Well, although it’s been a bit of a push at this time of year to get through all the student marking, end of year art show, and planning for next year, I’ve been slowly chugging along with the Domestika course to learn Blender. So far, I’m still loving it, the built in game engine rendered Eevee gives superb real-time visuals in the viewport, not dissimilar to Unreal although the scene is very barren. The facility to see how all the lights are acting with good resolution and fidelity is great. The other engine, Cycles, will need a whole lot of learning, seemingly similar to Arnold as a crude Maya comparison. One thing that I thought was fabulous was the very quick exporting of a video render, similar to the playblast in Maya, which gives excellent lighting results, the only downside is the unusual file format – .mkv
As you can see, it’s not natively supported and only seems to open well with the Film And TV app, or the VLC. Anyhow, spitting out single frames is quick enough in Eevee, I get this result-
The physics aspects of Blender are really easy to work with and it’ll be interesting to build this and particle effects into further teaching.
