Term 9, Portfolio I, Week 1

Week of 1/9/2023

Retrospective

I’m back from an unscheduled, 1 month break. It was not my intention to take a break, but somehow the combination of my arm injury (diagnosed as tendinopathy), the end of the semester at Brainstorm school, and the holidays sapped my motivation to draw. I think my arm is back to normal. I’ve been doing an arm exercise regimen prescribed by a physical therapist every day. I hope I can make it through the next semester without any trouble.

The Brainstorm School spring semester starts tomorrow (Jan. 16, 2023). I’m taking 3 classes again — ENT 1: Entertainment design, WB2: Environment design, and WB: SDVGD: Story driven visual game design.

My plan to work on my portfolio during the semester break fell apart, but I was able to update my Artstation portfolio to include my best work from last semester. I look forward to getting back in the habit of drawing.

Drawings and Critiques

Blender Geometry Nodes

I spent most of the week working through Blender tutorials on geometry nodes, which is a way to create models using math and limited programming. It’s really interesting. The cool thing about it is, after you’ve built the components, you can start generating really complex geometry. Here’s a good example of what can be done. The images below were all done from following tutorials.

I got a new Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card and it is so much faster than CPU rendering.

Blenderguru Donut

I finally finished the famous donut tutorial from blenderguru. I started it a while back but only finished the modeling part. At that point I thought I only needed modeling for concept ideation, but now I’m finding that there is a ton of useful stuff in Blender for concept art, so I went back and did the whole thing. This project made me so hungry for a pink donut.

Tarnhelm Design

I was planning on adding another piece to my “Twilight of the Gods” series in my portfolio, but didn’t quite finish it. This is the “Tarnhelm” from Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” operas. The crystal stuck through the helmet is what reanimates the undead wearer. I tried to model these helmets in Blender with geometry nodes but failed miserably.