A Big Decision

Welcome to my blog. This is a big day for me as I've decided to learn something new and it's about time. Blender is an open source graphics progam that has been constantly developed and updated over the past couple of decades (I think!) and is now a major contender to some of the expensive programs available on the market, such as 3DS Max, Lightwave, Cinema 4D and Maya, to name but a few. To learn any of these incredible programs can be hard and to master them requires a great deal of dedication.

My graphics background started back in the early 1990s when I worked with my brother running a video company. I had to learn some basic graphics and we had an Amiga 4000 at our disposal. The Amiga came with a graphics program but I can't remember its name. The results of some of my efforts at the time can be seen at the beginning of this video and others that may or may not still exist.


The title screen was made using the Amiga 4000 with me painstakingly copying an original drawing by a local artist and colouring and adding text. It was fun but the results by today's standards are very poor. Here is the screen in question.

 

I was even able to do some simple animation using basic stop motion techniques and I think some keyframing, which I will talk about in a future video. Anyway that was it for a number of years. No more graphics from me until I bought my first PC in 1997. It came with Windows 95 and 'Paint'. I struggled to get any real sense out of Paint and if I had been arty enough I would have been better just using a piece of paper and a pencil. For the next few years I tinkered with various demo programs of art packages that were attached to the front of magazines and even some full programs that came free, but I was never dedicated enough to achieve very much.

Then in 2003 my chance came to do something more substantial in graphics. The job I had at the time was probably my favourite job of all the jobs I had had, teaching adults IT in a relaxed and casual setting. Unfortunately, the government funding for free IT courses had come to an end and I was soon to be out of a job. At this stage I had always wanted to do web design so I enrolled on a degree course at my local university which looked right and I started in September 2003. I breezed through most of the first year but was disappointed by the lack of graphics involved in the course I was on. Luckily, a stroke of luck happened as I sought to change courses. A new course had just been advertised called Digital Film, Animation and 3d Technology. It was a degree course and some of what I'd already done meant that I could change courses and be credited for a couple of the modules.

This was where I wanted to be. Although being a mature student in my 30s made it sometimes uncomfortable to mix with other students during group work, I enjoyed the course. We started by learning 3DS Max 5, Photoshop and After Effects. Wow! I was hooked, but by now I had a young family and things would be harder to do at home. In the second year of the degree we learnt Maya and the change from 3DS Max was hard at first but I eventually found that I preferred Maya. I was not interested in doing graphics for games. I was more interested in films.

Well here is one of my basic efforts from my first year using 3DS Max.