#trying the donut blender tutorial

[mspoodle1]

[doodlingwren]

Me: Damn, I don't know what to do 😥😓

The unfinished 3d model of the Jamir Tower:

[gifti3]

god pls hit me with an asmotivation beam

[nonbinarynightcrawler]

I'm really doin it this time I'm gonna learn Blender!!! I'm gonna do it right!!

[helpmyinterestsareverywhere]

I've made a disastrous decision

[prettyflyshyguy]

Does anyone know how to use Blender

please my donut is plastic looking and my GPU is crying for no good reason

[occultradio]

So you wanna make cc?

Here's some helpful tutorials. BUT its highly suggested you start off with the donut tutorial or something similar otherwise nothing in blender will make any sense and you will be lost.

Now go make weird shit 💜 (but try to keep it low poly, sims is old 😅)

more links under the cut

[steelheart-redux]

so like on a range of like "it's convenient" to "it's a freaking game-changer" how helpful is having 3d models to trace over?

like. is it something you would recommend putting in the time and effort to learn?

Well, that depends on what you are drawing, how much you are drawing it, and how confident you are in drawing it.

For me, this comic absolutely could not be made without the 3D models. I am drawing fairly complicated hard-edged buildings and characters hundreds of times, and they have to be visually consistent. Like I said before, I could do that, but this comic is going to be long, and I'm trying to move as fast as I can in terms of production. Time is money, even when you're a college student making a webcomic in your free time for fun.

If you're not doing that All That, I wouldn't say it's game-changing. Convenient, yes, but it can be a lot of time and work upfront that might not be completely necessary.

WITH THAT SAID. I would absolutely recommend learning at least basic 3D skills to anyone with an interest in it. Learning 3D has helped me a lot with my understanding of 3D space even when I'm just 2D drawing on my own, and I personally find it really rewarding. As scary as it can look, blender is very beginner friendly imo (at least compared to Maya), and there are thousands of tutorials for just about everything.

That is my specific advice on learning blender, by the way. I've burned out on every "how to learn Blender" tutorial i've ever tried. I never finished the donut. I like going, "I am going to make x y z thing", and then looking up specific tutorials whenever I get stuck. Use your hyperfixation as fuel! Make a 3D model of your blorbo! I learned rigging because I wanted to see my bots move, and like hell am I 2D animating them. Now, I'm fairly competent, at least compared to where I started.

TLDR: it's not always necessary, but I'd recommend it regardless.

[lttleghost]

I AM FINALLY LEARNING BLENDER!!! and instead of trying to figure things out by brute force I am actually starting with a basic tutorial, it's having me make a donut

not done yet but eyyyyy

[surely-sims]

Hey! Hope you're doing well, I wanted to ask you if you have any resources/tutorials to start making cc?

Thanks❤️

Hi! I mostly learned by digging through the S4S forums and making basic recolors at first!

I guess it would really depend on what you want to make. CAS is a lot more complicated than BB in my opinion. If you want to learn Blender, The Donut Tutorial is a great resource.

I have some workshops saved on twitch and youtube going over making Build Buy (they're long) Part 1 | Part 2

I've also just got a few work streams. If you ever need a more specific tutorial lmk and I'll see what I can find. There's a lot of really lovely resources out there from lovely people and I try to help, but it's hard when it's just such a broad subject!

Hope this helped-ish.

xo, Anne

[yennefer-of-vengerbergs]

gotta love being in a creative rut atm 🙃yesterday I was trying to edit some screenshots and other images together to illustrate a fic scene, ended up deleting everything cause it wasn't coming along at all.

today I tried to continue following that donut tutorial for blender, it ended up giving me an existential crisis.

and if I want to write something, I just end up staring at a google docs file without typing anything at all 🙃

even taking screenshots isn't really coming out how I'd like it to either.

It's not even the ideas that are the problem (for the most part, at least - writing is just kicking my ass atm, words are once again, not wording), but actually turning those ideas to reality is😭

I just wanna create something and none of it is working out at all 😭😭😭

[sun-the-shattered]

So, I've wanted to learn Blender for a while. I had started and stopped years ago with version 3.6, but then I'd grow frustrated as my attempts at following a tutorial, so then I'd stop.

All this to say, I finally decided last month to try again with the famous Donut Tutorial and I'm so beyond pleased with how this turned out! Took five and a half hours to render and i seem things I know I can improve on, but I stuck with it! I made a thing! Now on to more tutorials lol

[blobbei-art]

"I should get into blender"

Many artists often joke about this.

But honestly, please don't force yourself to do it or think that this is the best way to getting better at 2D art. 3D is its own, very huge, complex and confusing medium of art with a high learning curve. You can easily get frustrated at the start. There's plenty of other ways to use 3D tools to help you.

But if you're scared and still looking to break into it here's some ideas you can do to start small and/or use it to help with your 2D art:

If you just want to model objects for you to trace/use as references: -> Basic lowpoly modelling is enough, especially if you just wanna get a background perspective right. Get some cubes, extrude faces and move around their faces/edges/verts. -> Alternatively, go to sketchfab and look for models, get it into position, screenshot and trace it. No modelling needed. -> Learn how to block out scenes or characters!

