Blender School -- The Mech!

 I've reached the end of the Blender training course. All that's left is the practical exercise to put to use all the new knowledge in order to make a really cool mech. In truth, I didn't get a huge amount of new knowledge, but it's more than enough to justify the time and the money. The course was clearly intended for beginners, and for them, this would be of massive value.

For me, the biggest benefit has been covering core principles and workflows that I'd learned in my first weeks, but then lost when I stopped using Blender for a while - sometimes a long while. Coming back, I'd overvalue my working knowledge and just push through modelling challenges without doing a knowledge refresh. This happened a lot over the ten years since I began my Blender journey.

I'd ended up with gaps in my knowledge for wildly important things. This has been a good refresher. It's taken me through the mesh cleanup steps and reminded me of the underlying concepts that drive that work.

Many years ago I bought HardOps. It looked amazing, but I didn't invest enough in learning its tools, and I was never comfortable with the necessary cleanup phase. Later, I bought Fluent, which was much simpler to use, but again, I'd get into trouble and not understand how to fix issues that are inevitable when you constantly throw around Booleans and Bevels.

I've decided that I will buy the Blender Bros Introductory course for Hard Ops and either transition to their HardOps workflow or at least have it available when it makes sense to use.

The Mech: Lesson 1 (Block out the body)

The same basic steps as the previous course: Creating and cutting a big structure.

The Mech: Lesson 2 (Continue to block out the body)

Booleans, bevels, clever mirroring and cutter management

Next lesson: The legs!