After years of dragging my feet, I finally buckled down and gave Blender a solid few nights and weekends to learn. I’ve been reluctant to give it my time only because I’ve invested years of experience into Maya, but what pushed me over the edge was seeing so much incredible work being done with Blender and my loathe for Autodesk’s insistence on high priced subscriptions.
Blender is an amazing tool. It’s mind blowing that it’s free. I really love the concept of the 3D cursor – coming from Maya, I often create a bunch of temporary locators in order to have a reference to a transform to snap things to, but Blender has a 3D cursor that is always available for things like this. Sounds little a small thing, but I’ve found it to be extremely useful.
Blender also comes with a set of add-on tools called Rigify. It helps to generate modular rigs for common structures like arms, legs, tails, etc. I decided to explore this by rigging the beautiful Aang model by Mia Pray and making a custom attachment system for his staff. This was really just a way for me to practice, but I may come back to this sometime in the future. I’d love to see Aang running around in game…
Yanman! 