Here we go!

The primary goal for these two weeks was to explore and get comfortable with 3D modelling (and animation) in Blender. And what a journey!

The first week we were introduced to the basics of Blender; primitives, Object Mode, Editing Mode, vertices, edges, faces, sculpting, modifiers, lighting, camera settings, rendering ect. 

A lot of trial and error went into this week. But being surrounded by fellow Blender newbies made the journey a lot of fun. Asking for help and sharing newfound knowledge got us through. 

The second week, we were asked to interpret and create our own island, based on a template from our teacher. I chose to create a tiny planet inspired by the children's book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I found a bunch of reference pictures from the animated movie (2015) and made a few sketches.

Then I started modelling my planet and my little prince: I used Subdivision on my Mesh to create a round planet, shaded it smooth, and then went crazy with the editing tools, to make the craters. 

The prince is build out of cubes and more subdivision. Then I dived into the sculpting tools, to create his face, clothes and body. It took some time, but with a little help from Remesh, I started to enjoy sculpting quite a lot.

The stars are cylinders with 5 faces and a little help from editing mode. 

The starry backdrop is painted in Procreate and added as an image. 

The animation:

I really wanted to give my little prince life, with blinking stars and a waving scarf. I played around with tons of keyframes and wave modifier. I used stepped interpolation, to give him a stop motion-like look and noise to create random movements. This was a lot of fun!

In the end I only had to render everything. I made sure to put down the amount of light bouncing around, and the samples as well. I chose to render in Eevee, to use the Bloom effect. I think it suited the stop motion style well. (And then I prayed to the Blender gods.) 

Hope you enjoy my Little Prince. He makes me super happy. <3