If you want to make characters: -> Learn 3D Sculpting! It's a lot more intuitive for a 2D artist. Blender has a sculpting feature. There's also NomadSculpt on iPad but it costs a little money. -> Also helps immensely with anatomy practise! Look up some anatomy references and really work out the details by blocking out the shapes of muscles. -> You can also do other props with sculpting, it's called Hard Surface but it's more difficult to do than organic shapes.

The infamous Blender Donut tutorial: -> This may be subjective but I've seen many 3D artists actually recommend against doing the Blender Donut. It doesn't cover all of the basics. -> Look for tutorials that aren't Blender Guru. You could also just look up individual steps such as "blender lowpoly modelling" or whatever. -> There are multiple ways to start out with a model. I personally like to do lowpoly (also known as low-to-high workflow) without using the subdivision modifier. Find something that's right for you!

3D taught me a ton about art and did make my 2D art improve. But I also do it because it's fun on its own. Don't think you have to do it. You're doing fine.

Also these are just ideas, i am not a professional. I'm simply going off from my own and other art students' experiences.

If you do try it, i wish you good luck and have fun!

[marsmerizing-sims]

Hey, I was wondering what programs you use to create your custom content? Such as photo editing software, etc. Do you have any tips for beginners? I've been trying to figure it out but it's honestly SOOO hard :/ I honestly LOVE your cc, and use it on almost all my sims, at least one item per sim, lol. Especially the male CC. I hope that you have a good day/night, and thank you if you respond!!

Hey! Thanks for the support! I'm sorry I don't know how to shorten my reply but here it goes. For the photo editing software--I'm just using adobe photoshop :) as for the mesh maker--it's Blender. Uuuugh... the first 3 months was sooooo hard for me too! щ(゜ロ゜щ)

I think the first thing to do is getting to know the Blender first--after watching CC tutorials. Blender is a very complex software in my opinion. So, at least you need to know the basic tools in Blender that you're going to need in CC making.

I honestly just went in to CC making with zero knowledge about the Blender tools (just relying on steps from CC tutorial videos). And I continued doing so for 3 or 6 months. The confusion didn't go away. So, I had to backtrack and learn about the Blender itself and make 3D donuts (the recommended step to learn blender). And after that, with some help from sims4studio forum--things got a lot easier! But yea, you need to read and watch tutorials a lot. You'll get better answers on sims4studio(.)com with more about the technical--or coding stuff of the CC. But the most important thing to me was understanding the Blender--just to get the mesh done.

Some of the tutorials recommend you to use Marvelous Designs, I used it for a while. But now I made my mesh directly on Blender (like I said--after knowing your tools, things got a lot easier).

[skitty-kirby]

I finally made it through the recent Blender Guru donut tutorial as I try to shift from 3DSMax to something more opensource-

Not a super clean render as my current setup is lower spec but this is an amazing first step as I try to make my way towards an indie game dev career :D

(plant and utensils are from BG's website)

[catsi]

Hi Catsi! Do u have recommendations for learning how to make low-poly characters in blender? I love seeing the stuff you have made!

hiiii! thank u so much! ^^ sorry this took so long to reply to, i had to really think about how i wanted to answer it

my first recommendation is to get familiar with blender if you aren't already! i know it's super tempting to want to jump straight into low poly stuff but it's easiest to do that if you already know how the program works. i'd say take a day or two and just follow along with some blender tutorials on youtube. make the donut and stuff. learn how the major functionality works and familiarize yourself with it. there's a few things you will need when you get into making low poly models, so if you're able to even just watch a video about these to make sure you know what people are talking about when they refer to them: Materials, UV Unwrapping, UV Layouts, & Image Textures

SORRY i know that part's very boring. but i can't stress enough how much easier it is to do this stuff with a bit of a foundation. if you're already familiar w blender then woohoo! nvm!

my next recommendation would be to start looking into more specific tutorials and following along with them. in particular, if you're trying to do low poly stuff, you might want to try adding "PSX Graphics" or "PS1 Graphics" or "N64 Graphics" as search terms.

^ i've got a playlist on youtube with a bunch of various blender tutorials that i've found helpful - giving any of them a watch is a good place to start!

i'd also recommend to make sure to give urself permission to make stuff that looks like shit at first LOL when i started i was always so obsessed with making my models perfect but even now whenever i make a model i accept that my first draft is gonna be super fucked up haha. 3d modelling is a very big 'trial and error' based activity imho, so accept that some parts of the 'trial' part are gonna look and feel BAD. that's ok! that means ur learning!

i have a lot more recommendations i could give for specific parts of the processes, like for UV Unwrapping or creating image textures, etc, but there's TOO MUCH to say all at once lol so if there's any specific part you need future recommendations for, let me know!

good luck my friend! o7