Blender Week 1

As a summer project I decided to lean a bit of Blender. Mainly on my own but my I have some help of my son who has been building car models in it for a while. The first day I played around getting some of the basics down and made this:

Day two was a dedicated to getting a hang of modeling, and, since I wanted to get to rigging, I made an easy to rig two legged creature

That looked a little gray, so day three was a little texturing and shading, followed by building an armature - which is blenderish for skeleton

On to animation for day four. That meant weight painting. Not fun in Maya, but possibly even less fun in Blender. But I got it to walk. And used Blender to add an wiggling image in the background, with its build in compositor
 

Day five: more animation and shading. I added some environment and played with shaders to create an animated texture on a cube. Though totally misplaced, I added some hair to the character as well. And rendered slightly longer animation. Which took something like four hours, not too bad but if I had used the default sertting of 4096 samples that would have been more like ten hours.
 

Because of bad weather we added an extra day to this week. I played with geometry nodes, which are part of the reason I wanted to try blender more seriously. Over the years I had occasionally played with Blender, and used it as a file convertor, but never did any serious work in it. I do remember that in the late nineties, when Blender was under Not A Number, I played a role in the instutute where I was a graduate student buying the (hard copy) manuals. I have met Ton Roosendaal at SIGGRAPH a number of times and followed Blender developments from a distace. But this is the first time I took a serious stab at learning the program.
 

That concludes week one of the Blender summer project. Week two will have to wait at least a week, have other plans for next week, like finally finishing VR projects. One great thing about Blender, at least version 3.6 for mac, which is what I used this week: it hardly ever crashes. Only when I messed with displacement did I get it to freeze or outright die.
Now I have a week to think of what I want to try and do for Blender week 2. I got a lot further than expected in week 1!