing spaces more. I want to continue playing with shapes - especially curved ones!

This weekend I also dusted off Adobe Fresco to use for sketching the layouts of my spaces so that I could bring them into Blender as reference images when creating curved shapes. The weekend also brought some realizations to surface - I need a new personal computer. Not a 'PC' per se. Rather, a computer that's not my work computer. Up until last night, I was rendering on my Alienware which is my work computer. I gave my Mac a try last night and whew, it was NOT up for the task! It took maybe 15 mins to render the image for this post. Whereas my Alienware averages at less than 3 minutes. I landed on getting a Mac Mini! I've had one in the past and simply adored it. I'll still keep my MacBook because it's honestly still in good condition. It just isn't efficient and lacks good storage. I almost did a spur of the moment purchase yesterday for a Mac Mini but found out that the Apple store doesn't have my preferred specification in store. Therefore, I'll have to order one.

Another thing that came to mind yesterday was finding a better way to display my process. Right now I'm just blogging based on what I'm learning - which is cool. However, I'd like to one day dive a little deeper into my process. I think I may be too early on for that given that I haven't even reached Materials yet for the 100 Days of Blender. I did check yesterday and learned that my 100 Days of Blender will be over in July. So, maybe some time after I finish the Materials part of my learning, I'll spin up something great for capturing my process.

But until then, the blog it is!