Blender box of donuts software#

Stay tuned to see what sorts of fine art ends I can use Blender for in the coming months.Īnd if you like my art or criticism, please consider chipping in so I can keep working until I drop. Some, I’m sure, think it’s a tragedy I’m doing it, to the degree I am, and for however long I am. It would be a tragedy if people clamored aboard the 3D modeling direction and abandoned other avenues of visual art. It’s like a boxer going into a mixed martial arts competition and declaring all kicking and all grappling techniques illegal.

Some people like to make bold pronouncements of “all art is X” or “all art must X”, but that’s just a rather pathetic attempt to eliminate the competition. The real art is always the artist’s unique vision manifested in a visual form. And the further I go into the digital realm, the more I also fantasize about taking a plein air oil painting class. There’s room for all kinds of art-making, and each has valuable contributions. It should go without saying - among us more civilized sorts of individuals as regards art - that any avenue I might personally pursue does not invalidate, sideline, or diminish anyone else’s mode of art making in the slightest. In the same way that the camera forced a revaluation of painting, because painting couldn’t compete with it for realism, now it can, if the artist chooses to paint with a 3D modeling program. My own ideas about the still image are getting a roughing up, I can assure you. The technology makes this possible, and it upturns pre-existing concepts about what art is and how it is made. But once again, the rectangle can be a window into another world, and the visual imagination of the artist. To do this creatively, for fine art ends, is to go completely against many of the cornerstone developments of art in the 20th century, including the flattening of the picture plane, and ceasing to see it as a window into another world. It’s creating artificial reality in all its visual dimensions. You aren’t just sculpting, or just creating an image (which is also frequently a photo), but you create the scene and lighting in which it exists. There’s no photo involved at any stage and to any degree whatsoever. There’s a magic to the technology - obviously not real magic, folks - but the fact that this apparent food is created purely through math is astounding. I have some great ideas, I think, but right now I’m amassing more skills, kind of like training for the big fight. I mean, if you can make the Starship Enterprise soaring through space at warp speed, and a donut that makes you want to sink your teeth into it, you can do about anything with enough perseverance and ingenuity.

Blender box of donuts software#

I received virtually zero training at this in university.īlender, or 3D software program(s) of choice may be the ideal medium for exploring that imaginative terrain. But there’s another avenue which may appeal more to other personalities, which is to create unusual imagery with realism. Eventually representational imagery was completely eliminated. Much of the project of fine art in the 20th century was to paint ordinary subjects in unusual ways. There’s something I mentioned before which I’ll touch on here, and go into greater detail sometime in the future. Each medium has its advantage and disadvantages.įor me, because I’m been increasingly interested in realism over the last year, this is a good avenue. So, in the sense of competing with traditional mediums at ultra-realism, it’s not a fair competition at all. But then we could rotate the donut or change the lighting and have another variety that would require you a month to compete against. Your best bet to try would most likely be to copy a photograph. However, you just couldn’t compete for realism trying to make a donut like this through painting. It’s not as physically difficult, but it requires a lot more brain power. It’s cheating in the way piloting a 747 is cheating compared to riding a bicycle. Blender is exponentially more difficult than Photoshop, and it incorporates every aspect of visual phenomenon. It’s just a different way to make it than drawing and painting, or photography, and it’s no picnic. It’s really quite sophisticated, and even the shape of the frosting needed to use the extrusion tool, a subdivision surface modifier, organic sculpting, and proportional editing…Īt some point in the past I might have looked at a donut done in 3D modeling and thought, “cheating”. The sprinkles were created using particle maps.