As you may have read in a previous blog post, when I did my shed-based skills test I opened Blender, panicked, then closed it and went back to Unreal to build everything from scratch in there. I’m happy with how the shed turned out but not with this skills gap, so I decided to spend the weekend in Blender Jail. I learnt this jail concept from my comics creating peers: it’s a self-imposed crunch in which you pour all your available time into your current project in order to make serious progress. My plan was to spend as much time as I could modelling a list of objects I could use in my Unreal house.
So did it work? Hell yeah it did! My first object was a tentative attempt at a coffee table made from a stretched cylinder and stick legs - I did it and it counts. Next, I followed a mug tutorial and made a basic coffee mug and unlocked the ability to apply materials and colours in Blender. Where do mugs live? On a mug tree, which is really just a bunch of cylinders stuck together at odd angles. When I exported the mug tree to Unreal part of it was inside out. I posted the image to my Instagram stories and another bootcamper reached out and suggested I recalculate the normals — success! By the end of the weekend I had a right-side out mug tree populated with mugs, a kettle, a moka pot, a bread bin and board, and an oven that even has dials on it. I’m super excited for my next blog when I can put all these objects into my project and video capture all this awesome new swag.
