Blending
As someone who bounces between 50 hobbies like a pinball slamming against bumpers, lanes, and spinners, I find it both satisfying and greatly disheartening to have such a breadth of experience without having any of the expertise that comes with true dedication to a skill.
This week's hobby of choice is 3D modelling using a software called Blender.
It's a free and open-source software that allows you to create 3D models, materials, effects, animations, and more.
I've dabbled with it in the past multiple times (I'm a hobby hopper, remember) and am now familiar enough that I can use shortcuts and navigate around the UI with some familiarity. I haven't yet reached the point where I know how to do what I want.
For example, if I wanted to make an arch shape attached to a cube shape in a specific way, I would bungle my way through, deleting some of the faces on the objects and then generating new ones to connect the two. I am 95% sure there is a much cleaner and easier way to do this task.
The thing I like about being a hobby hopper is that I get to get a feel for so many things that I collect a broader interconnected knowledgebase that allows me to see things and have a general sense of what it is, how it was made, how much effort it takes to make, what resources were used to make it. This goes for both physical and digital things.
Here are a few of my old 3D models I worked on (never finished). It's a mixture of me just playing around, following along with tutorials, and giving an earnest attempt at trying to do a specific thing (understand lighting, modelling, or some other aspect of the software).
I recently purchased a new graphics card (I'm a serious gamer) and it pushed me to reinstall Blender and mess around again. One of the things I love about it is that it's essentially just art. And it's so quickly manipulatable, adjustable, and convenient. I like to paint but I never do, because it's kind of a pain in the ass to go to garage where I keep my paint supplies and then I also don't really know how to make something look like something using paint. While the end results of my painting sessions bring me joy and I hang them up on my walls, I still recognize that they're lacking something.
I'm sure if I dedicated myself to painting and understanding how to mix colors and apply brushstrokes, I could find that missing essence. But that's not who I am. I am a hobby hopper.
3D modelling is fun. I may not be able to hang up the artwork (who knows? One day I might print out a render and get it printed on some canvas), I can see what I made, adjust anything I don't like, add anything I think of later, and also save every version of it along the way in case I don't like where it ends up. This freedom to the artwork is kind of nice?
This is a scene I'm working on now. It's just a theater. I wanted to figure out lighting and just get my feet wet again.
The other thing I like about this style of art is being able to see it in its various forms. What I show above is a final 'render' of the scene, accounting for all the meshes, materials, textures, settings, and all the wonderful details I decided on as I moved forward. It's a work in progress but I can already see things that work, don't work but need a tweak to fix, and don't work and never will.
I can look at the same exact scene with just the meshes, none of the fluff and determine if what I don't like is the foundation, or if it's something between that foundation and the final render.
You can also look at it in a wireframe mode to see all the vertices and lines that make up each object. And lastly you can look at it with the materials but none of the lighting or textures. Get a sense of the colors of object but not how it'll look when the computer finishes bouncing light rays of varying sources, intensities, colors, and angles against the surfaces.
Playing with Blender has given me a much bigger appreciation for the people who work on CG movies, video games, commercials... hell, even engineers who use CAD programs to design everything. It also has shed some light on my perception of the world. I look at an aluminum can of sparkling water on my desk and I can see more than a can.
I see its properties. It's a cylindrical shape. The texture is smooth - not rough. It's metallic and shiny, but it's not super shiny like stainless steel. The reflections on the surface are dull imitation. Vague shadows that return 80% of the picture but drop the details somewhere along the way.
Being a hobby hopper sometimes gets me down about 'wasting' my time or not committing to something that I could become great at. Other times, like now, I see a can on my desk and come to appreciate the little bits of knowledge I've gained by dipping my toes into many, many things.