Using Blender

The whole project was created and rendered in Blender from A to Z. Since migrating from 3ds Max, I found various perks of Blender that just suited me, from add-ons like Hard-ops and Box-Cutter to the free integrated renderer Cycles/Eevee and compositor. Many tools are very interactive and stable which provides a stress-free and very fun area to be creative. Also, the community is great and there are literally hundreds of add-ons that can be used to fine-tune your workflow.

Currently, I am not happy with the state of Blender 2.8. I find it difficult to work with large scenes due to performance issues. These problems include slow OpenSubDiv, which currently still works on the CPU instead of the GPU, painfully slow Undo system, which takes anywhere from 5-10 seconds to undo anything in a medium to a heavy scene (800K tris and up), and slow edit mode performance. These issues have been noted by the developers and hopefully, they will be addressed in the next release series. I expect these issues to be fixed as soon as possible and once fixed, Blender 2.8 will be a 3D modeling paradise.

Modeling

My workflow for modeling any hard-surface designs begins with browsing Google and Pinterest for similar real-world objects. It’s important to plan the function of the object. What does it do? How was it made? This helps to avoid vague and generic designs that become unrecognizable to the viewer. I begin the blockout stage by mashing boxes and cylinders to obtain an interesting form. This initial step is very important as it allows me to get realistic proportions and understand what functional elements go where and what sizes they should be. After this I start to model a more complex form, still keeping everything fairly simple. I use Hard-Ops and Box-Cutter addons to quickly boolean-in cuts, just to see how it looks. It’s important to iterate and try a lot of things at this step, as it sets the stage for how the final piece will look.