A Year of Blender

After a year of learning Blender, I figured it will be nice to have a little documentation of my short journey and to share my experiences.

April 2020; a pandemic is going on, I just turned 28, a lockdown was imposed in Singapore, the world and life as we have known is not returning anytime soon.

I have gotten a new desktop in June 2019 in hopes of improving my video editing skills, with the possibility of picking up 3D rendering. Many months later — during a pandemic and a lockdown — I finally got started on learning Blender, a free and open source 3D software. At that time I did not know what I was getting myself into, what I was planning to do with it, and how far I would go. It was just an attempt to continue being ‘productive’ with life in a pandemic, to continue learning new stuff.

Many donuts and one year later, I find myself still not knowing what I can get out of Blender or 3D rendering, except that it is a joy to play with. Seeing some learning progress videos recently and realising it’s been a year of learning Blender myself, I decided to make a video of my own progress in Blender, and to pen down some thoughts so as to remind myself of this learning process, my experiences and the memories that come with it.

It was difficult initially. Not the learning part, but the adaptation of working from home and blurring lines between work and life. The uncertainty that comes with the pandemic and with work…